About the Law Program
The Law Program explores ways of helping lawyers, judges, law professors and students reconnect with their deepest values and intentions, through meditation, yoga, and other contemplative and spiritual practices. We run retreats and events which provide a framework for considering ways in which contemplative awareness can enhance and enrich our professional and personal lives, and bring them more into balance. Our retreats address questions and ideas from both a contemplative and legal perspective: the nature of winning and losing, the role of compassion in adversarial situations, truth and “right speech,” Socratic and contemplative methods of inquiry, action and nonaction, separation and connection, and listening.
Lawyers enter the field of law for a myriad of reasons. Some want to help the disenfranchised; some see law practice as a means to financial security. Others seek to promote democracy and fairness. Still others hope to correct societal injustices. In one way or another, the personal reasons for pursuing a law career reflect one's individual morals and priorities.
Along the professional path, rigorous training in analytical thought, combative discourse and a narrowing focus on a body of written rules tends to obscure or overshadow those original guiding principles. Law students are trained to “think like a lawyer” rather than to think as individual moral agents. Moreover, the demand of exhausting work schedules during and after law school leaves little time for leisure and fun, let alone for quiet introspection and realignment with one's inner compass. Professional stress and burnout are commonplace. As a result, many lawyers find that the details of their daily work, the analytic decisions they make and the directions they pursue on behalf of their clients bear little resemblance to the values and aspirations that originally led them into a law career. Furthermore, the very notion of the law as a “helping profession” is laughable to much of contemporary America, and this reflection serves to further demoralize practicing attorneys and to discourage many who would seek to join the profession.
Within this context, in October of 1998 the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society hosted its first Contemplative Law Retreat. This venture began a series of experiments within a new model: bringing together law students, faculty and practitioners in a shared space for a retreat experience that included instruction in and time for both contemplative practices and group discussions about combining these practices with a life in the law. The premise was simple: If lawyers had the time and tools for quiet contemplation, their professional actions could be informed by their own deep and abiding personal values. If lawyers could gain more insight and perspective on the many factors that influence their work, from emotions to physical health to stress, they could recognize and ultimately disengage from distractions and attend to their clients' needs more completely, and with far greater satisfaction.
Contact
Douglas Chermak
Law Program Director
contact: law(at)contemplativemind.org
Law Steering Committee
Robert A. Burt
Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law,
Yale Law School
Mirabai Bush
Executive Director,
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Doug Codiga
ex-officio member,
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Harlon L. Dalton
Professor of Law,
Yale Law School
Joseph Goldstein
Co-founder,
Insight Meditation Society
Charles Halpern
Chairman of the Board,
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Visiting Scholar,
Boalt Hall School of Law
Founding Dean and former Professor of Law, CUNY Law School at Queens College
Jack Himmelstein
Co-Founder & Co-Director,
The Center for Mediation in Law
Steven Schwartz
Director,
The Center for Public Representation