The Soul of the Law : Understanding Lawyers and the Law - Softcover

Benjamin Sells, a former practicing attorney and psychotherapist, is now retired and living in Riverside, Illinois.

The professional habits of lawyers can isolate them, driving them to drink or even to suicide. An ex-lawyer turned psychologist, Sells knows the mentality that brings distressed barristers into his office and writes about it in an almost spiritual way without producing anything like the ethereal, God-loves-me idiocy that afflicts pop-psych titles. No case narratives, no self-inventories, not even much psychiatric analysis: Sells omits these in favor of pertinent generalizations about the law, and the adversarial and hierarchical character of its practice, that can sap a lawyer's soul. Diction is a classic example. Admonished to craft drum-tight language, Sells says that lawyers reduce words to a "pseudo-mathematics" that is the death of imagination. On he goes with the field's other traits (objectivity, proceduralitis) that spill into nonwork life, delivering experienced insight for the new lawyer. Fine for the career shelf and as a supplement for law courses. Gilbert Taylor