The Affective Assistance of Counsel: Practicing Law as a Healing Profession

This book is intended for lawyers and law students interested in developing the competencies to practice law as a healthy, healing profession, one that the lawyer finds fulfilling and rewarding and that is beneficial and healing for the client. It will interest those inclined towards new directions in lawyering, psychology and multiculturalism. In addition, it will be a useful text in clinical law teaching as well as other courses aimed at finding alternative, humanistic approaches to legal practice. The incidence of alcoholism, substance abuse and depression among lawyers, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the practice of law, underscore the importance of developing healthy, healing alternatives to traditional, largely adversarial, law practice. Despite increasing interest in alternatives to traditional legal practice, embodied in what Professor Susan Daicoff has characterized as The Comprehensive Law Movement, and including schools of thought such as Therapeutic Jurisprudence, there currently exists no compendium of the competencies needed for such practice. In addition, there is little in the literature of the Comprehensive Law Movement that explores the particular challenges of cross-cultural representation. This book is intended to fill that void