Kathryne M. Young

"Packed with insights from over 1,000 law students, this book offers practical wisdom to help law students find a sense of purpose. An indispensable companion for law students, prospective law students, and law professors and scholars"--

How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School

Each year, over 40,000 new students enter America's law schools. Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more. How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether. Young provides readers with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily. This book is an indispensable companion for today's law students, prospective law students, and anyone who cares about making law students' lives better. Bursting with warmth, realism, and a touch of firebrand wit, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School equips law students with much-needed wisdom for thriving during those three crucial years.

Paper 1, "Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight, " sheds light on the social processes that underpin our attitudes and beliefs about law. I focus particularly on a "second order" layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Drawing on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in Hawaii, I describe how law enforcement practices affect cockfighting rituals and are embedded within them. Informal rules and formal police practices work in concert to shape fighters' second order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second order perspective underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs. I describe how one police action directed toward a sub-group of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for that group. Additionally, I suggest new directions for legal consciousness research that draw on other law and society subfields: procedural justice, identity theory, and legal pluralism. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law. In Paper 2, "Balanced Play? Notes on the Hawaiian Cockfight and a Masculine Undercompensation Hypothesis, " I observe that within Hawaiian cockfighting's uncontestedly "masculine" and overwhelmingly male context, fighters enact behaviors that they otherwise consider "feminine, " such as nurturing, caretaking, and overtly expressing emotion. I draw on ethnographic data to pose a theoretical elaboration of Connell's work on hegemonic masculinity. I suggest that in many situations, rather than approximating "ideal" masculinity, masculine performance incorporates a balance of idealized masculine traits and subordinate or feminine ones. This tempered iteration of masculinity draws on ideal masculinity but "falls short." I introduce the term "masculine undercompensation" to describe the mechanism through which subordinate masculinities may be subconsciously incorporated to create this "tempered" masculine performance. The mechanism I describe helps maintain unequal gender relations by creating a smokescreen of apparent "progress" while quietly masking the maintenance of hegemony. In Paper 3, "Sociolegal Meanings of the Hawaiian Cockfight: Identity and Resistance, " I argue that Hawaiian cockfighters are not cruel, indifferent to animals' suffering, or participating simply for the sake of tradition. Rather, cockfighting has at least two meanings in their lives. First, it allows participants to express a "positive" identity as a Hawaii local. Cockfighting embodies a positive cultural assertion and affirmation that honors a local's family history and establishes his value as an intelligent, trustworthy member of the community. Second, in the throes of legal, economic, and demographic changes to Hawaii, cockfighting has taken on a meaning as a "resistance" activity that stands in opposition to these developments. I argue that in the social and economic contexts they inhabit, cockfighters perceive that they have few other means of protesting changes they oppose. In a sense, these two broad purposes, identity and resistance, are sides of the same coin. In asserting local identity, cockfighters communicate who they are; in resisting changes, they communicate who they are not. Furthermore, I argue that legal prohibitions are unlikely to be effective, and pose policy changes to deter curb cockfighting that draw on the deeper purposes cockfighting serves.

Kathryne M. Young

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