My students get tired of hearing me saying that lawyering is all about empathy. (See, at least I understand my students’ feelings!) A lawyer cannot practice effectively without understanding their clients’ situations from their clients’ points of view, recognizing their clients’ emotions to the extent they play a role in their legal decision making, identifying what having a lawyer and utilizing the legal system means to them, and knowing what their clients’ visions of a successful outcome is.
My study of this over the summer led me to Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison writes essays that explore people’s emotions and mindsets. Her subjects range from athletes who participate in the Barkley Marathons, a race where people cover over 100 miles over several days through almost impossible terrain and torturous obstacles that almost no one completes; a prisoner who was one of those athletes, looking particularly at what confinement means to a person whose daily life as an endurance athlete involves active movement that prison takes away; people with Morgollons, a disease where people believe thread or other matter is growing out of them, a condition that they clearly believe is very real that others question; and parents of child murder victims of the West Memphis Three, looking at how their grief is taken away from them and turned to anger when perpetrators are identified, and then looking at their subsequent feelings when it becomes clear that those alleged perpetrators might not have done it. She even tries to explain and understand the artistic genre she calls “wounded women”—the Ani DiFranco, Sylvia Plath, Carrie expressions of female pain (I admit that I struggled with this one).
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