A couple of recent articles discuss the prevalence of substance abuse in the legal profession.
This article at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reports on a new rehab program geared for legal professional in Minnesota.
This article by the Daily Iowan is about a program at the University of Iowa School of Law that informs law students about high rate of substance abuse in the legal profession.
Remember the Socratic method of instruction at law school? For anyone that doesn't know, or who blocked it out of their memory, that’s where the law professor picks on one student and grills them for 15-20 minutes. I remember my own particular interrogation in Contracts lasting almost the entire class period. That’s stressful, and it’s no surprise that law students also are subject to higher rates of substance abuse.
Along with demanding teaching methods, imagine taking difficult postgraduate courses where your entire grade in each class is based on the final examination. That’s law school, at least as I remember it. And after three years of that, you then have to take the bar exam in the state where you hope to practice. That’s three grueling days of tests, and in California the most recent pass rate from the July 2010 exam was only 54.8 percent.
That’s enough to drive a person to drink. And it does. Both articles above mention a 1990 article published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, reporting that attorneys had twice the rate of drinking problems than non-lawyers.
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I think its necessary to make a law for drunker. If they found out to drive a car than they must be punished. We know that to drink is not illegal but to drinks and drive a car is illegal.
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