Law as a Healing Profession
By Susan Daicoff, Professor of Law
Florida Coastal School of Law 2006
What we have been doing in the law has not been working. Clients are excessively unhappy with their lawyers, with the system, and with the outcomes of the process. Too many lawyers are extraordinarily unhappy or even impaired. Extralegal dispute resolution mechanisms in society have too often failed and society is overdependent on legal processes to resolve conflict. As a result, society in general is suffering from the effects of law’s adversarial, other-blaming, position-taking, and hostile approach to conflict resolution.
Perhaps in response, a number of new approaches to law practice have emerged in the last 16 years. These new approaches add more collaborative, comprehensive, healing, humane forms of law practice to the traditional forms. There are at least ten of these approaches, or "vectors," which comprise the "comprehensive law" movement. The "vectors" intersect in two ways: first, they all seek to optimize human psychological wellbeing and, second, they all focus on more than simply legal rights – in a "rights plus" approach they consider other, nonlegal concerns in the resolution of legal matters.
