Each year, over 40,000 new students enter American law schools, and each year, they experience startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Professor 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, to delve more deeply into law students’ experiences. How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School shares Young’s results in an accessible format for law students and law-students-to-be. The book 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 kind of law school experience. Young provides today’s and prospective law students with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily.

Kathryne M. Young holds a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University.  For six years, she was a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught law and society, social psychology, and teaching pedagogy. She moved to a law school in 2022, and is now Associate Professor of Law at The George Washington University, where she teaches Evidence.  

Young is an internationally recognized expert in legal consciousness—the study of how people understand and come to hold beliefs about the law.  Her research lies at the intersection of law and sociology. She investigates how law maps onto the realities of the social world, and the consequences for access to justice in both civil and criminal realms. Her work has been published in Harvard Law Review, Law & Society Review, Social Forces, California Law Review, and numerous other law reviews and social science journals. She has been cited by the Washington State Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the sociology department and the Center for Life Beyond Reed.