THE
GOOD
LAWYER
Seeking Quality in the
Practice of Law
by DOUGLAS O. LINDER and
NANCY LEVIT (Oxford
University Press, 2013?)
The Good Lawyer
About
The Good Lawyer
Preface
Introductory
Note
The
Good Lawyer is Courageous
The
Good Lawyer is Empathetic
The
Good Lawyer Has a Passion for Justice
The
Good Lawyer Values Others in the Legal
Community
The
Good Lawyer Uses Both Intuition and
Deliberative Thinking
The
Good Lawyer Thinks realistically About the
Future
The
Good Lawyer Serves the True Interests of
Clients
The
Good Lawyer is Persuasive
Seeking
Quality
Quotes
Random
Facts
The
Happy Lawyer
Excerpt from Chapter
8:
The Good Lawyer Has Ample Willpower
The
tendency to pick safe options when willpower
levels are depleted explains the results of
the study of over one thousand parole
decisions made by the parole board of an
Israeli prison system. Researchers
compared the decisions made by the board when
willpower supplies could be expected to be
high, such as early in the morning or just
after a snack break, to those made just before
the break or late in the afternoon. The
results were striking. Prisoners who
appeared before the board early in the
morning, for example, received parole 70% of
the time, while those unfortunate enough to
face the board late in the day received parole
less than 10% of the time. Prisoners who
appeared right after a replenishing
break during which the judges ate sandwiches
and fruit won parole 65% of the time, compared
to prisoners who appeared just after the break
and got paroled only 20% of the time.
The researchers, after exhaustively
considering other possible explanations for
the disparity, concluded that as mental energy
levels dropped before meals and late in the
day, the parole board members usually fell
back to their default position, which was to
deny parole. Judging, like practicing
law, is mentally stressful work.
Granting parole is, for a parole board, the
riskier choice, because board members are
likely to be criticized when a paroled
prisoner later commits a serious crime.
The safe option is to keep a prisoner in jail
for now and let him try again next time.
As willpower supplies of the board members
depleted, they became biased towards the safer
option: letting the prisoner linger in jail.
The lesson here is if you want a favorable
ruling from a judge, make sure he or she is
operating on a full stomach.
Why, you might ask, did the parole board grant
more paroles after snack breaks and
lunches? The rather surprising answer is
that are willpower supplies are replenished by
glucose. Willpower is not just a matter
of psychology; it is equally a matter of
physiology. An impressive collection of
studies make clear, as Burmeister and Tierney
put it, “No glucose, no willpower. Brain
imaging shows that glucose ingestion causes
dramatic shifts of activity within various
regions of the brain. Unlike a computer, which
ceases to function at all without a source of
energy, the brain instead “stops doing some
things and starts doing others.” Low on
glucose, you are, for example, more likely to
lash out inappropriately at a secretary.
Impaired glucose tolerance, which leads to bad
decision-making of many kinds, has even been
identified in two recent studies as a
substantial risk factor for criminal
recidivism and juvenile delinquency....