generate more options for the client’s consideration, but can work
with a certain confidence that they have given their all and done their
best for their clients.8
Second: Mistaken preconceptions or assumptions sometimes get in
the way of truly understanding a situation or a client or seeing the
best solutions for the problem under scrutiny.9 Self-monitoring and
self-correcting faulty conceptions may save a lawyer from these and
other costly mistakes, especially jumping to erroneous conclusions
about clients whose life experiences and assumptions may be very
different from their own.
Third: The more self-aware the lawyer, the more he or she may draw
from their own humanity and life experience, the more likely he or
she might be able to anticipate the personal and social dimensions of
the client’s problem and address these considerations in meaningful
and compassionate professional ways – an approach that may also
help work against the unfortunate image that many people have of
lawyers as mercenary and opportunistic.
Fourth: Equipping students with a self-reflective bent should
help them to uncover and negotiate the inevitable conflicts or
disharmonies that arise between the professional and personal realms
when lawyering. 10 This is vital to professional health and happiness.
It is vital to bringing an integrated self to the professional arena – a
self who can intentionally draw upon both intellectual and emotional
resources in rendering professional service, a self who can more
knowingly balance professional and personal demands, and a self
who can more consciously attempt to reconcile the cognitive and
emotional dissonances lawyers sometimes feel when professional
obligations cramp personal belief or preference.
Professor Alleva teaching
her last law school class,
Civil Procedure, on
November 20, 2018.
8
THE GAVEL
And fifth: The more developed a lawyer’s self-evaluative ability,
the more likely he or she is able to learn from mistakes and build
upon or repeat successes. In short, self-awareness promotes growth
and life-long learning – critical long-term survival skills for legal
professionals, who must constantly adapt and respond to new
situations and problems in this increasingly complicated world. 11
And that, very briefly, is why teaching to the whole person and
cultivating self-awareness carries with it the hope that professionally
self-reflective students will be able to make better judgments on
their clients’ behalf as well as lead more authentic, integrated, and
satisfying professional lives. Indeed, this pedagogic approach is
based on a respect for the self that each student is and will become
by his or her own design. And it holds the potential to enrich our
profession and, ultimately, our state, with new lawyers who bring
to their practices a more holistic and humanistic understanding of
professional role and responsibilities – lawyers who thoughtfully
bring wisdom beyond technique to client problem-solving, with head
more consciously connected to heart, along with an abiding capacity
to self-evaluate and self-improve. Given the gnarly challenges of the
ensuing decades, North Dakota deserves no less in its new lawyers.
Part II
So here I am, at the far end of my University of North Dakota
teaching career. I have wondered, time and time again, especially in
these last few years as I agonized over the right time to leave the law
school that I love, how three decades and then some have passed. It
was July 25, 1987, when I boarded the Northwest Airlines jet in New
York City that would take me from all that I had ever known to a