Practicing Holistic, Humanistic Law

About This Course

Practicing law can be fulfilling, humanistic, and effective. The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP; https://www.spiritlawpolitics.org/) spreads healing models of law practice that move beyond the highly stressful traditional format—a narrow analytic focus on legal issues with an adversarial approach to other parties.

PISLAP promotes attending to clients' emotional, spiritual, and physical needs while addressing their legal problems. This program will introduce lawyers to integrative practices: holistic criminal practice, restorative justice, and treatment courts. The faculty will discuss how the shared values and tools of the integrative approach can make any kind of law practice more effective and meaningful.

PISLAP aims to improve lawyers' well-being. This program will also offer lawyers an experience with contemplative practice, which more and more lawyers find helps them remain calm, centered, and attuned to their clients amid a busy practice.

This program is suitable for law students and practicing lawyers with any level of experience.

Learning Objectives

• Review the principal models of holistic and humanistic law practice
• Recognize common themes and principles that link the growing number of integrative techniques
• Evaluate and experience contemplative practice and its benefits
• Analyze better results from addressing a client’s emotional and spiritual needs in addition to legal ones
• Assess and appreciate the personal benefits to lawyers who practice in a humanistic fashion in conformity with their values
• Explore current developments in law practice with themes that appear in other spheres of society, such as connections between all people, the importance of consciousness in social change, and creating social structures that meet people's needs