Beyond Core Skills and Values: Integrating Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Preventive Law into the Law School Curriculum

Within the last decade, many law schools have broadened their educational missions to include lawyering skills programs that bridge the gap between practice and theory. At the same time, legal scholars have advocated training attorneys to integrate their planning and counseling roles to become "therapeutically oriented preventive lawyers." Skills and clinical programs in law schools are well suited for such training. The authors discuss the lawyering skills program they developed and direct. Using examples from classroom simulations, they illustrate how the integration of therapeutic jurisprudence and preventive law into the skills curriculum can sensitize students to the psychological aspects of the attorney–client relationship and prepare them to practice law as a humane profession.