Legal education is slowly beginning to include not only education in critical
thinking and legal knowledge, but also education in complementary qualities of
personal conduct and early professional formation. Positive psychology, with
its emphasis on the evidence-based study of how people can thrive, not just be
treated for mental illness or emotional difficulty, can aid these additional
educational objectives. This Article examines some of the ongoing pedagogical
choices involved in creating a law school course on positive psychology
oriented around experiential student learning. Highlighted are a few key
insights from the field, including resilience, character strengths, positive values,
and enhanced relationships with other people. While only an introduction, this
course is designed to help law students become sufficiently grounded in these
insights and others from positive psychology to continue their education after
law school. Because the course is experimental, the hope is that it will lay the
foundation for initiatives by other law professors to make the application of
positive psychology more broadly available to law students in general.
