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47 Washburn L.J. 453 (2007-2008)
Lucifer Goes to Law School: Towards Explaining and Minimizing Law Student Peer-to-Peer Harassment and Intimidation

handle is hein.journals/wasbur47 and id is 461 raw text is: Lucifer Goes to Law School: Towards Explaining and Minimizing Law Student Peer-to-Peer Harassment and Intimidation Rebecca Flanagan* I. INTRODUCTION A. Naming What We Take for Granted An article in The Washington Post on March 7, 2007 exposed the rise of online bullying used to intimidate female law students.1 While that statement alone hardly creates shockwaves, few in the law school community would expect that the perpetrators and victims were law students from Yale Law School.2 Humiliation, intimidation, and har- assment in law school have been memorialized in movies such as The Paper Chase and in books such as One L, yet few would use the word bully to describe law students. By avoiding the word bully, law schools avoid facing evils lurking in the hallways and the classrooms. Behaviors modeled by professors, intense competition among students for scarce jobs, and the relationship between class rank and employ- ment, result in bullying behaviors as both a cause and a response to stu- dent depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. These sources of in- trapersonal distress can result in external behaviors directed toward peers, family, and friends. While the focus of much research has been on the internal responses to distress and depression in law students, such as alcoholism and substance abuse, little research has focused on the ex- ternal responses to distress and depression among law students. Exter- nal responses to pressure only partially explain the unique prevalence of these maladies in law students; bullying is the unnamed missing link in the causal chain between the law school curriculum and the prevalence of depression and substance abuse in law schools. Despite a plethora of anecdotal reports of humiliation and intimi- dation in law schools, it is difficult to measure bullying and peer intimi- dation with traditional quantitative techniques. Law students and ad- * Assistant Professor and Director of Academic Success Program, Vermont Law School. 1. Ellen Nakashima, Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web, WASH. POST, Mar. 7, 2007, at Al. 2. Id

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