Law School and Marriage: Making It Work

A qualitative study, drawing on twenty-three student respondents, examined the levels of marital-destabilization stress sustained by married law school students at an urban, Midwestern university. Literature strongly indicates that marital partners in similar, high pressured circumstances, such as graduate school, sustain great stress as do attorneys in the field. Consistent with this, the intensive interviews yielded rich accounts of daily life that revealed significant amounts of varying types of distress that undermined the students' marital and/or family life. Despite this, the findings revealed that only two of the students had separated since they entered law school and each had reunited by the time of the study. None of the others suggested that separation or divorce was imminent. Rather, the interviews showed that students employed a variety of strategies that minimized the associated stresses or maximized the participants' abilities to sustain them. Suggestions for ways that law schools could alleviate the predictable stresses that married students face were drawn from the findings. (C) 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.