Many legal educators are familiar with some of the challenges that neurodivergent law students face in managing their time, staying focused on productive studying, or being able to successfully complete an exam. For some neurodivergent law students, these challenges may be a life-long experience, especially where they may have been diagnosed neurodivergent as a child.
Though for others, the first time they may struggle is the LSAT or in law school. In fact, as legal educators, we can hear this sentiment a lot: “This is the first time I feel like I don’t know what I am doing.” And sometimes this conversation leads to the question of whether that student is neurodivergent (though that is not to suggest that question should be asked with every struggling student). This is because first-time academic struggle upon entering law school can occasionally indicate a previously undiagnosed neurodivergence.
Why might this occur? How does academic success prior to law school sometimes manifest in law school academic challenges and late diagnosed neurodivergence?
Consider how autism has been shown to be related to gifted and talented programming:
“Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services. [Their] apparent high intelligence puts [them] in a double bind: [they] are expected to accomplish great things to justify [their] oddness, and because [they] possess an enviable, socially prized quality [of good grades], it’s assumed [they] need less help than other people, not more.”[1]
There are other examples of this here and here. Being autistic (or neurodivergent) and “gifted” is commonly referred to as “Twice Exceptional.” Twice exceptional students may evade proper diagnoses due to their ability to achieve academically. Of course, challenges with poorly developed diagnostic tools (as many were developed with white, affluent, male samples), lack of access to funding for diagnosis, sociocultural norms that devalue disability, and masking so as to appear neurotypical are other reasons that increases in adult (late) diagnoses of neurodivergence may impact our law students. And, because academic struggle may not have been something a twice exceptional student has previously experienced, their first perceived failures in law school may shed light on the social value deposited solely to their ability to achieve good grades above all else.
By nature of their entering credentials, law students are generally high achievers. So, it would not be surprising that some masked autistic or neurodivergent law students who were never properly diagnosed are currently enrolled in law schools across the country. There are likely even practicing lawyers who may just now be realizing their neurodiversity as they experience significant burnout tied to heavy over-masking.
So, what happens when an underdiagnosed twice exceptional student graduates college, goes to law school, and starts to struggle academically for the first time?
First, we can refer students to proper counseling, diagnostic, and disability resources for support. As much as we may perceive signs of neurodiversity, we are (most of us) neither trained nor licensed to perform such assessments.
More importantly though, as legal educators in this space, we can remind students that everyone who graduates law school and passes the bar exam is an attorney at the end of the day. We can remind students that their academic success in law school does not define them, nor does it prohibit them from having a successful legal practice and future. Grades don’t make the lawyer; the ability to understand the law, apply it to the facts, and ethically resolve issues for clients—that’s what makes the lawyer.
And we can remind our neurodivergent students that when it comes to academic and bar support, we can help them come up with strategies to build the foundational lawyering skills necessary to improve their academic success and pass the bar exam.
(Erica M. Lux)
[1] Devon Price, Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity: Unmasking Autism 120 (2022) (citing S.G. Assouline, et al., Profoundly Gifted Girls & Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Psychometric Case Study Comparison, 53 Gifted Child Quarterly 89-105 (2009)).
