Attorneys disproportionately report symptoms of anxiety, depression, substance misuse, and burnout. Prevailing explanations emphasize structural stressors: billable-hour demands, adversarial conflict, and chronic time pressure. While these factors are salient, they do not fully account for the depth and persistence of psychological distress observed among many practitioners. This Article advances a complementary thesis: that for a subset of attorneys, the legal profession functions as an adaptive—but ultimately constraining—extension of earlier cognitive strategies developed in response to

The modern legal system is an extraordinary conceptual achievement. It is a structure of rules, categories, doctrines, and precedents constructed to generate predictability, stability, and a baseline of safety within which citizens may pursue liberty and happiness. Without law’s conceptual architecture—contract, tort, crime, property, due process—social life would regress toward the unmediated assertion of power, greed, and instinctual drive. Law disciplines impulse through abstraction. Yet the very cognitive capacities that make the legal system possible