2026 June New York Fellows Virtual Event

Please join the New York State Co-Chairs, Vince Chang and Adrienne Koch, for a virtual presentation by Swethaa Ballakrishnen, ABF 2025-26 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law.

“Giving More, Feeling Worse: Familial Support Exchanges and Mental Health Among Law Students”

Research on intergenerational transfer of capital has focused primarily on the downward movement of resources to heirs and dependents. This focus is crucial given the range of systemic advantages that generational privilege can offer, especially for those seeking access into already elite institutions. Still, it is an incomplete portrayal of inequality because it obscures the more relational and recursive nature of how support flows from heirs to their previous generations, especially for populations whose mobility is not buttressed by generational advantage. In this talk, Professor Ballakrishnen will make the case, drawing from their collaborative research, that paying attention to the ways in which support is received and given to older generations can be instrumental to understanding the layers of inequality that buttress individual experience within professional sites.

Focusing on new longitudinal mixed-methods social network data on law students, we find that multi-directional structures of support are particularly common for law students from marginalized backgrounds (and in particular, Black law students and students who parents did not complete their bachelor’s degrees), and that this inverse relationship to support has implications for students’ mental health. Particularly, our data show that students’ potential for depressive symptoms were not moderated by receiving support from their parental figures. Instead, regardless of support received, those who gave more support were more likely to experience depressive symptoms. The association between giving support to parents and depression was partially mediated, or explained, by differences in law students’ locus of control, satisfaction with law school, GPA, and quality of relationships with other students. Together, these findings have implications for our understanding of generational privilege and the ways in which historical social advantage can buffer and burden mobility.