The Ethics of Imposter Syndrome
by Josh Lerner, 2025 Law Fellow
I’m a fraud.
Or at least that’s how it felt as I lined up at the airport gate. I was heading to Berlin for the FASPE trip, a program that brings young professionals together to study the ethical failures of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals during the Holocaust. When I learned I’d been selected, I was honoured, thrilled, and quick to tell everyone I knew. I had wanted the fellowship badly, but I couldn’t shake that persistent whisper in the back of my head: you don’t really belong here.
That feeling wasn’t new. As a judicial law clerk and recent law student, I knew imposter syndrome as a familiar companion, one that fed on long hours and thrived in the shadow of more experienced voices. I told myself that if I just worked harder, if I made myself indispensable, maybe no one would notice that I wasn’t smart or capable enough to belong.
During my clerkship, each time I met with my supervising judge, I prepared obsessively for what might only be a five-minute conversation. The thought of sharing my opinion with someone of his stature was daunting enough. Correcting or potentially even disagreeing with him felt impossible. Meanwhile, the other clerks seemed effortlessly brilliant and endlessly busy. I worried that if I wasn’t drowning myself in work, I wasn’t doing enough. So, I took on more cases, assisted other judges, and pushed my standards so high that even trivial mistakes felt like proof of my inadequacy.
In law, this is a familiar story. Studies indicate that approximately 74% of lawyers experience imposter syndrome, with the rate rising to 83% among junior lawyers.1 Even using more conservative reporting, about 35% of lawyers cite feelings of inadequacy or imposter syndrome as ongoing challenges to their well-being.2
But in the weeks before I left, the pressures felt uniquely mine. I pushed to clear my workload during the fellowship on my own instead of asking other clerks to assist, turning what should have been weeks of steady work and FASPE prep into a hectic stretch. I stayed late in the office, tabs of research cluttering my screen while coworkers posted pictures from a camping trip I’d skipped. Birthdays and family dinners slipped by without me. Friendships thinned too, maintained only by the occasional late-night text I was often too tired to answer.
Now, in the airport, I was still scrambling to finish preparing for FASPE. I’d spent the Uber ride over and my time at the gate listening to the readings on 2X speed, but it looked like I’d have to spend the redeye reading to complete everything in time. Maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew and made a commitment that I couldn’t keep.
FASPE, at least, held up their end of the deal. The program presented an incredible opportunity to examine how professionals perpetuated and enacted Nazi policies.
At Brandenburg, we stood in the remains of a facility where doctors participated in euthanasia programs to advance their careers. At Wannsee, we studied the conference where high-level officials, many with law degrees, coordinated the Final Solution. I wondered if any of them had once struggled to speak up. Maybe they thought this opportunity, however twisted, was their only chance to prove themselves. Insecurity has always been fertile ground for unethical choices.
We learned there was no record of Nazis being punished for refusing to commit atrocities. The truth was more banal and more damning: those who opted out were simply reassigned. That left me with unsettling questions: what makes someone speak up when it matters? What makes them shrink back? Could imposter syndrome—the fear of being “found out,” the belief that your voice carries less weight—nudge people toward silent complicity?
Despite these thoughts, I still hesitated to speak up in discussions at FASPE. In an early session, I offered a comment based on a mistaken historical assumption, and another Fellow corrected me. Embarrassment surged, and I pulled back. Surrounded by Ivy League résumés and the specialized vocabulary of unfamiliar legal systems, I became convinced I had only confirmed everyone’s suspicion that I didn’t belong. I shrank into silence. It felt like my clerkship all over again.
But conversations over dinner and long bus rides revealed something different. Other Fellows wrestled with the same doubts. Even faculty admitted as much. Slowly, I found my footing. When I spoke, others listened, even built on my contributions. I learned something critical: the voice you withhold might be the one someone else is waiting to hear.
The interdisciplinary discussions with other cohorts drove this home further. As lawyers, we often confined ourselves to raising purely legal points, worried it would be overstepping to speak on ethical or moral concerns. But Fellows from other fields said they expected lawyers to do precisely that. To them, it was our responsibility to raise ethical questions.
Among the ideas and figures we studied during the FASPE trip, the words of Helmuth James von Moltke stood out to me. A German lawyer and resister executed by the Nazis, Moltke warned that men guided only by expediency are like chameleons: in a healthy society they look healthy; in a sick one, they look sick. They are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.
Von Moltke’s own resistance garnered allies and led others to make a difference. His actions remind us that once one voice speaks up, others often follow. But there has to be one voice to go first. His warning made me think about silence not just as abdication but as a failure to use the space we are given.
FASPE called this space Spielraum; the “wiggle room” available to professionals even in systems of repression. What struck me most was how wide that space often was. The Nazis rarely punished refusal. The ethical tragedy was not the absence of choice but how often people surrendered their ability to choose.
Spielraum, I realized, is largely subjective.
It’s one thing to say a lawyer has room to speak up. It’s another for that lawyer to actually see that room and believe they have the authority to use it. Imposter syndrome collapses that space from the inside. If you convince yourself that you do not belong, then you narrow your own space to act before anyone else ever does. You risk becoming a chameleon—present but invisible.
During the fellowship trip as we trailed our guides through Berlin, dozens of people moving in a crowd, I pondered these ideas. More than once, we stepped blindly into traffic, each of us assuming someone else was watching. It was ironic: while studying the dangers of following without independent thought, we were doing exactly that. Our Spielraum only becomes visible when someone is willing to look around, stop, and speak up.
Once I returned to work, I realized the ethical insight I had gained was not confined to the fellowship. The case files still piled up, the days were still full, and the minds around me were as sharp as ever. But something had shifted. I found myself more eager to speak up in chambers; I pressed points and raised concerns that I once would have struggled to phrase. While I can’t share the details of that work, I can say that the conversations felt different. More honest. More engaged. And more, not less, faithful to the duties required of those in the legal profession.
I also found myself making quieter choices that reflected this new confidence. In meetings, I didn’t overprepare to prove myself. I prepared to contribute. In discussions, I asked questions not because I feared looking ignorant but because I knew they might sharpen our analysis. I began to see my presence in the room not as a mistake but as a call to responsibility.
The fellowship left me with a simple but profound insight: Spielraum is real, but only if you can see it. And to see it, you have to believe you belong. Imposter syndrome doesn’t just manifest as self-doubt; it also creates silence. And silence, for a lawyer, is never neutral. It collapses the very space we are ethically bound to use. I no longer see overcoming imposter syndrome as a private struggle but as a professional responsibility lawyers owe to ourselves, our clients, and the profession.
Josh Lerner was a 2025 FASPE Law Fellow. He is a disputes lawyer in Toronto.
Notes
1. In-House Connect, Imposter Syndrome in the Legal Profession: Understanding Its Impact and Finding Solutions (Sept. 13, 2024).
2. Bloomberg Law, 2024 Attorney Well-Being Report: The Divide Between Health & the Legal Industry, at p 5.