One L (12 page)

The stuff is still in my head all the time, although at moments I wonder if that absorption isn't a little dangerous or crazy. The other day I ordered a hamburger and sat a few minutes earnestly puzzling over whether a contract had been formed and what the damages would be if I reneged. Would the restaurant be entitled to the reasonable value of the hamburger, or their full profit?

A lot of my classmates continue to feel a greater remove from the law and a lot more unhappiness in it than I do. Many more people are enthusiastic about law school than were, for instance, at the end of the first week. But there's also a hard core—at least a third of the section—who can't seem to find a way to enjoy it. Karen Sondergard is still crying almost daily and there are plenty of people who talk about how frightened, uncertain, overwhelmed they constantly feel. Some classmates complain about boredom. Many still bemoan the competition and the hard-driving atmosphere. On those matters, I continue to feel people should be looking a little more honestly—and charitably—at themselves. There are not many of us around there who like to run at only half speed, even though we probably end up pushing each other.

However, whatever their reasons, I know that people are sincere when they talk about how unhappy they are. I've heard more than one person describe the past month as the worst in his life. It's some sign of the crazy intensity of the experience that from my own perspective, I'd have to call it one of the best.

Over the Columbus Day weekend, Annette and I went with David and his wife, Lynne, to upstate New York, where David's family owns a cabin on a lake in the Catskills. He and Lynne had invited us up there to see the fall colors for the first time after our years in California and to take a rest, which we all needed. It was the first weekend off I'd had since I'd started law school, six weeks before.

As we drove out of town, I sat in the front seat with David, talking law. We arrived at the cabin after dark and did not see the hills until the next morning, but as Lynne and David promised, they were magnificent. Maybe nothing but that kind of grandeur would have been enough to remove me from my legal trance. Even so, it worked. We hiked and fished, drank and talked by the fire. We looked around the small, pretty upstate towns and often simply stood dazed by the splendid spread of color across the small mountains.

I had a chance for the first time in weeks to spend some time with my wife. For Annette, it had not been an easy month and a half. She'd started a new job as an art teacher in a grade school district in one of the northern suburbs. It was an excellent job and she felt lucky to have it, but the work was physically taxing and it left her exhausted. She saw 700 children a week and carried her materials with her from room to room. And I was in no state to help her with the adjustments to a new environment. I was barely there, distracted at all moments and usually studying. Toward me Annette had maintained a generous good humor. She told me she considered this year a period when we were “living on our savings,” the fund of love, regard, good feeling accumulated through five years of a good marriage. But despite her tolerance, I knew it was no fun. She was alone and tired, and also stuck with most of the housework.

For us it was important and exceedingly pleasant to have time together again when my head was not boiling over with law.

“You're relaxed,” Annette told me on Sunday morning. “I wasn't sure I'd ever see you this way again.”

She was right. I was somewhat amazed, just by the changes in my physical state. I felt slower, stronger, more substantial. I had slept. My stomach was not perpetually clenched. My pulse seemed less violent. I did not feel always on the verge of a light sweat. I realized for the first time how great the pressure was which I'd been under. I was a different person here, the man I'd been six weeks ago. I thought about different things. I was not trying to keep my language precise, or analyzing every spoken proposition to find its converse. I could look at mountains as well as words and books. I could live with nothing but the dull gray buzz of tranquillity passing through my head.

“I've stolen away from the brain thieves,” I told Annette.

With Lynne and David, we had a late breakfast, then read the Sunday
Times
. In the afternoon, the four of us began a climb of the hill behind the cabin. We passed through a stand of small trees and Annette and Lynne, who'd come out in loafers, didn't think they could go on without something to grasp for support. They headed back to the cabin and David and I continued on toward the crest of the hill.

From the top you could see the whole valley: the lake under clouds, a rich gray like slate; the hills brilliant with color. We sat quiet, watching. I thought again how peculiar the demands I'd made on myself all these weeks seemed from here. Achieve, succeed, do and be excellent. It was a kind of madness. What was going on? What the hell was I doing to myself?

I asked David how he'd describe his state of mind during his first year of law school.

“Looking back,” he said solemnly, “I think I was crazy.”

“I think I am too,” I said.

“Well, don't worry about it,” he answered, “it always seems to pass, and around the law school, no one will ever notice. People there would all tell you the same thing.” David hoarsened his voice in imitation of an unknown elder and clapped me once soundly on the back. “ ‘My boy,' ” he said, “ ‘you're just learning to love the law.' ”

Disgrace

10/18/75 (Saturday)

Law school seems now to be entering its second phase. The zing of the first few weeks, the exhilaration at the mammoth complexness of the law and the brilliance of classmates has started to dissipate. The dimmer aspects of law school life begin to make themselves apparent. Which is not to say that school has become boring—only that there is a balance emerging, albeit one I still find greatly favorable.

Within the section, relations seem to have regularized, much as do those in any large group. Having been in class, having recognized mutual ignorance and fallibility, has made us all a little less awed by each other and consequently a little less attracted. For the most part, an atmosphere of modesty and bonhomie has taken over. We no longer see one another as the unknown objects on which all the splashy accolades and achievements were displayed like the tour decals on luggage. Dealings are more personal, and we feel for each other the normal range of attractions and aversions. There are a few in-section romances, many growing friendships. I've become increasingly close to Steve Litowitz. We spend a good deal of time with one another during the day, walk together to the Harvard Square bus station in the late afternoon, even hang on the phone like high schoolers in the evening. I admire his wit; and being almost from the same pod, we seem to react to most things the same way.

The work is still there, crushing in amount and far from easy. In Legal Methods, the assignments continue to pile on. Soon we will face our big project in there: drafting a brief in support of a motion for summary judgment in the Jack Katz case. In the regular courses, I feel a growing resistance to a number of things. There is only one class about which I have no complaints. Incredibly, that's Torts. For two or three weeks now, my affection for William Zechman and the subject he teaches has been growing. It started while we were studying consent, the defense in which the defendant maintains there was no wrong because the plaintiff agreed to the activity which caused his injury. Befuddlement in the class had hit such a high level that it had been transformed into a kind of hopeless boredom. The woman who sits beside me was discreetly reading a newspaper. The man on the other side was groaning for diversion: “If he'd just move,” he'd whisper, looking down at Zechman frozen behind the podium. “
Move
.”

I was not much happier. Him and his goddamn questions, I thought, his crazy hypos: If battery is a mere offensive touching, is it battery to kiss a woman good night, if she demurely says no? To push a man off a bridge that's about to collapse? Or does consent somehow cure those wrongs?

I wondered when he would cut it out. There was no answer to these questions. There never would be.

I sat still for a second. Then I repeated what I'd just thought to myself: There were no answers. That was the point, the one Zechman—and some of the other professors, less tirelessly—had been trying to make for weeks. Rules are declared. But the theoretical dispute is never settled. If you start out in Torts with a moral system that fixes blame on the deliberately wicked—the guy who wants to run somebody over—what do you do when that running down is only an accident? How do you parcel out blame when A hopes to hurt B in one way—frighten him by shooting a gun; and ends up injuring him in another freakishly comic manner—clobbered on the head with a falling duck? How far do basic moral notions carry you? At what point do you have to say, It's nobody's fault, life is tough?

With the realization that I was not missing some clear solution to all of the problems, Zechman's class suddenly has begun to make sense. I now see him as a sort of jeweler of ideas. He uses his questions like a goldsmith's hammer, working the concepts down to an incredible fineness and shine.

Not all of the people in the section yet share my enthusiasm. The man and woman on either side are still groaning and reading respectively. Nazzario is also displeased. “The dude's on some philosophical trip I can't handle,” Terry told me last week. But I think there's now a majority of us who relish the class. I'm often so excited that I literally cannot sit still. We're back there in the second-to-the-last row, the woman reading, the man groaning, and me bouncing up and down in my seat.

The other classes, unfortunately, are not going as well. In Criminal, Mann is near to intolerable. He plods straight ahead like some kind of bewildered plow horse, each class a trudging comparison of the case law and the code. And when my objections are not to bad teaching, they seem to be to the professors personally. Like my classmates, the teachers are becoming known quantities—people, now, and not deities—and I have developing feelings about each. Perini is still brilliant in class. He picks students' minds like a clairvoyant and I give him the prize as the best lecturer I've ever heard. We've started the “basic triad” of contract law—offer, acceptance, and consideration, the three elements required to form a binding obligation—and Perini has shown a wonderful finesse in presenting those hard ideas. But the atmosphere he creates in the classroom strikes me as more and more objectionable.

“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the mornings we have Contracts, I get on the bus in Watertown and I'm nearly sick to my stomach,” Stephen confessed to me on the phone last week. “I can't believe it, but I think about that class and I get ill. And when I walk out of there on Wednesday, I feel as if the week is already over.”

The same sort of thing can be said for almost everyone in the section. What bothers me most is that Perini seems to recognize our discomfort, and takes it with something only a little short of glee.

Even Nicky Morris has started to get on my nerves. I'm grateful for his easygoing manner in the classroom, but there are moments when that gentleness seems less friendship than condescension. We're still doing jurisdiction over the person, a topic which has mushroomed in complexity as we've gone along. Historically, courts could assert their power only over persons found inside the state where the court sat. These days a precarious weighing of subtle factors takes place to determine how far that power can extend. Sometimes in explaining that process, it seems that Nicky is trying to be deliberately confusing. When the class does not understand, he can then address us in that increasingly familiar tone which suggests that not only are we people far less knowledgeable than he, but also substantially less intelligent. The thought has crossed my mind that Nicky, the famous football competitor, came to teaching seeking a field on which he could always win.

Reading all of this over, it sounds as if I am totally bummed out. That is not so. I still feel plenty of that thirsty pleasure in school. I've just begun to recognize the bad with the good—a balance, as I said at the start. I suppose the task of the next few weeks will be to adjust to those small disappointments I'm starting to feel.

 

Sooner or later, I had to touch down. For six weeks, I had been swooning and careening like some sky-dazed hawk, and my Columbus Day weekend away from the law had shown me how perilous and crazy that flight sometimes had been. I couldn't go on asking that much of myself. I had to ease off. Settling back in on the following Tuesday, concentrating, scrutinizing, pressed at again by that atmosphere of tense precision, I'd actually become dizzy and a little bit ill.

As I moved through those middle weeks in October, a lot of things were serving to sober my mood. That gray cap which hovers over Cambridge at least six months a year had begun to appear. The squirrels were burrowing, storing nuts. Winter, cold and slushy and despised—the first this temporary Californian had been through in five years—was nearing. And in retrospect, to a far greater extent than I then recognized, I see that the warnings I gave myself when we were in the mountains came too late. I had simply burnt myself out. The initial strength and enthusiasm I'd brought to law school had been spent and I had no reserves left. I was exhausted, still under the same pressures, and, in consequence, occasionally gloomy.

I was also increasingly vulnerable to a lot of things I'd suppressed. In the first weeks I'd recognized many troubles without allowing them to alter my prevailing high mood—the sacrificial demands of the achievement ethic, the personal changes forced by the education which Gina had pointed to, the self-doubt I felt during interview season. Now all of those things, and a series of new but similar realizations, began to have an impact. I also had to deal with the plain fact that the new shine had worn off. For my classmates and myself, there'd been a stunning gain in knowledge and competence, but in the process, the thrilling mystery of the law had started to dissolve.

All in all, my expectations were changing, but the sane and prudent tone I struck in my journal—saying that I would have to “adjust” to “small disappointments”—masked a wild-ness and bitterness and lack of control in my feelings which would intensify in the coming weeks, and had to an extent already set in.

Many of the things I felt during that period were unique to me, the result of my personal lunacies, but a sense of spirits stepping down seemed widespread. Most of us in Section 2 appeared to take on a sort of sullen grimness about what we were doing. A few people seemed to develop strength from the emerging routine and ground ahead remorselessly, but the more common reaction was the beginning of an active resistance to law school and its demands. No one quit, of course. In the first weeks of the term, one man, always gently complaining about how perplexed he felt, had withdrawn. That is not unprecedented. Each year, two to three percent of the entering class leaves. The reasons vary: marriage, illness, determinations by students that they're simply not cut out for the law. Some persons in each of those categories eventually return.

But in Section 2, virtually everyone decided to stick it through. They all wanted to be lawyers, I guess; and besides, almost all of us had arrived prepared for exactly the kind of emotional letdown we felt by the middle of October. We all had friends who'd gone to Harvard Law School and who'd issued grim reports. We'd chosen to come anyway. Perhaps the expectation of difficulties hastened trouble's arrival.

Whatever the source, many were displeased enough to become slightly uncooperative. Attendance, though nominally required, began to fall off in each of the courses, especially Mann's, where it was frequently down as much as fifteen or twenty percent for each session. Except in Perini's Contracts, where it was not permitted, backbenching had also become common. Every time a class met, between six and a dozen people were located in the rear seats—that lost world not mapped on the seating chart.

Terry was one of those who began to show up irregularly and to backbench when he did come.

“I just can't sit still, man,” he told me. “I'm tired of those guys talkin' at me, tellin' me how to think. I've gotta do it my own way.”

To me the most dramatic sign of the changing attitude among students came one day in Torts in mid-October. Zechman was talking about conversion, one of the tort remedies for theft. If a car thief makes off with your Chevy, you can sue him civilly for conversion, even if he's criminally tried for joyriding. Zechman described the tort as a “judicially-enforced sale,” meaning that the thief would keep the car and you would get what it was worth—a valuable option if the joyrider had for instance, cracked up your Chevy on his tour through the neighborhood. It was a point many of us had missed.

From the center of the classroom, one man called out, a little belligerently, “Where do you get that from?”

Zechman was normally inordinately polite to us, but I guess that remark struck him as a breach of decorum. He looked icily at the student and said, “When you get a chance sometime, read the cases.”

It was quick and snide. Some people laughed, but after a few seconds a rattling hiss spread from various parts of the room. Hissing the speaker for a disagreeable comment is an old Harvard habit, practiced throughout much of the university. It's imported to the law school each year by those 1Ls who were undergraduates at Harvard College and it had been quickly picked up in my section. Until that day in the middle of October, hissing had been reserved for fellow students, usually when the speaker's remarks were politically conservative. (Most of the hissers seemed to be left-wing.) But after that day when Zechman was treated to it, hissing became a piece of student weaponry frequently used against the faculty, most commonly when a professor dismissed a student's comments unfairly or said something hardhearted. Usually, the teachers accepted the hissing with a dim frown or a weak attempt to justify their remarks.

There was more and more of that mood of open confrontation. In the first few weeks many of the students who were uncomfortable or unhappy had assumed that it was their fault, that they were somehow incompetent. Now they seemed to stop blaming themselves and were pointing the finger at the institution and the educational style. The Socratic method, they said, was unfair and intimidating. In class we learned too much raw technique with too little attention to the ethical duties lawyers owed the society. And the atmosphere around HLS was often bitterly deplored—a robot factory, people began to call it; a legal pressure cooker.