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As often as not, the most vigorous in their criticisms were the members of the Harvard Law Guild, a student organization dedicated to progressive reform in the structure and educational format of the law school. The Guild had held an organizational meeting early in the year, and many of the men and women of the section had joined. Kyle, the fuzzy-haired Harvard grad in my study group, was a member. So was Helen Kirchner, the woman who'd complained about the aggressiveness of our classmates. There were quite a few other Guild members in Section 2. Most of them, during the first weeks, had been somewhat circumspect, usually sharing their complaints only with each other. But as the mid-term mood of displeasure made itself more apparent, the Guild members, sensing a more hospitable environment, tended to speak up frequently. Occasionally they challenged the professors in class, especially Mann, who often assumed moderate or conservative positions on loaded subjects such as sentencing, bail reform, white-collar crime.

The most outspoken of the Guild members was Wade Strunk. Wade was from Alabama and he made a paradoxical radical. He was mannerly, precise. He wore his hair short and he was usually very well dressed. He often had on expensive foulards and designer shirts, and his accent sounded of all the luxury and graciousness of a bygone southern age. But he was unstinting in his criticism of the law school.

My first brush with Wade came late in September. On Thursday and Friday, Torts and Civil Procedure met in the same room in Langdell and there was a half-hour break between classes. After Torts, one man who sat near me asked if I thought it would be safe to leave his books. I said I was sure it was, that none of our classmates struck me as the thieving kind.

Wade, standing nearby, overheard.

“These people here?” he asked at once. “Why, half of them are thieves already and don't know it. Three years from now they'll be working for these big corporate law firms whose fees are paid by nothing much better than thieving. Plenty of them are stealing right now. My teaching fellow's briefcase was ripped off right out of his office.”

I wasn't sure Wade was serious. I said to him that this was a large school and that there were probably a few people here capable of anything. And there was no question that in the future some good people might become trapped in bad institutions.

“But you don't really think everybody here is a bad guy, do you?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Wade answered. “Most of them. Most of them are quite corrupt.”

Many of Wade's classmates held an equally charitable view of him. By the middle of October, there were a number who snickered out loud every time Wade spoke in class. We all knew it was going to be the same dime-store Marxism, a description of how the particular doctrine we were studying had been laid down for the protection of the upper classes and their wealth. After one of Wade's more unreasoned outbursts, one of the wryer members of the section approached me at the end of class. He nodded toward Wade, expensively dressed, as ever, and said, closely imitating Wade's accent, “Aftuh the cent, “Aftuh the revolution, ever'one will wear Yves St. Laurent.”

Yet by the middle of October, I'd begun to pay more attention to all of the Guild members, even to Wade, who I knew was made silly only by passion and real concern. I felt some caution toward the people in the Guild. They were kids from Harvard and Yale, Park Avenue and Beverly Hills, who would lecture you freely on the plight of the poor. But I admired their forthrightness, and as time went on I'd become less certain that whatever else could be said of them, I'd call them entirely wrong.

10/21/75 (Tuesday)

A difficult day. A disturbing incident at lunch.

For a while, I've felt that there's a cohesion lacking in my studying and it has seemed to me that the study group could help provide some focusing. In talking it over, I found that everyone else felt the same way. It seemed time for a meeting, to see if we could hash over the problems with the study group and consolidate purposes, and so, with the exception of Stephen, who had a date for lunch, we all got together at noon.

The complaints about the group came out at once: too disorganized, too uncommitted, rudderless, overaggressive in discussion (Aubrey's point, aimed at me, I think), and too many people.

The last was Kyle's complaint, and he kept hammering at it.

“We've got too many people. We can't have effective discussions. We can't concentrate on anything. We're going to keep BS'ing.” Finally, Kyle said, “We've got to narrow the group to four people, five at the most.”

The suggestion pretty plainly was that we throw somebody out, and it offended me. I was telling Kyle exactly that when Sandy Stern, guileless or guilty, suddenly spoke up.

“You're not going to throw me out, are you?” Sandy asked. “Not just because I'm in two groups?”

Two? we all asked. Sandy quickly admitted that he was part of another group which had been busy all term outlining courses and preparing review notes. He had joined our group too, he said, because we seemed more interested in high-minded, speculative talk about the law, which he felt was missing in the other.

“Hey,” Terry told him, “we don't wanna do that kind of jiving around anymore. We wanna start putting it all together now.”

Sandy refused to take the hint. He sat there pulling at his big scraggly moustache and proposing compromises: One day, with him present, we could speculate. On a second, without him, we could review. As a last hope, he even offered to make copies for us of the outline he was preparing for the other group.

It did no good. Kyle, pointedly, kept repeating, “Somebody's gotta go, someone
has
to.”

I told Sandy that it should be his decision. I said that I was against his sudden exclusion and that if he wanted to stay it would be okay with me, but I also told him that I felt it had been deceptive to conceal his membership in the other group, and that so far as I knew everyone always assumed study groups were exclusive.

Sandy debated my points but finally said that he would do whatever we preferred. Aubrey seemed to hold the crucial weight and he shook his head no. He had wanted a smaller group from the start.

With apologies issued all around, Sandy gathered his books and departed. We stayed to plan further activities for the group. But the whole event stayed with me all day. I felt a frustrated pity, angered by Sandy's obtuseness but ashamed that we had been so hard-nosed as to boot him. What difference is it to us really if he thinks he can handle being in two groups? I was disturbed by what had emerged in each of us. Kyle had been ruthless and Aubrey a little matter-of-fact. Terry all along was bothered by Sandy's mincing way and was visibly anxious to have him gone. I had hardly been stalwart in defending Sandy's right to stay.

When I told the story to Stephen tonight on the phone, he was dismayed.

“That goddamn Kyle,” he said.

I admitted that none of us had been shown to much advantage this afternoon. I'm beginning to get some idea of what might be involved in meeting my enemy.

“Yes, Mr. Turow?” Professor Mann said, looking down at his seating chart to be certain of my name.

It was the fourth week in October, and we were discussing inchoate crimes—crimes attempted or solicited, but never completed. The case concerned a man who'd come into a bar, drunk and obviously disturbed. He'd brandished a gun, threatened a number of patrons, and finally, with the gun at the bartender's head, had pulled the trigger. The gun had not gone off. Mann had asked us how the case would be classified under the Model Penal Code. The members of the section had paged through the code and come up with various suggestions: assault, attempted murder. Mann himself had asked if this were possibly attempted manslaughter. I had the answer to that, a very clever one, I thought, and raised my hand.

“It can't possibly be attempted manslaughter,” I said. “Attempted crimes have to be intended and manslaughter's an unintentional offense.”

People smiled around me. I heard somebody say, “Ah!” I'd got it. A good point.

Mann glanced down from the ceiling and looked at me kindly.

“Don't you hear the wind whistling behind you?” he asked.

I froze.

“I'm afraid you've gone through the trapdoor,” he said, and as I sunk lower in my seat, he explained that an intended attempt at murder, given mitigating circumstances like drunkenness or insanity, could be classed as attempted manslaughter under the code.

I'd made a mistake. It wasn't the blunder of the year, but I felt horribly embarrassed—worse than that, corrosively ashamed. This seemed to be happening to me a lot recently—raising my hand to say things which were somehow inappropriate or flatly wrong. And none of us found it easy to endure our classroom errors, let alone on a regular basis.

“Isn't it awful?” Stephen asked me one day after he'd muffed an answer in Civil Procedure. “I haven't felt that bad in years.” Gina said she brooded on her mistakes for hours.

As the year had worn on, classroom performance had assumed an increasing importance. We now engaged in close assessments daily of how well people had done in class, especially when they'd been called on, almost as if it had been an athletic event. “Jack was terrific today.” “Yeah, but I felt bad for him when Perini nailed him on that question. McTerney really saw that all the way. She
is
smart.”

The reasons we all put that kind of stock in what happened in class were complex. Superficially, I suppose it was no more than a further sign of how competitive we were with each other. But there were a number of environmental effects which had recently begun to exaggerate the drive and ambition within each of us. For two months now we had all been doing exactly the same things day in and day out, listening to the same professors, doing the same reading, making the same discoveries. Moreover, there was little time to find more personal outlets outside of school. For many of us, then, the feeling had grown pronounced of being faceless, lost in the mob—and the only kind of distinction available was to be known as good, bright, quick, adept with the law. Thus a striving for a sense of identity began to be mixed in with our hopes for success.

That, in turn, led to another problem. As students became more desirous of doing well, they could only grow more conscious of the fact that there was now no sure indication of how much or how well they were learning. Though we'd all been working like Trojans for a couple of months, none of us could even be sure that we'd pass each course. Obviously, odds were in our favor. There are few Fs given at Harvard Law School. Forty years ago a third of the entering class would flunk out, but these days almost no one leaves for academic reasons. Nevertheless, considering the difficulty of the material, the possibility of something close to failure, however remote, sometimes invited contemplation. Though I wanted to do well, for me, and I imagine for others, the less clear my standing became the more my fantasy cycle intensified at the darker end—a few thoughts of wild success obliterated by panicked visions of being thrown out in the street.

The only end to that fear of failure would come when we were examined in January. There would be no grades until then, and the single test would be the sole basis for determining marks in each course. Longing perhaps for the assurance exams would provide—and also hoping to lay the ground for good results—many people, even at the end of October, had begun pointing toward the tests. In the meanwhile we looked wherever we could for signs that we were holding our own. People who had high LSAT scores often speculated about whether the correlation between the test and law school grades would hold true for them. On a number of occasions I was told that because I was older and married, I was certain to rank high in the section and there were many moments when I halfheartedly repeated that wisdom to myself.

But it was in the classroom, with the 140 of us together facing the professor, that exam competition was most closely simulated; and it was to what happened there that we gave the greatest weight. The more people tended to see classroom performance as an index of standing, the more pressed we all felt to do well. The unofficial ban on outside research had been inadvertently lifted one day early in October when Sandy Stein had raised his hand in Contracts. We were studying a case about a Pennsylvanian who had volunteered for service in the Civil War. He promised he would send his wife a living allowance of $20 a month while he was away, but he had never paid it. The wife sued for breach of contract and lost. Perini used the case to illustrate the differing ways in which courts treat agreements between family members compared to agreements between persons in business—a theme he returned to often during the year. Sandy, however, had gone far afield.