One L (2 page)

Normally, Legal Methods would gather in classes of twenty-five, but today for the introductory session three groups had been joined and the small classroom was crowded. There was a lot of commotion as people went about introducing themselves to each other. I sat down next to a man who was glad-handing everybody around him. It was only a moment before he got to me.

“Terry Nazzario,” he said, grasping my hand. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-twenties, coarse-skinned but quite handsome. His black hair was combed back behind his ears and he reminded me a lot of the kids we'd called “greasers” when I was growing up in Chicago. He looked a little out of place amid the Ivy League ease of Harvard Law School. Apparently, he thought so himself. When I asked where he was from, he told me Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Montclair State College, then added, “Hey, man, the only reason I got in here was cause they thought I was Puerto Rican.”

I looked at him.

“No jive,” he told me. “My mailbox is full of stuff from the Latin Students Organization.”

He might have been serious, I decided, but he did not appear disturbed. A character, I figured. Your basic hustler. I smiled cautiously. Nazzario watched me a moment, then laughed out loud and gave me a wink. I had passed.

At the front of the room the instructor was calling us to order.

“I'm Chris Henley,” he said. He was short and had a full beard. He looked to be in his early thirties. “I'd like to welcome you to Harvard Law School. This'll be a brief session. I just want to give you a few ideas about what we'll be doing for the next few days and then in the rest of the course.”

Before he went on, Henley told us a little about himself. He had been a lawyer with OEO in Washington for seven years. Now he was here, working on a graduate law degree; next year he would probably move on to another school to become a law professor. Then he introduced the three members of the Board of Student Advisors who would be working with each of the Methods groups. A lean, dark man named Peter Geocaris, a 3L, had been assigned to mine. After that, Henley described the course.

“In the Legal Methods program,” he said, “you'll be learning skills by practicing them. Each of you will act as attorney on the same case. You'll assume the role of a law firm associate who's been asked to deal with the firing of an employee by a corporation.”

It would all be highly fictionalized, but we'd follow the matter through each of its stages, gaining some taste of many aspects of a lawyer's work. Among other things, Henley said we would be involved with a client interview, the filing of suit, preparing and arguing a brief for summary judgment. At the very end we would see how two experienced attorneys would handle the suit in a mock trial. I had only the vaguest idea of what many of the words Henley used meant
—depositions
and
interrogatories
and
summary judgment—
and perhaps for that reason alone, the program sounded exciting.

Henley said our first assignment would be handed out at the end of class. It consisted of a memo from our mythical law-firm boss and a “case” the boss had asked the associate to consult. “Case” here means the published report of a judge's resolution of a dispute which has come before him. Typically, a case report contains a summary of the facts leading up to the lawsuit, the legal issues raised, and what the judge has to say in resolving the matter. That portion of the case report in which the judge sets forth his views is called an “opinion.” Cases and opinions form the very center of a law student's world. Virtually every American law school adheres to the “case study method,” which requires students to learn the law by reading and discussing in class a steady diet of case reports. Most of those are the decisions of appellate courts, designated higher courts to which lawyers carry their objections to some point of law ruled on by a trial judge. Because they deal with closely defined legal questions, appellate opinions are considered especially apt tools for teaching students the kind of precise reasoning considered instrumental to a lawyer's work.

The case Henley assigned us was from the Supreme Court of New Hampshire. He asked us to read it and to be ready to discuss it the next time the Methods group met. That did not sound like much.

Before letting us go, Henley reminded us of our schedule for today and the rest of the week: this afternoon an address by the dean and a beer party with our section, tomorrow, for my group, more meetings, classes, a lecture by the librarian. Then Henley added a word of his own.

“I hope you will all take some time off during the year,” he said. “I know you'll have your hands full. But it's so important,
so important
to get away from the law now and then. Just so that you can maintain some perspective. Don't get so caught up in all of this that you forget to leave it once in a while. Your work will always be there when you get back.”

This seemed advice I hardly needed. After five years in California, one thing I'd thought I'd learned was how to relax.

When Henley finished, people swelled to the front to collect the memo and the case report. I picked up copies, then followed most of my classmates as they headed toward the basement, where Henley had said our first regular class assignments would be posted.

In law school there would be no “introductory day” like the ones I'd experienced in college and graduate school, none of that business of the professor's displaying himself to prove he does not have a mumble and hoping that students won't drop. “Lectures begin on the opening day of the year,” the catalog sternly announced. Assignments were posted in advance so that we would be fully prepared when we entered class Monday.

In Criminal Law, Professor Mann had simply assigned the first chapter of the casebook. But Professor Perini's announcement was longer:

It was not a good sign. As I copied the announcement, one man beside me said he had looked at the casebook and that the assignment would take hours. And as I finished writing I also noticed that Professor Perini had underlined the last word,
CAREFULLY
, twice.

 

Back upstairs, the dean was already in the midst of his welcoming address. It was a typical first-day speech, full of anecdotes and general advice and muted efforts at inspiration, but the dean delivered it with verve. He reminded us that almost all attorneys regard the first year of law school as the most challenging year of their legal lives and he urged us to use the year well. Then he released us to the green behind Harkness where beer was being served to the sections, each of which was gathering on a different corner of the lawn.

It was our first chance to mingle, aside from the quick handshakes and introductions that had been taking place in the hallways, and the members of my section sought each other out eagerly, inquiring into backgrounds, exchanging accounts of what had brought each of us to law school. I met a former Senate aide, another man who'd been U.S. karate champion while in the army. I introduced myself to a number of people: a group standing together who had been undergraduates at Harvard; a man who'd been a paralegal in New York City; the M.D. whose name I'd noticed in the entry ledger. She had interrupted her residency at the University of California, she told me, because she thought law school “might be fun.”

As I met my classmates that day and in the next few weeks I was often amazed by the range of achievements. About two fifths of them had been out of college for at least a year and few had wasted the time. Around twenty of the people in the section had other advanced degrees, and many more had been successful in previous careers. There was an inventor, an architect, a research scientist, a farmer, mothers, a number of businessmen, three women who'd been social workers, many former college instructors, three reporters, ex-servicemen, people who'd had significant jobs in government. Nor were the men and women who'd come direct from college less impressive. If anything, their undergraduate records were more outstanding than those of us who'd been out, many of the younger people, if not most,
summa cum laudes
from the best-known universities in the country.

But more than the array of résumé glories that each person could present, I was taken in those first few weeks with the personal force of those around me. After ten years in universities I was accustomed to being surrounded by bright people. Yet I had never been in a group where everybody was as affable, outgoing, articulate, as magically able to make his energy felt by others. I had been told that my classmates would be academic privateers and cutthroats, but as I wandered around the Harkness green, sun-dazed and excited and a little bit drunk, I felt a little like one of the astronauts, headed for adventure with the most prime and perfect companions anyone could choose.

Indeed, that impression was not far from the truth. The process of selection which brought each of us to that green was rigorous. In the past decade, the race for admission to all the law schools in the country has grown remarkably thick and heated. The number of persons enough interested in law school each year to take the LSAT has quadrupled since 1964, and since 1971, when the crunch became especially pronounced, there have been more than twice as many law school applicants each year as there have been places.

The reasons for the incredible law school boom are varied. Certainly the birthrates after World War II, the end of the draft, and the drought in university-level teaching jobs, which has discouraged enrollment in other graduate schools, are all significant factors. So too are national episodes like Vietnam and Watergate, which have inspired many to look to law as a means by which change can be accomplished. Probably most important in accounting for the sudden rise in applications is the fact that minorities, and especially women—groups virtually excluded in the past—are now seeking legal education in large numbers.

One of the results of this boom in interest has been a boom in the number of lawyers. Law school enrollments have grown rapidly, and in 1974 there were nearly 30,000 young lawyers graduated, three times more than were graduated ten years earlier and far too many for the legal job market to absorb. The Department of Labor estimated that there were only 16,500 positions available that year for new attorneys.

In consequence, the battle has grown ever more intense for admission to “name” law schools; Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, University of California (Boalt Hall), Penn, NYU, and Virginia are most often listed as the top flight. It is only the graduates of those schools, and law review editors at some others, who continue to have job opportunities as extensive as those commonly available to all law school graduates a few years ago. Harvard each year receives between 6,000 and 7,000 applications for a class of 550. At Yale and Stanford the disparities are even more dramatic: 3,000 applicants for only 165 spaces.

In making their selections, admissions officers generally place the greatest weight on two factors—the student's college grades and his score on the LSAT. The emphasis on those criteria is often criticized. Because of variations from college to college in academic standards, law schools tend to favor applicants from undergraduate schools whose marks have proved reliable in the past. At law schools like Harvard, that means a continued influx from the Ivy League colleges, with candidates from smaller and lesser-known schools at a disadvantage. The sole leveler is the LSAT—the only measure common to all applicants—but its accuracy is often doubted. The test is administered in a session which lasts only four hours, and many persons question the fairness of allowing the results of so short an exam to be so crucial. A grade below the median of 500 makes it difficult to get in at most American law schools, and each year many college students who have long planned on a legal career must change objectives when the LSAT results come back.

Admissions officers, however, discount the failings of grades and test scores and point instead to their utility in speeding the selection process and also in foretelling law school success. By now the average grades and test scores of those admitted to the most selective schools have hit astronomical levels. In recent years, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago, the entering class has boasted medians near a solid A average and LSAT scores of around 720, close to the ninety-eighth percentile among all those taking the test nationally.

No matter what criteria were used, though, my guess would be that most of my HLS classmates would have arrived there or someplace similar anyway. They had been jumping hurdles all their lives, impressing teachers and counsellors and admissions officers, leading, succeeding, achieving. There were moments when I wished for greater diversity in the group. Nearly a third were from Ivy League colleges—and it was hard not to notice how many of my classmates were plainly the children of privilege and wealth, now acquiring more of the advantages they had started with. But those observations applied just as well to me—eastern-educated, a son of the well-to-do—and if advantages became a basis for exclusion then I might well have been the first to go. As it was, there were many moments during those initial days when, awed by the geniality and talents of my classmates, I felt proud, and sometimes startled, that I had been included at all.