One L (28 page)

Thursday night, I put on my three-piece suit—another fall lesson—and drove to school. After evincing blitheness earlier in the day, Terry seemed to be having second thoughts and was now trying to write out his argument word for word. We met our opponents, both from another section. Terry's opposite was friendly, small, quick-witted. The guy on my issue, however, looked crooked. His brief had seemed good and Margo had praised it when she'd given us a copy. But consulting his cases, I felt he'd often gone over the line from advocacy to outright distortion. Looking at him now I thought I detected the same kind of cosmetics—nice suit, neat hair, and dirty fingernails. It may well have been a battlefield reaction.

At 8:00 precisely, our three judges filed in. Ames is sometimes pretty formal, and I'd heard about one group of student “counsel” who were bawled out for not standing when the court entered. Our judges were a little more casual. One was a student from BSA; he figured to be the toughest judge, since he'd been the best informed on the case. The second was a Boston attorney, an HLS alum. The third, and the heavy-weight on the panel, was Judge Clarence Mealy, a sitting Superior Court judge who also teaches Trial Practice courses given for upper-class students at HLS. David had told me that Mealy was an exceptionally well respected judge in Boston and I was glad for the realistic touch, even though I was a little more intimidated.

Terry began, “May it please the court.” He was terribly nervous. He was wearing a gold sharkskin suit and he shifted uneasily as he spoke, choking, wetting his lips. To start, he was able to read from what he'd prepared. Oral argument usually commences with a brief recitation of the facts and questions of the case. This is to refresh the memory of the judges.

Terry did not get much beyond the facts, though, when the court started hitting him with questions. Like everybody else, they were having trouble making sense of his argument relating defamation to negligence. He'd finally found a case that offered some support, but it was from a minor court and from the nineteenth century, and the judges seemed to ridicule him for using it.

“Counsel,” the BSA judge told him, “I don't even understand why you argued this point.” Judge Mealy, a tired-looking Irishman, appeared somewhat amused. He rocked in his chair, smirking now and then in my direction. You got stuck with this palooka, he seemed to be saying, I feel for you. I tried to remain impassive, watching Terry instead. He was getting angry and frustrated. He began smacking his fist into his palm and he took on a tough, sulky look like that of a bad schoolboy. He'd become downright surly by the time they let him go back to his seat.

I went to the podium next. I had the usual lump in my throat, but most of the time the preparation helped me through. When questions were asked, I felt like I was able to move with the flow. I had composed a broad argument to incorporate the new Supreme Court case. I claimed that the general thrust of all the Court's opinions was that a person was a “public figure” whenever he or she was somehow involved with the well-being of a community, and that within that community communication about that person should be largely uninhibited. I think it was a pretty good argument. The judges sort of threw my points back at my opponent when he came to the podium later and he seemed to have a hard time handling them. “You're just making this worse,” the Boston lawyer told him at one point.

When he finished, there was a round of rebuttal; then the four of us left the room to allow the judges to consult. It is usually weeks before a real appellate court announces its decision in a written opinion, but in Ames we'd be getting the word after a few minutes. BSA gives students the option of getting what they call a “competitive decision.” If all the students consent, the judges not only say which side won, but also rank the four, one against another, on the quality of their arguments and their briefs. Terry and I discussed “competitive decision” in advance and ruled it out as being more Harvard Law School sickness. Victory or defeat seemed competitive enough.

In the hallway, the four of us drank beer, which BSA had provided, while we waited. Terry was feeling bruised about his treatment and I tried to console him, agreeing that the court had been rough. The guy who'd argued opposite me kept saying, “I'm just glad it's over.” I agreed with that, too.

Ames cases are constructed such that they can go either way, but in most instances this year the teams which handled our side of the
Gantry
case seemed to win. Generally, they lost on my point but carried Terry's, thus overturning the lower-court verdict. We won too, but the opposite way. The decision, when we were called back in, was to reverse the lower court on the grounds that Reverend Gantry was indeed a public figure. I guess I had sounded pretty good. As we headed back to the hallway with the judges for more beer arid a postmortem, there was a lot of praise for my argument from the judges and from Terry and even from our opponents. The Boston lawyer seemed to be offering me a job for the summer, repeatedly asking me what my plans were. It had not hurt me any, I knew, that none of the judges had yet actually read the Supreme Court decision.

Out in the hall, Terry soon got into another hassle with the BSA judge, repeating a lot of the things he had told Margo. I just walked away. I'd been listening to all of that for a month and I felt too good now to spoil it. It was moot court, a mythical state, a mass of frictions; but boy, did I enjoy winning. I haven't felt that kind of outright glee in victory in years. Maybe it's something else law school's done to me—more childishness—or a sign of how praise-starved I am. Maybe I just felt I'd finally done something roundly good with the law.

Anyway, I still felt high when I got out of bed yesterday morning and a trace of the tingle remains today. I can see now what makes a trial lawyer's life go round. All those victories in the courtroom, clean and unequivocal, and the sweet purring of your ugly little enemy when he is finally satisfied.

Because of the tension, HLS is a place where people are usually hungry for a laugh. In mid-March, two of the customary events for poking fun at what goes on around the law school took place.

On a Friday shortly before spring vacation, the April Fools' issue of the law school newspaper appeared. The edition carried articles reporting that turnstiles had now been installed in the faculty office building to stem the tide of students seeking to speak to their professors, and a that second campus publication, noting the Law Review's choice of a female head, had taken affirmative action one step further and installed a dog as editor in chief (“Streaky woofed, ‘My species had nothing to do with my being elected.' ”) Another piece said that because students had proved so unreliable in relaying their grades to prospective employers, the registrar would now send marks directly on to the firms, from whom students could request a report in case they wanted to know how they'd done. The April Fools' issue came out on March 19. No one seemed deterred. As I say, at HLS a laugh is always welcome.

At about the same time, the Law School Show was closing its run. The Show, a musical, is an annual event. If this year's production was typical, then Harvard Law School is one site which can be safely skipped by Broadway scouts. The number of persons within the law school with both interest and time enough to take part in the Show is so low that many in the cast come from outside. Nevertheless, the Show goes on.

For such a supposedly sober institution, HLS is a place where grade-school-style dramatics are relatively frequent. One L sections often perform skits like the one we had given for Zechman in the last Torts class. In time I realized that all this playacting is a way that students manage to make clear the emotions that are not expressible amid the formalities of the Socratic classroom. Students can show affection, as we did with Zechman, not to mention other feelings more securely demonstrated in the guise of drama. Each year the Law School Show is the student body's most extensive opportunity to ridicule the faculty, and no doubt that has something to do with the Show's continued production.

Many of the faculty felt that this year's offering went beyond the limits of good taste. The sexual habits of some professors were called into question, and there were a couple of teachers who took the brunt of most of the humor. The Incident was often recalled. In one scene a “Professor Preening” took a meat-ax to a student who'd answered “unprepared.”

Perini was sensitive enough about the Incident that he was rumored to have regarded the Show without much joviality. That was unusual for him. In class, humor was the only form of student rebellion he tolerated happily. He had a mild sort of banter going with Sandy Stern all year. Usually he would goad Sandy good-naturedly and Stern, flattered by the attention, would try to respond. In general, Perini had far the better of it, even when the class began to come to Sandy's aid. One day he called an answer of Sandy's “predictably confused.” After he'd been hissed, Perini remarked, “I didn't know you had that many friends, Stern.” But Sandy had his day. Late in the year, Perini was reminding us once more of the importance of precision in lawyer's work. Be careful of details. “Of course, you can overdo it,” Perini admitted. “You don't want to go into court looking like the German army marching into Poland in nineteen forty-one.” It was Sandy who shouted out from the back of the room, “Nineteen thirty-nine.”

Other professors displayed a more controlled wit. Stumped by a question in a Criminal Law class, a student told Bertram Mann he was feeling uncomfortable. “I think that's the nature of the Socratic method,” Mann replied, “we stand here and make each other uneasy.” Fowler, on occasion, could rise up out of his gloom and be almost silly. “Everyone knows what
laches
means,” he told us in defining a term which had appeared in an opinion: “No one knows what
laches
means.”

Among students in the section, by far the most graceful sense of humor belonged to Ilene Bello, a tall, cheerful woman who wisecracked her way through most of the year. In the middle of the second term, repairs were made on the classroom in which we normally met for Civil Procedure. The class was shifted to another room, twice the size of the other, with seats in different order. Nicky found the seating chart useless. Instead, he called on us by shouting out digits, with students responding or passing when they heard their seat numbers. People were sitting scattered throughout the huge classroom and Nicky often struck on empty seats.

“Ninety-one,” Nicky called out one day.

On the far side of the room, Ilene Bello stood up. She picked up her purse, her books, moved over a space, and sat down again. Then she looked sweetly down to Nicky at the podium.

“No one,” she told him, “is sitting in seat ninety-one.”

Ilene's greatest triumph, however, came with Perini. Ilene had grown up nearby in Boston's Italian North End. One day Perini was discussing a case styled
D'Angelo
v.
Potter
. D'Angelo, a layman, had drawn up his own complaint in the suit, claiming Potter had breached a contract with him.

“Now in the first paragraph,” Perini asked Andy Kitter, who was on the hot seat that day, “what does D'Angelo say the contract concerned?”

“Four dozen bathroom fixtures,” Andy answered.

“And how many fixtures is that? Give me the number.”

“Forty-eight,” Andy said.

“Just wanted to be sure,” Perini told him. “Now look at the third paragraph of the complaint. How many fixtures does D'Angelo say he wants delivered?”

Andy looked down to his book for a second. “Forty-six,” he said.

“Forty-six,” said Perini. “Typical Italian mathematics.”

The next day as class was about to begin, Ilene suddenly shouted out, “Professor Perini,” and got to her feet. She had a red rose in her hand and she came to the front of the class. She put the rose in Perini's pocket, then kissed him on each cheek.

“D'Angelo says he'll be in touch,” she told him.