One L (30 page)

Am I saying, then, that I'm sorry I'm at Harvard Law School? I don't think so (although looking ahead to spring exams, which are always thought of as the pit of the first year, I reserve judgment). None of my observations on the law school are meant to be wholeheartedly damning. It's just that three quarters of the way through the year, I have realized that HLS, with its great size and wealth of resources, is a place where you must always pick and choose. I see myself in these last few months making an effort to regard the place more realistically, to keep myself from looping into either ecstasy or despair as I meet up with the diverse range of what is offered. And the arrogance of HLS is one of the things I am most eager to escape. It makes the environment even more claustrophobic and consuming and leaves me grateful for whatever few reminders I get that Harvard and the law school are not really the center of the universe. I had a nice one last week, a letter from a poet friend, a professor at a southern university, to whom I'm sure the Ivy League has always been a kind of distant mystery. The letter was long delayed in reaching me because it had been addressed care of Harvard Law School, Harvard University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Exams (Last Act)

4/6/76 (Monday)

Back in school after vacation. I know a little bit now of how the astronauts feel, snatched out of free flight and returned to earth. Even today I could feel the incipient pressure of exams. My stomach already is tight as a fist.

 

At the end of my vacation, Annette and I had gone to Cape Cod. It was our fifth anniversary and we'd spent the weekend in a romantic old country inn, hand-built in the eighteenth century. We'd walked on the beach. Sunday we flew a kite. I would not have another day off until exams ended on the first of June.

I didn't plan, of course, to let exams overtake me that thoroughly. On April 6, the first test was still more than five weeks away. But I had ignored work during Ames, and had eased off in March. Now, in the first days back, I saw that I was going to have to pay. In Property, for instance, I had never mastered the Estates in Land, a set of medieval rules which still govern many aspects of the conveyance of real estate. Fee simple, fee tail, remainders, reversions, life estates—I'd let it all go, hoping the ideas would somehow settle in over time. They hadn't. In April the concepts were still more foreign to me than anything I'd encountered since the physics formulas of my first term in college.

Obligations outside the regular course work also began to crop up. Sternlieb gave us a pass/fail take-home test on the analytic material covered in the initial weeks of his course. That ate up one weekend. Perini scheduled a practice exam on the first term's material, and preparing for that consumed another. Perini's test was not required, but I knew I needed the review. Another thing I'd recognized in the first week back was how difficult it was going to be to put together the two yearlong courses, Contracts and Procedure. My classmates had returned from their vacations talking about terms from the two classes which I'd all but forgotten: quasi in rem jurisdiction, the parol evidence rule, promissory estoppel.

So, suddenly and without the zest and excitement I'd felt previously, I had reverted to the first-semester schedule—five hours sleep, work all weekend. In the second week of April, Eric Varnig, a professor from Harvard Business School, took over the teaching of Law and Public Policy from Sternlieb. Varnig lectured on management techniques in government, condensing what was a semester course at the B School into five weeks. He did not, however, cut out much of a term's worth of reading and by the end of his third lecture I was nearly three hundred pages behind. It was again a race to squeeze the most out of every day. I was always looking at my watch.

The biggest burden was probably the study group Procedure outline. Once more Stephen was administering an exacting standard, but it was difficult now to quarrel with him, for the outline had taken on undeniable importance. In the week before spring vacation, Nicky Morris had discussed his plans for the final with the section; he wanted our reactions before he began composing the test. Nicky told us that he had decided to try an even more pronounced departure from issue-spotting exams. “People never get beyond reciting rules,” he said, and admitted that students had criticized him in the past for giving a rule-oriented test in a formidably theoretical course. Instead, this year he planned to test knowledge of the rules with a single issue spotter. The remainder of the exam would be comprised of more open-ended questions.

Even while Nicky was detailing what the other questions would be like, I heard Stephen call my name from behind. His arms were open and his face was full of the glee I'd seen the day he'd received his grades. “We've got it,” he was mouthing, “we've got it.” What he meant was that the Procedure outline on which we'd now all begun work provided a nearly ideal organization of information for the exam Nicky was describing. The test would be another eight-hour affair, and with that amount of time, it sounded almost as if we'd be able to pull the answers out of the outline verbatim.

Our plan for the document had been entirely inadvertent, but in April word spread through the section that our group had craftily devised the “perfect” outline. As the month wore on, I became aware that we were the objects of a quiet resentment. Most groups had never resumed operation in the second term, and several people seemed vaguely offended that we had continued engaging in cooperative efforts. Even those groups still functioning would find it hard to duplicate what we had done. We'd started a month ahead of them and also before the hectic term-end reviewing had begun.

In a few instances there seemed to be outright irritation, a sense that we had gained some unfair advantage.

“How's the machine doing?” Jack Weiss, regularly asked me, referring to our study group. Jack was another two-A man, a strong contender for the Law Review. By mid-April he'd become twitchy and taut, chewing up Maalox by the box. He seemed nearly obsessed with our damn outline. I'm sure that rumor had turned it into a virtual Rosetta stone of Civil Procedure. Jack was probably certain we'd all make As, and he knew he was working against a curve with top grades for only so many.

Terry had had the same treatment from Jack.

“Look,” I suggested to Terry one day, “maybe we just ought to announce that anybody who wants to Xerox our damn outline can.”

Terry did not like the idea. It did not fit in with his bootstrap philosophy. Nobody had ever given him much of anything, let alone at Harvard Law School. I was not sure I liked the idea myself. We'd all done a good deal of work on the outline by now. I wasn't sure what compensations there'd be in making a gift of those efforts to the whole section.

As for Stephen, he did not seem to notice any of this air of mild controversy about the outline. He was in a kind of blind panic now, preparing for exams. Over vacation, he had visited St. Louis, where he'd gone to graduate school. He liked the city and he had a weak hope of finding summer work there. But when he displayed his résumé to a number of law firms he found that the customary prejudice against first-year law students as summer clerks did not apply in cases like his.

“I'll tell you something,” he said to me when he returned with four or five offers for the summer, “grades don't talk—they
scream
.”

Anybody would be taken with that kind of sudden new attractiveness. Stephen—lonely, bereft—was especially susceptible. He seemed desperate not to let any of that slip away. He'd spent all his free time over vacation reviewing, and now he was going at it even more intensely. He was literally outlining the commercial outlines—”distilling,” was the way he put it; he'd already finished a complete digest of Perini's hornbook. He would excuse himself from lunch after eating in minutes. He was even going off by himself to study in the brief breaks between classes.

In the process, he seemed also to have grown more beguiled by the trappings of success, Harvard Law School style. He was talking less often about teaching when he finished school and more about practicing law. That, I'm sure, was a response to the real interest in law he'd discovered in himself. But he also frequently talked about the financial differentials between the two careers and said he was thinking about working permanently for the private firms of which he'd been so contemptuous in October.

“I never thought it would be him,” Terry told me after watching Stephen for a while after spring vacation. “I mean, I've been around people, I know what goes on. But I didn't think he'd get sucked in. Man, he bought the whole trip.”

I probably should have spoken to Stephen. I saw him being taken away from himself. But I remained confused about how much of what I recognized in him was a reflection of my own jealousy. I stayed silent, while my friendship for him veered toward pity.

On occasion, Stephen would still take the time to call me, especially when he was down. There were a lot of moments now when he seemed to be borne on heavily by the pressures, the contradictions, in everything he wanted. The conversations were more or less soliloquies by Stephen, alternating tones of fear and ambivalence and denial.

“Well, I'm working away here,” he told me one Sunday when he called. “I have the Procedure outline going and I've really been getting down on Con Law. I figure Contracts, I'll have pat; he won't be able to touch me. Property's the only thing. We're hanging over the cliff in the course.” Like me, Stephen had been having his trouble with the Estates in Land. Recently, he'd told me with real concern, near panic, that he was sure he'd flunk the course. He had instants like that when all his fears seemed to open up. Usually he allayed them with more work.

“You'll be okay,” I told him now.

“Oh, sure. I figure—the hornbook, the outlines—I'll get up in the B range. From there, who knows.”

“Uh-huh.” I said. I asked about his weekend.

It was okay, he said. He'd gone to a party Friday night. Sandy Stern was there and they'd spent the evening talking about who was going to make Law Review. Stephen had categories all marked out. At the top were “sure ones,” which meant Shearing. For some reason he didn't include himself in that group. He was one step below, among the “good possibilities.” There were others whom he'd decided were clearly “out,” because they were not working hard enough. Andy Kitter was “out” because he had fallen in love.

“I figure people who make Law Review deserve it,” Stephen said. “What a prize, huh? Fifty hours a week in hell.”

I made a sound of assent.

“I hear the firms really get down on you if you quit,” he said. “I don't know. You've got the grades anyway. Well,” he went on, “these exams really aren't bothering me. Not like first semester. I felt like hell then. I figure I'll be cool about these. I don't feel any anxiety yet,” he said. “Not yet,” he said, before he got off the phone.

Late in April, the registrar's office made available forms and pamphlets so that the 1Ls and 2Ls could register for courses for the following fall. Amid the gathering fears roused by exams, it was nice to know that someone actually thought we would reach the second year.

Like many of my classmates, I had frequently looked forward to being an upperclassman. For one thing, there would be more free time. We'd all be beyond that struggle to familiarize ourselves with the law's strange language and logic. The work would be easier, and there'd also be less of it to do. At HLS, second- and third-year students are usually not allowed to enroll, even voluntarily, for as many course hours as are required in the first year.

For 2Ls and 3Ls, much of that unoccupied time goes into extracurricular activities, including a wealth of student organizations that work on law-related problems which affect the world beyond HLS. Three student-edited legal journals cover developments in the specialized fields of civil liberties, international law, and legislation. Student research groups, like the Legislative Research Bureau, harness the free legal manpower floating through the Law School's halls to delve, at the request of those affected, into contemporary legal problems. There are also organizations, such as the Legal Aid Society, involved in the direct delivery of legal services to the poor.

Nearing the end of the year, many 1Ls were eager to participate in those groups next fall. And we could see other appealing freedoms in the year ahead. Often we had spoken wistfully of the more relaxed atmosphere in upper-year classes. In some, the Socratic method is forsaken. Professors lecture, taking questions from the floor when they finish. Where the Socratic method is employed, it is sometimes treated with disdain. In December, Gina reported that she had sat in on a Commercial Transactions class in which nine persons consecutively had passed. The professor had employed the screw-your-buddy tactic, calling on the student beside the one who'd failed to respond, and had ended up going down an entire row. “Pass.” “Pass.” “Not me.” “Not me, either.” “Sorry.” “Maybe next time.” Gina told the story to a group of us at lunch and we were all gleeful. Those would be the days.

Most important, the curriculum in the second and third years is far more flexible. About 150 upper-year courses are offered, and not one of them is specifically required. Every student decides on his own what he or she will take. For the second year, the faculty recommends a series of what they call “basic courses”—Constitutional Law, Accounting, Corporations, and Taxation, which is essentially a study of the provisions and policies of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code—but you are free to disregard those suggestions. Some students view the inclusion of Corporations, Taxation, and Accounting in the faculty's recommendations as an effort to direct students into business law. But even professors like Nicky Morris, politically radical in their perspectives, agreed that the basic courses dealt with material important in almost every area of practice. Even a criminal prosecutor, for instance, could not handle many kinds of fraud and embezzlement cases without knowing something about a corporation. Morris, however, was not as encouraging about the courses themselves.