One L (8 page)

The only other option in dealing with those feelings was to give in to them—to seek openly to do well and win recognition and favor. Solely the professors had the authority to award those prizes, and right from the start of the year there was a crowd of students, usually the same ones, who rushed to the front of the room to consult with the teacher at the end of every class. But the most obvious way to score with the professor and your classmates was to be able to answer those befuddling questions that were always being asked. By the beginning of the second week there was a noticeable group who seemed to talk in every meeting, people who raised their hands, faced the professor, and proved themselves less fearful and perhaps more competent than the other members of the section. Clarissa Morgenstern had come to law school after the dissolution of a brief marriage. She was still only twenty-three or twenty-four but she was a commanding figure—tall, attractive and dressed each morning in the best from
Vogue
. She spoke in a high-flown, elocutionary style and when called on she would hold the floor for a lengthy statement, not just a one-line answer. Wally Karlin, inspired perhaps, by his first-day success with Perini, spoke repeatedly; so did Sandy Stern, the MIT engineer, from my study group. Other regulars emerged in the next couple of weeks. And there were also a couple of students from large state universities, so accustomed to succeeding by driving through the masses, that when not recognized by the professor, they would, on occasion, shout out their answers anyway.

In general, those people heard from regularly were regarded with a kind of veiled animosity. Many people admired and envied their outspokenness, but for the most part, the regular talkers were treated with an amused disdain.

“I can't stand Clarissa” someone told me one day during the second week. “I can't imagine how I'll live through all year listening to her. The way she carries on, you'd think it was opera.”

Stephen repeated to me someone else's remark that Clarissa was “a nice guy off the field, but a terror once she gets between those white lines.”

Feelings seemed widespread that the people who spoke daily were hotdogging, showing off. They were being egotistical. They were displaying the ultimate bad taste of appearing competitive.

With that background, the idea of continuing to volunteer after my initial face-off with Perini left me feeling a strong conflict. There were advantages. I'd been told by 2Ls and 3Ls that you were less likely to be called on off the chart if you raised your hand. And I'd feel more involved in those large classes if I spoke now and then. But it still seemed childish greed to demand the attention of the professors and my classmates, and given the subtle hostility to everyone who talked regularly, the stakes on performing well were raised considerably. If you spoke too often, or frequently proved uninspired or wrong in what you said, you risked being thought a boor. I felt that way now and then about some of the daily speakers.

And I imagine some people felt that way about me, because in spite of reservations, I did begin to raise my hand often. I fell into a kind of second phalanx behind Clarissa and Wally and Sandy and a few others. I was heard from frequently, but not every day. Yet I never reconciled my ambivalence. Whether I spoke or sat silent, whether I was right or wrong, from the time an idea entered my head until I or someone else had said it, I would sit in class in a state of discomfort.

It seemed a trivial preoccupation, but finally I tried talking to Aubrey about it, since he tended to volunteer as often as I did.

“Two classes out of every five,” Aubrey told me at once. He'd worked out a formula, an emotional calculus, to tell him how often it was appropriate to speak.

I had trouble believing he was serious, but he nodded his head. I kidded him a little bit about it, but in the next few days I found myself keeping count.

9/22/75 (Wednesday)

The bad teachers, Mann and Zechman, seem to be getting worse.

Through last week, I tolerated Mann. In fact, I remained somewhat interested in the course. But today I realized that my middling reaction thus far to Criminal Law is the result of what Mann subtracts from a subject that actually fascinates me.

Mann is still wandering around the front of the classroom talking to himself. Half the time his remarks are too disconnected for me to make sense of them, and when I do understand what he's saying I'm disappointed by the sort of cramped, sociological style of his thinking. There are moments when you can see how large and subtle his mind is, but usually he tries to stuff big questions into little boxlike categories. We've spent all this time talking about the use of criminal sanctions in terms of how junkies, madmen, drunks, juvenile delinquents—persons clearly incapacitated—should be treated. Answer? They should not be confined without a fair hearing. Terrific. But what do we do with the unmad, undrunk, unyoung who know what they're doing and who menace us all? How can we protect ourselves from them without losing our sense of principle and decency?—those questions Mann prefers to brush off. Perhaps we'll reach them later in the course, but my impression is that our time for being philosophical is now.

As for Zechman, I'm still lost in there, along with ninety-nine percent of the section. People remain befuddled and angry. Class was called off today and I did not even have to go into the classroom to know. I heard the cheer go up from a hundred yards away.

Last week, we seemed to take a definite turn for the worse in there. Still confused about what “intent” is, we began our study of intentional torts. The first discussed was assault. Zechman took a straightforward case and turned it into a maze. A man pointed a rifle at another's back. The gun hadn't been fired and the victim was unaware that he was in any danger. The court held that there was no assault, which made sense since there had been no personal injury.

But then Zechman started with his questions.

What if the victim had been facing the gunman? What if the rifle was loaded? What if it wasn't? What if, instead of a gun, a recording of a landslide had been played behind the victim's back? What if the gunman had pointed the rifle at the sky, but fired it? What if the gun had discharged accidentally? What if the gunman had meant to pull the trigger?

No one could even begin to sort through it all. The students again left disgruntled, even outraged, and this time Zechman chose to take notice.

The next morning he came into class and wrote on the board: “Assault: intent to cause harmful or offensive contact or apprehension of that.” Facing the class, Zechman strained to seem pleasant, but he was obviously a little bitter.

“I am giving you this definition because the level of anxiety in the class seems to have reached such extreme proportions. I hope you realize how little such a definition tells you.”

No matter how little it told, everyone I saw carefully wrote the sentence down. But if Zechman had provided any relief, it didn't last long.

“Now let us commence our discussion of battery,” he said, “returning to the gunman of yesterday whom we left shooting at the sky. Let us assume that the gunman intended to frighten the victim and that those actions indeed constituted assault. Imagine now that a duck was flying overhead. The duck was hit by the gunman's bullet, wholly inadvertently, and fell from the sky, striking the victim. Battery?”

For the next two days we talked about that goddamn duck.

No answers, of course. No answers!

Amazingly, there are a few people who seem to like what Zechman's doing. I talked on Friday with Leonard Hacker, one of the kids who went to school in England. Len was a philosophy jock at Cambridge and he thinks Zechman is wonderful.

Far more people seem to have given up. There are a number now skipping the cases and reading the hornbook instead, Professor William Prosser's
Handbook on the Law of Torts
, another famous first-year aid, usually known simply as “Prosser.” I have a copy I haven't cracked yet, but that may not be true by the end of the week.

9/23/75 (Thursday)

Henley very much liked my memo for Legal Methods. Nice to get the stroking, but after three years as a writing instructor I'd probably have been dismembered if he'd told me I couldn't put a sentence together.

We now have the next chapter in the story of Jack Katz, the fired raincoat company employee. Henley passed out another memo from our mythical senior partner. Katz has come up with an old letter which may pass for an employment contract with Grueman. It's close enough so that we'll soon be bringing suit in Katz's behalf.

9/25/75 (Saturday)

The student life is still a treadmill, class and books all day, closed up in my study briefing cases every evening. And never enough sleep. The only time I get to see Annette, during the week, is over dinner. On the weekends, thus far, I've managed to take off Friday and Saturday nights for movies, music, restaurants; but even then I'm sure I'm not the best of company. Right now, law's my greatest enthusiasm, yet after losing me to the legal world all week, it's the last thing Annette wants to hear about. Even when she's willing to listen, the strange language and the intricacy of all of it makes it difficult for me to convey just what's so exciting. To A., I'm sure it all seems a jumble and a bore. I continually make resolutions to talk about other subjects, which I somehow never keep.

 

In those first few weeks, I gradually became aware that second-year and third-year students were moving through a world much different than that of a 1L. Upperclassmen have no required courses and their work load is lighter. Many participate in the numerous law-related extracurricular activities from which 1Ls are usually excluded. Much of the energy of 2Ls and 3Ls does not go into school at all. They are busy looking for work for the forthcoming summer or after graduation, a process with which most 1Ls are not involved.

Yet what made the 2Ls and 3Ls seem most distinct was simply that they had survived their first years. They were initiates, part-way attorneys, people no longer fazed by the things which confused us. All of my classmates seemed to have some second-year or third-year student on whom they relied for advice, and I was no exception.

I often solicited wisdom from Mike Wald. Even more frequently, I would go with questions to our BSA advisor Peter Geocaris. Peter was a generous guide in acquainting me and my cohorts in our Methods group with the customs of the law school. I was intrigued from the start by the earnestness with which Peter regarded HLS's institutions. Other upperclassmen came on jaded about the school and about studying law. But Peter took Harvard Law School quite seriously.

One day in mid-September I was talking to him about the amazing pace at which the first-year students seemed to be driving themselves, the amount of work we were doing, and the relentless stress we all seemed to place on doing that work well.

“That's what I love most about the law school,” he told me. “People want to come here because they think it's the best and they demand the best from themselves. There's a real standard of excellence here, a standard of achievement.”