One L

by Scott Turow

  “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’AnBelo, 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.

  One of the sages I was regularly running into in the law-school gym had issued a prophecy to me early in February. He was a 3L, a strapping man from Texas.

  “You just wait ‘til those first-term grades come out,” he told me, “it’ll be a whole different ball game after that. They’ll be those fellas with two As who think they’ve sprouted wings and a halo, and they’ll be a whole lot more folks who won’t give one little goddamn after that. Brother, it is not the same.”

  Nearing spring vacation, most of those predictions had come to pass. There were people whose grades had not been what they hoped and who now showed little concern about school. Aubrey was one of them. In the aftermath of grades, he’d fallen into deep despond. When he emerged, he’d more or less written off Harvard Law School. From then on, he was going to be serving time until they let him out to do something useful. Ned Cauley’s case was far sadder. Middlinggrades badly shook his self-confidence, and his clever, elegant remarks were rarely heard in class after mid-February. I once tried to encourage him, mentioning that he’d been silent lately and that I’d valued what he’d said in the past.

  “Well,” he answered, “I feel as though I shouldn’t be wasting everybody’s time. There are a lot of people in there. Maybe somebody else has something better to say.”

  The effect of grades was not always as dismal. Either because of improved self-images or demolished pretensions, some classmates seemed more approachable. Harold Hochschild, rumored to have fallen far short of the grades he’d expected, was now almost a likable fellow. There were others—people who suddenly developed a sense of humor about school and themselves, a few who just stopped running and now revealed that they were attractive persons.

  In the wake of grades, there was also growth in a peculiar phenomenon that had been with us all year: an inordinate concern about the quieter students in the section. During registration week, Peter Geocaris had first recited to us an HLS shibboleth: “People who don’t talk make Law Review.” As a stereotype, it possessed less than complete accuracy, but the line and the many repetitions of it I heard were revealing of a deep suspicion of the few persons among us who were not especially outgoing. They were the unknown, the unsounded in a closely run race. Inevitably when a professor would call on one of them, there would be a round of speculation later in the day on whether so-and-so was really a secret genius, or just bright like the rest of us.

  When grades came out, word eventually got around that a gentle, retiring guy from Missouri named Rick Shearing had had two A-pluses. That development seemed to exaggerate all the more the fear that there was a group of silent, all-knowing automatons hidden in the section. As estimates of who would make the Law Review became regular, I’d often hear people say, “You’ve got to watch out for the quiet ones. They’re back there taking all of it in. People like Shearing.” By and large it was mass psychopathology. On a couple of occasions I heard people who’d been fearfully identified as “quiet ones” engage in the same kind of worried guessing about others.

  There was now much more of that open talk about who was going to make Review. The students who’d done best wanted to believe it would be they, and of course the odds were on their side. Frank Brodsky was one of the few people in the section who’d maintained the kind of ecstatic interest in the law throughout the year which many of us had felt at first. Frank was usually with a quieter man named Larry Jenner and they were always talking law. Always. I remember one day standing by my locker and hearing Brodsky’s voice—full of the usual furious, highbrow excitement—echo through the airshaft, resounding out of one of the stalls in the men’s room: “Now I think Justice Jackson was right in Willow River; he put it exactly the right way.”

  I imagine Frank was eager for the Review, and there was no question in my mind that he had both the talents and interest to warrant it. A day or two before grades came out, I had spoken with Frank about exams. We’d both agreed they were silly exercises. After receiving a couple of As, however, Frank had changed his mind. There seemed to be a correlation of some kind, he said. It seemed most people had had similar grades on the two exams—an A and an A-minus, a B-plus and a B—so they must have meant something. It had not seemed that way to me.

  Stephen, who obviously was another of those people at the top of the section, had his doubts now and then about the meaning of his marks. “If it weren’t for Terry,” he told me one time on the phone, “I might believe it. But looking at how much Crim he knew and how little Torts, and then at his grades, I sometimes think we all just got potluck.”

  Most of the time, however, Stephen was not as dubious. He talked to me often about whether or not he should “take Law Review.” Gently, I’d try to remind him that things weren’t quite in the bag. He’d agree, but the Review always circled back through his conversation like a point on a Mobius strip.

  “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” he’d say. “My feelings are, this is nice, I’m glad I got high grades because now I can relax, I can’t have a bad year. But, you know, I do think about the Review. Forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. I’m still not sure I should do it.”

  With Stephen, I had to read that as meaning he’d decided he should. There were indications that he wanted to pull out all the stops. At the beginning of March, he said he wanted to get the study group back into gear. With Ames, very few of the groups had gone on meeting, ours included. But Stephen had a plan now—another outline, this time of Nicky’s course. Again, the arguments for the group effort were persuasive. The course was too theoretical and idiosyncratic to be covered by any commercial civil-procedure guide. But in March, with exams not until late May, I was not willing to throw myself into preparations. I had finally managed to find some time away from law—I’d taken off each weekend for three or four weeks now—and I was reluctant to give up that freedom so soon. Nevertheless, Terry, Aubrey, and Stan Kreiler, a quiet, handsome man from California whom Aubrey had brought into the group in place of Kyle, all agreed with Stephen. I conceded, but reserved the right to do no work on it until April.

  Stephen was hardly the only one who was already looking ahead to exams. Many people had announced plans to study for them over spring vacation. With the whittling away of about two thirds of the section as contenders for Law Review, some of those still in the running were now willing to put out an extra effort to get themselves that much closer to the promised land. On the other end, some people who were unready to accept the first grades as a permanent
verdict had become determined to prepare even more thoroughly this time.

  I was still working at staying cool. I told myself not to think about Law Review—I was too long a shot. Again and again, I reminded myself that exams measured none of the things which mattered most to me. But an event in Perini’s class reminded me and everyone else of the real power our grades could wield over us in the future.

  Early in the second term, Perini announced that, as he did annually, he would be hiring a few members of the section as summer research assistants. Several people were hopeful of getting one of the jobs. Most as have a hard time finding legal work over the summer, and being students, many people needed the money. After grades came out, Perini announced he would be receiving resumes.

  “They should include,” he said, “all relevant information.” In case anybody doubted that that meant the two fall-term grades, Perini went on. “I’m very proud,” he said, “that so many of my summer people make the Law Review. I have a very high batting average.”

  Perini’s announcements concerning the jobs were always made during class, and the race to work for Perini became another of the dramas and competitions within the section. One time I overhead two men commiserating because, with two Bs each, both knew they’d be wasting their time applying. Eventually, Perini narrowed his choice to eight candidates. He wrote their names on a piece of paper which he affixed prominently to the seating chart. When people saw that Cauley, who’d so long pleased Perini in class, had been excluded, the criterion of selection became clear: These were the eight applicants with the highest grades. In the last two weeks before spring vacation, Perini gave each of the eight a workout in class, interrogating them on cases while the rest of us looked on. And in the end, the jobs were awarded anyway to the three men with the best marks.

  It had been a vulgar episode in all respects. Once more he’d used the classroom for his own purposes, turning a private matter into a public spectacle. He’d glorified himself and the job of working for him. He’d rubbed our noses in the crucial effects of grades. And once again, he’d played on our worst vulnerabilities, everything from status fears to the need for money. It was a thoroughly contemptible performance and it doused whatever weak light of regard I’d maintained for Perini. I hated him now, and I thought less of Harvard Law School because he was there.

  3/29/76

  Spring vacation. Lord, how often I wondered if I’d ever make it this far.

  In the past two weeks, the weather, after sporadic temptings, has lolled into spring. The gray is out of the sky and the feeling is pure liberty.

  A week away from the Mighty H: Harvard, Harvard, Harvard-I cannot describe how sick I am of hearing that name. The whole university is suffused in such crazy pretense, a kind of puritan faith in the divine specialness of the place and its inhabitants. It’s upper-class parochialism. I was told a story recently about a secretary who was fired after her first day on the job because she did not know how to spell the name of the university’s president.

  The law school is hardly immune from that kind of snobbism. It is an education in itself, learning to worship HLS. A few years ago the man then dean would instruct each student entering to refer to it as “The Law School.” Much of that attitude seems to carry over to the present faculty. Fowler recently presented a problem in mortgage law which, he said, “you won’t find troublesome when you encounter it in practice, unless, of course, the other side is represented by a graduate of the Harvard Law School, or perhaps Yale.”

  Harvard-love at HLS even goes so far as to amount to a kind of prejudice in favor of the law made by Harvard jurists. Perini never fails to mention it when an opinion he likes was authored by a judge who is a graduate of HLS. Most revered is the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, now a sort of Harvard Law School idol. Frankfurter was an HLS professor when he was elevated to the U. S. Supreme Court, and I guess he is the embodiment of half of the faculty’s lushest fantasy. In addition, many profs were his students; a number—including Fowler—were his clerks. Frankfurter, in truth, was a giant, but his opinions are all treated like biblical texts and his style of jurisprudence, now probably dated, is uncritically endorsed in most classrooms.

  Amid the adversities of the first year, we have all been particularly susceptible to this kind of thinking about HLS. It must be special, you tell yourself, why else, in God’s name, am I going through this? Our presence at Harvard Law School is for many of us the only thing left on which to rest our self-esteem and we have all at one time or another gone around assuring ourselves how fortunate we are to be here, how smart we must be. The standard of excellence stuff feeds on all of that—makes us run harder to prove that we are worthy, really are the best.

  Of course all of HLS chauvinism would be silly, as well as offensive, were it not for the fact that over time people at Harvard Law School have made believers of so many others. It might all be a snow job, but there is still that aura which draws the firms and the politicians, and even the tour buses on the weekends. (In the latter case, it may be nothing relating to the law which is the attraction. I was standing in front of the law school recently when three young women piled off one of the buses and begged me to point out the dormitory where theyoung hero lived in Love Story.) In the legal world, with its formalities and stratifications, people cannot resist thinking of a top layer of law schools, and Harvard and Yale are pretty much it.

  As a result, it is simply assumed at HLS that a Harvard J. D. is a stepping stone to big things. Mann often told us he was addressing us as a group of future judges and law profs. Guy Sternlieb goes even further. We are now doing a section on what Guy calls “political analysis.” We dissect political environments and evaluate options for actors within them. Sternlieb will often issue challenges to the class. “Damn it, there’s a reason I teach this course. You people are going to be congressmen and mayors and State Department officials in twenty years. What will you do in these situations? What will you say?”

  I am glad Guy asks those questions, but I am still a little discomfited by a place which is so cheerfully assumed to be the training ground for the power elite. That peculiar pride represents an incredible, if tacit, stake in the status quo, and also amounts to a quiet message to students that their place in the legal world should always be among the mighty. It produces the kind of advocate who is uncommitted to ultimate personal values and who will represent anyone—ITT, Hitler, Attila the Hun—as long as the case seems important.

  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.

  APRIL AND MAY

  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 wasgoing to have to pay. In Property, for instance, I had never mastered the Estates in Land, a set of medieval rules which stillgovern 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 year-long 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.