One L (1977)

by Scott Turow

  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 m
ayors 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.

  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 resume 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 havepat; 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.