One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

by Scott Turow

  My group was especially earnest, in large part a result of the efforts of Stephen, who was growing more nervous daily in the face of exams. A year or so before he’d started law school, Stephen had been divorced. He was still upset about his marriage. He talked often about his wife, in tones alternately wistful and bitter. He lived by himself now in a small apartment in Watertown and I think that law school was one of the first things he’d found that took his mind off his loneliness. Increasingly, he had become involved in school, always full of law-school gossip, his susceptibility to the law school’s demands growing, the more so because he had an obvious gift for the law.

  Gradually, Stephen had emerged as one of the persons, like Hochschild and Stern and Cauley, although far better liked, who could be counted on always to say something penetrating. The others had a talent for paring away at an idea, peeling it down like an onion until there was nothing left; but Stephen was an intellectual builder, somebody who could take a bare notion and turn it into something fuller—a concept, a policy. He rarely volunteered in class—he was too shy for that—but when Stephen was called on or made one of his infrequent remarks, his answers were precise and deeply reasoned, and the professors often praised the power of the points he’d brought up. Aubrey and Terry and I would meet after class, shaking our heads at Stephen’s fluency and intelligence. “He’s so damn smart,” Aubrey often said, “he’s so damn smart.” We admired him sincerely.

  Despite all of that manifest talent, Stephen was no less frightened than any of us at the prospect of the tests. I suppose he’s a nervous person by disposition. One afternoon late in November he asked the study group to gather so we could discuss our plans for exam preparation.

  “We’re all doing well,” he said as he looked around the table. “We’re really on top of this stuff compared to everybody else in the section. We’re in much better shape.”

  We all murmured denials, and I suspect that Stephen’s opinion too was actually the opposite. Like a lot of people, he was apt to say the precise reverse of what he felt about those subjects which made him most uncomfortable. He would, for example, often tell me how much he hated law and law school, even as he poured himself into it. In this instance, there was no point in arguing, for Stephen immediately held up a hand.

  “We’re doing well,” he said, “but we can do better.” At that point, Stephen set out his plan for the Criminal Law outline. It would require us to boil down class notes and case briefs, to describe and reference the relevant portions of the Model Penal Code, and then to integrate all of that information. It would be a long, laborious effort and we all briefly resisted, but Stephen’s logic seemed inevitable when we considered the disorganization of the course. Reluctantly, we each pledged responsibility for a different portion of the semester’s work and agreed to have certain segments of the outline complete by various deadlines. We also promised to meet each day in the weeks after Thanksgiving to discuss what we’d outlined thus far.

  The initial review sessions were fruitful. We worked together until six or so, probing at each other, trying to clarify, then we’d often sit and gossip for another half an hour, usually about who was going to make Law Review. As exams neared, Law Review somehow seemed to dominate our conversations. Regularly we’d exchange speculations about who the top candidates were—Hochschild, Sandy Stern. After Nicky’s exam, Stephen decided that Kyle was a shoo-in. Often we would tell Stephen that he too was a hot prospect, but he would hear none of it. We were sitting in one of the Pound lounges early one evening at the end of a study-group session, draped in various poses on the butcher-block furniture, when someone accused me of being a possibility.

  I shook my head and said I did not have that kind of mind.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “I wouldn’t take it.”

  Terry didn’t believe me. He had been making good use of the time he was not in class and lately had been spending hours in the library reading law-review articles on whatever he found interesting. In the process, he’d become quite enthusiastic about legal scholarship. He was even talking about teaching law when he finished school and we’d all been told a number of times that Review membership was an invaluable aid to an academic career. But Terry did not like to think that he alone had succumbed to the Law ReN;iew mystique.

  “You mean you wouldn’t even try it? I mean, come on, I would try it. I admit that.”

  “I still don’t see it,” I said. “Fifty hours a week extra. Buried in the library? What do I need that for?” I asked Stephen if he’d do it.

  “Never,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

  “Hey, man,” Terry cut in. “But you’d like to make it, right, even if you were gonna turn it down. Right? Admit it. It’d be nice to do that good.”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “I hope it won’t break my heart if I don’t do well.” I had been concentrating on developing that kind of attitude since I’d emerged from my depression in November. I’d realized how much I had taken the achievement ethic to heart—I had been so hard on my mistakes and middling performances. A sincere effort was all I owed myself. “I mean, I think that’s kind of an ugly desire to feel that you have to do better than everyone else.”

  Aubrey came in then. “Why is it ugly?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what makes the world go round. Frankly, I’d love to be on the Review. It opens every door. I’ll jump if I have the chance.”

  Terry nodded. I said again that I wouldn’t want to do it. Stephen did too. But I knew I was being a little disingenuous.

  There was another side to my feelings. I had no desire to do the Review work. And I had resolved to be satisfied with less. But there had been moments when I envisioned my best efforts as somehow being good enough that I would have the opportunity to turn the Review down. I still had no conclusive idea on how far I could reach with the law, and like many first-year students I had heard about the Review so often that it had finally been digested as the emblem of a success which was otherwise hard to define. I liked to think of that kind of status and prestige accruing to me. And God knows, I, like most of my classmates, had worked hard enough to feel that I deserved some extraordinary reward.

  The next day I was talking with Terry in the library and the Review came up again, as it so often did now. Terry’s a hard man to resist, especially when he thinks he’s hit on the truth, and today I had to give in.

  “Admit it, right. You’d like to make it, at least.”

  “All right,” I said, “I admit it. In some ways, I’d sort of like to make it.”

  Terry laughed and socked me in the arm.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Right,” I agreed. But I felt I’d done something precarious, something quite dangerous, the minute the words were out of my mouth.

  As we entered the last week of the term, right before Christmas, most of the students at the law school seemed to abandon any effort to maintain a brave front in the face of exams. The evidence of great apprehension was widespread. Whenever I visited the library, there were long lines before each of the Xerox machines, as people waited to copy earlier editions of the red books or Law Review articles which were said to offer particularly trenchant digests of the material in various courses. Everybody around the school seemed to be fretting aloud that they would never catch up in their classwork in time to make a thorough review. Karen Sondergard was now crying four or five times a day. And the students who lived in the on-campus dorms reported that people were running up and down the hallways, shouting questions to each other, at all hours, night and day.

  For me, the anxieties showed in a spending spree on hornbooks, outlines, and prepared briefs. The purchase of study aids by all students was proceeding so briskly that one person had set up a sales counter outside the dining hall; I was a particularly willing customer. By the last week, I knew I had gathered more aids than I could possibly examine between then and the second week of January, but I could not re
sist my insecurities. Both the Torts and Criminal exams would be “open book,” meaning that we could consult any printed source during the test. I was convinced that if I skipped the purchase of any one item it would prove to be crucial. With Stephen, I made a number of trips to a Harvard Square bookstore where legal study aids were stocked in shelf-high abundance, and on each occasion I bought something else. My own doubts and Stephen’s rationale would persuade me each time.

  “After three thousand for tuition,” Stephen would say, “how can you worry about six bucks for the Criminal Procedure Nutshell?”

  I would agree. After all, I could sell it next year in the law-book thrift shop. I must have spent close to $100 that way.

  The faculty did what little they could to lessen our obvious uneasiness. Both Mann and Zechman described in some detail the tests they were planning to give. Mann’s would be an eight-hour affair which could be taken at home; it would require us to relate a fact situation to the Model Penal Code and to delineate the procedural issues. In Torts, the test would last only four hours but we’d have to take it in school, together, with proctors. Each professor tried to give us some advice on approach. Mann passed out a model answer to the previous year’s exam. Zechman put off the start of one of the final classes for nearly twenty minutes while he offered suggestions on how to review.

  Yet no matter how well-meaning the advice, we still had to live through the exam process ourselves. In the meantime there would be strain, and the evidence of it was increasingly visible to me, most noticeably in the study group, where relations were rapidly deteriorating. Aubrey was upset with the disorganization of the afternoon discussion sessions and had ceased attending, believing that his time could be more profitably spent alone. Stephen was miffed with Terry, who he felt was doing a shoddy job on his portions of the Criminal outline, and Terry, devoted to doing things his own way, was angered by the criticism. I was generally aggravated with the outline, and especially by the stiff standards Stephen seemed to have set for it. Racing to finish my portions before the end of classes, I felt as if I was little more than Stephen’s employee. “Beef up the case summaries,” he had snapped when he saw my first section. I considered the outline itself an albatross, not worth nearly the energy that had gone into its preparation. What we were doing for the most part, it seemed, was soothing Stephen’s nerves. With exams approaching, I could see better uses for my time.

  Whatever the tension between the four of us, it was mild in contrast to what we were feeling toward Kyle. From the start Kyle had been somewhat isolated from all of us because he was younger and straight out of college. He resented the distance. On occasion he would complain to me about being treated as “the kid.” I think the rise of Section 100, which none of us had joined, had convinced him that there were more sympathetic personalities among the Guild membership.

  In consequence, he had become personally remote, and after the start of December he also withdrew from most of the activities of the group. He announced first that he would attend none of the study-group sessions because he’d fallen too far behind in his work during the course of the Incident. We knew that was true and the four of us took his absence without much complaint. But as it became apparent that Kyle was not going to finish his work on the outline on time, we became less generous, particularly since Kyle had already happily accepted what the rest of us had produced.

  We drew straws and I was dispatched to find out whether he was going to do the work at all. In his desperation to catch up, Kyle was barely in school and I had to reach him by phone. He assured me that the outline would be done. By the middle of the last week, however, he had to concede that he’d never finish before we all left for the Christmas break. He said he’d have to mail the portions to us.

  When I brought that word back, the four of us shared our bad feelings. Terry said aloud what we all were thinking, that the outline would never arrive; and Aubrey, though milder, was also displeased. Kyle, he said, had gotten a little impressed with himself, had stopped caring as much as he normally would have about his responsibilities. Stephen was angriest of all.

  “Next time you talk to him,” Stephen told me, “you tell him to kiss my crack.”

  Yet within a day or so, Stephen too had announced that he was not going to be able to complete the final portion of his outline before we left. He had set a standard of detail in the work too elaborate for even him to match in limited time. At that word, Terry had fumed. He’d taken off the last three weeks of Criminal class in order to scour the commentaries and review articles on the Model Penal Code and he’d presented the research to the group. In return, he’d expected the last few days before vacation to be spent on some mutual effort to clarify Torts, a subject which still mystified Terry. Now that he realized that we were all too busy with Criminal for anything like that to occur, he felt badly outdone and held Stephen to blame, since he’d designed the study project in the first place.

  “He sure expects a lot, I’ll say that,” Terry said to me. “Sometimes, I wonder, man, where he gets off.”

  With Terry I agreed that Stephen was terribly demanding. To Aubrey I complained that Terry had not done all he’d promised. I can only imagine what they said about me.

  It was late December at Harvard Law School. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

  12/21/75 (Sunday)

  Classes are finished and everybody’s headed away for home and vacation. At HLS they’ll soon turn off the heat. Wednesday Annette and I fly to Chicago, where we’ll spend the holidays with our families.

  Despite the atmosphere of rancor and tension, the final events of the term came off neatly. Last Thursday, Legal Methods concluded with the “trial” of Katz v. Grueman. Jack finally got justice. All quite authentic. The proceedings were conducted in the Ames Courtroom on the second floor of Austin, a huge chamber with oak paneling and flying buttresses and banks of judicial benches. A real judge from the Middlesex County Superior Court presided over the trial, and two Boston lawyers went through the case step by step. Katz was played by a gruff, hefty tax attorney from the city who fenced questions nimbly on cross-examination and who won not only loud applause from the assembled lLs who’ve been rooting for him so long, but also a verdict for $231,000, when the jury composed of Harvard undergraduates returned long after midnight. The trial was sparsely attended, most lLs being too burdened by the work of approaching finals, but the reaction of those who did come was instructive. Most were bored. Many of my classmates have never been inside a courtroom and couldn’t believe that a real trial would move so slowly. In a way, that’s thee roblem the Methods course has faced all term, convincing us that the lawyer’s job is usually more drudgery than Perry Mason.

  The two classes which ended this week also closed nicely. Mann managed real grace as he left. This term, for the first time at HLS, student course evaluations were circulated. Mann was bitter when he saw the results. Graham Heller had lunch with him last week and reported that Mann had reminded the students of how much he could be making practicing corporate law. By today, he’d cooled. He admitted the course had gone badly, said that he’d tried to cover too much, that he was disturbed that he hadn’t made clear how much he cared about the issues in criminal law.

  “But I want you to know that I respect you,” he said to the section at large. He praised our intelligence, even “the fierce mutual protectiveness you show to each other,” an apologetic reference, I guess, to the many occasions on which he’d been hissed for smart remarks or short replies to sincere questions. When he made the traditional exit ahead of his students, he received a rousing hand.

  But the greatest warmth was reserved for Zechman on Friday. Almost all of us have moved beyond the point of mere interest in the course and have become engrossed, fascinated. The middle of the term was absorbed with the study of what Zechman called “the heartland of Tort”—the concepts of negligence and fault, and the kinds of recompense available for unintentional injuries. Zechman taught fault as an idea
of utility combining philosophy and economics. If precautions against injury are less costly than the likely toll of possible losses, then we say that the person who failed to take those precautions was negligent and must pay for the harms suffered. For weeks Zechman persuaded us to endorse that idea and all its ramifications, then in the final nine or ten classes he engaged in extensive criticism of the fault concept. At the end he was asking why we don’t hold people responsible for whatever losses their actions cause, precautions or no. As usual, there was no way to read him, to figure which set of ideas he himself subscribed to. For each he offered the same unencumbered advocacy. Yet with that kind of poker-faced rationality he managed to show us the exciting breadth and play that exists in legal ideas.

  Yesterday was an uninhibited showing of the class’s gratitude and goodwill. As Zechman was about to begin, a student stood and announced, “Professor Zechman, Section 2 presents `A Tort.-- There followed an enactment, with ten or twelve players, of one of Zechman’s crazy hypotheticals, replete with rifles and hunters and meteors and other strange things falling from the sky. Zechman was then presented with a series of gifts, including a frozen duck. But what was probably the warmest moment came when Zechman’s relentless formality finally eroded. After the skit, he started his lecture. Suddenly he paced away from the podium, turned fully about, and spread his arms.

  “I’m just lost, he declared. The class applauded wildly. When he left at the end he went out to a roaring ovation with all of us on our feet.

  12/28/75 (Sunday)

  Christmas vacation at home. A few days of eating, drinking, seeing friends. A chance to be the fair-haired boy from Harvard.

  Today I began to study for exams. I’ll do it five, six hours a day while we’re here, leave the mornings for sleep, the evenings for friends and family. I feel only mild and occasional pressure. For the most part, I’m relaxed and whole.