by Scott Turow
I was not much happier. Him and his goddamn questions, I thought, his crazy hypos: If battery is a mere offensive touching, is it battery to kiss a woman good night, if she demurely says no? To push a man off a bridge that's about to collapse? Or does consent somehow cure those wrongs?
I wondered when he would cut it out. There was no answer to these questions. There never would be.
I sat still for a second. Then I repeated what I'd just thought to myself: There were no answers. That was the point, the one Zechman--and some of the other professors, less tirelessly--had been trying to make for weeks. Rules are declared. But the theoretical dispute is never settled. If you start out in Torts with a moral system that fixes blame on the deliberately wicked--the guy who wants to run somebody over--what do you do when that running down is only an accident? How do you parcel out blame when A hopes to hurt B in one way--frighten him by shooting a gun--and ends up injuring him in another freakishly comic manner--clobbered on the head with a falling duck? How far do basic moral notions carry you? At what point do you have to say, It's nobody's fault, life is tough?
With the realization that I was not missing some clear solution to all of the problems, Zechman's class suddenly has begun to make sense. I now see him as a sort of jeweler of ideas. He uses his questions like a goldsmith's hammer, working the concepts down to an incredible fineness and shine.
Not all of the people in the section yet share my enthusiasm. The man and woman on either side are still groaning and reading respectively. Nazzario is also displeased. "The dude's on some philosophical trip I can't handle," Terry told me last week. But I think there's now a majority of us who relish the class. I'm often so excited that I literally cannot sit still. We're back there in the second-to-the-last row, the woman reading, the man groaning, and me bouncing up and down in my seat.
The other classes, unfortunately, are not going as well. In Criminal, Mann is near to intolerable. He plods straight ahead like some kind of bewildered plow horse, each class a trudging comparison of the case law and the code. And when my objections are not to bad teaching, they seem to be to the professors personally. Like my classmates, the teachers are becoming known quantities--people now, and not deities--and I have developing feelings about each. Perini is still brilliant in class. He picks students' minds like a clairvoyant and I give him the prize as the best lecturer I've ever heard. We've started the "basic triad" of contract law--offer, acceptance, and consideration, the three elements required to form a binding obligation--and Perini has shown a wonderful finesse in presenting those hard ideas. But the atmosphere he creates in the classroom strikes me as more and more objectionable.
"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the mornings we have Contracts, I got on the bus in Watertown and I'm nearly sick to my stomach," Stephen confessed to me on the phone last week. "I can't believe it, but I think about that class and I get ill. And when I walk out of there on Wednesday, I feel as if the week is already over."
The same sort of thing can be said for almost everyone in the section. What bothers me most is that Perini seems to recognize our discomfort, and takes it with something only a little short of glee.
Even Nicky Morris has started to get on my nerves. I'm grateful for his easygoing manner in the classroom, but there are moments when that gentleness seems less friendship than condescension. We're still doing jurisdiction over the person, a topic which has mushroomed in complexity as we've gone along. Historically, courts could assert their power only over persons found inside the state where the court sat. These days a precarious weighing of subtle factors takes place to determine how far that power can extend. Sometimes in explaining that process, it seems that Nicky is trying to be deliberately confusing. When the class does not understand, he can then address us in that increasingly familiar tone which suggests that not only are we people far less knowledgeable than he, but also substantially less intelligent. The thought has crossed my mind that Nicky, the famous football competitor, came to teaching seeking a field on which he could always win.
Reading all of this over, it sounds as if I am totally bummed out. That is not so. I still feel plenty of that thirsty pleasure in school. I've just begun to recognize the bad with the good--a balance, as I said at the start. I suppose the task of the next few weeks will be to adjust to those small disappointments I'm starting to feel.
Sooner or later, I had to touch down. For six weeks, I had been swooning and careening like some sky-dazed hawk, and my Columbus Day weekend away from the law had shown me how perilous and crazy that flight sometimes had been. I couldn't go on asking that much of myself. I had to ease off. Settling back in on the following Tuesday, concentrating, scrutinizing, pressed at again by that atmosphere of tense precision, I'd actually become dizzy and a little bit ill.
As I moved through those middle weeks in October, a lot of things were serving to sober my mood. That gray cap which hovers over Cambridge at least six months a year had begun to appear. The squirrels were burrowing, storing nuts. Winter, cold and slushy and despised--the first this temporary Californian had been through in five years--was nearing. And in retrospect, to a far greater extent than I then recognized, I see that the warnings I gave myself when we were in the mountains came too late. I had simply burnt myself out. The initial strength and enthusiasm I'd brought to law school had been spent and I had no reserves left. I was exhausted, still under the same pressures, and, in consequence, occasionally gloomy.
I was also increasingly vulnerable to a lot of things I'd suppressed. In the first weeks I'd recognized many troubles without allowing them to alter my prevailing high mood--the sacrificial demands of the achievement ethic, the personal changes forced by the education which Gina hadpointed to the self-doubt I felt during interview season. Now all of those things, and a series of new but similar realizations, began to have an impact. I also had to deal with thep lain fact that the new shine had worn off. For my classmates and myself, there'd been a stunning gain in knowledge and competence, but in the process, the thrilling mystery of the law had started to dissolve.
All in all, my expectations were changing, but the sane and prudent tone I struck in my journal--saying that I would have to "adjust" to "small disappointments"--masked a wildness and bitterness and lack of control in my feelings which would intensify in the coming weeks, and had to an extent already set in.
Many of the things I felt during that period were unique to me, the result of my personal lunacies, but a sense of spirits stepping down seemed widespread. Most of us in Section 2 appeared to take on a sort of sullen grimness about what we were doing. A few people seemed to develop strength from the emerging routine and ground ahead remorselessly, but the more common reaction was the beginning of an active resistance to law school and its demands. No one quit, of course. In the first weeks of the term, one man, always gently complaining about how perplexed he felt, had withdrawn. That is not unprecedented. Each year, two to three percent of the entering class leaves. The reasons vary: marriage, illness, determinations by students that they're simply not cut out for the law. Some persons in each of those categories eventually return.
But in Section 2, virtually everyone decided to stick it through. They all wanted to be lawyers, I guess; and besides, almost all of us had arrived prepared for exactly the kind of emotional letdown we felt by the middle of October. We all had friends who'd gone to Harvard Law School and who'd issued grim reports. We'd chosen to come anyway. Perhaps the expectation of difficulties hastened trouble's arrival.
Whatever the source, many were displeased enough to become slightly uncooperative. Attendance, though nominally required, began to fall off in each of the courses, especially Mann's, where it was frequently down as much as fifteen or twenty percent for each session. Except in Perini's Contracts, where it was not permitted, backbenching had also become common. Every time a class met, between six and a dozen people were located in the rear seats--that lost world not mapped on the seating chart.
Terry was one of those wh
o began to show up irregularly and to backbench when he did come.
"I just can't sit still, man," he told me. "I'm tired of those guys talkin' at me, tellin' me how to think. I've gotta do it my own way."
To me the most dramatic sign of the changing attitude among students came one day in Torts in mid-October. Zechman was talking about conversion, one of the tort remedies for theft. If a car thief makes off with your Chevy, you can sue him civilly for conversion, even if he's criminally tried for joyriding. Zechman described the tort as a "judicially-enforced sale," meaning that the thief would keep the car and you would get what it was worth--a valuable option if the joyrider had, for instance, cracked up your Chevy on his tour through the neighborhood. It was a point many of us had missed.
From the center of the classroom, one man called out, a little belligerently, "Where do you get that from?"
Zechman was normally inordinately polite to us, but I guess that remark struck him as a breach of decorum. He looked icily at the student and said, "When you get a chance sometime, read the cases."
It was quick and snide. Some people laughed, but after a few seconds a rattling hiss spread from various parts of the room. Hissing the speaker for a disagreeable comment is an old Harvard habit, practiced throughout much of the university.
It's imported to the law school each year by those lLs who were undergraduates at Harvard College and it had been quickly picked up in my section. Until that day in the middle of October, hissing had been reserved for fellow students, usually when the speaker's remarks were politically conservative. (Most of the hissers seemed to be leftwing.) But after that day when Zechman was treated to it, hissing became a piece of student weaponry frequently used against the faculty, most commonly when a professor dismissed a student's comments unfairly or said something hardhearted. Usually, the teachers accepted the hissing with a dim frown or a weak attempt to justify their remarks.
There was more and more of that mood of open confrontation. In the first few weeks many of the students who were uncomfortable or unhappy had assumed that it was their fault, that they were somehow incompetent. Now they seemed to stop blaming themselves and were pointing the finger at the institution and the educational style. The Socratic method, they said, was unfair and intimidating. In class we learned too much raw technique with too little attention to the ethical duties lawyers owed the society. And the atmosphere around HLS was often bitterly deplored--a robot factory, people began to call it; a legal pressure cooker.
As often as not, the most vigorous in their criticisms were the members of the Harvard Law Guild, a student organization dedicated to progressive reform in the structure and educational format of the law school. The Guild had held an organizational meeting early in the year, and many of the men and women of the section had joined. Kyle, the fuzzy-haired Harvard grad in my study group, was a member. So was Helen Kirchner, the woman who'd complained about the aggressiveness of our classmates. There were quite a few other Guild members in Section 2. Most of them, during the first weeks, had been somewhat circumspect, usually sharing their complaints only with each other. But as the mid-term mood of displeasure made itself more apparent, the Guild members, sensing a more hospitable environment, tended to speak up frequently. Occasionally they challenged the professors in class, especially Mann, who often assumed moderate or conservative positions on loaded subjects such as sentencing, bail reform, white-collar crime.
The most outspoken of the Guild members was Wade Strunk. Wade was from Alabama and he made a paradoxical radical. He was mannerly, precise. He wore his hair short and he was usually very well dressed. He often had on expensive foulards and designer shirts, and his accent sounded of all the luxury and graciousness of a bygone southern age. But he was unstinting in his criticism of the law school.
My first brush with Wade came late in September. On Thursday and Friday, Torts and Civil Procedure met in the same room in Langdell and there was a half-hour break between classes. After Torts, one man who sat near me asked if I thought it would be safe to leave his books. I said I was sure it was, that none of our classmates struck me as the thieving kind.
Wade, standing nearby, overheard.
"These people here?" he asked at once. "Why, half of them are thieves already and don't know it. Three years from now they'll be working for these big corporate law firms whose fees are paid by nothing much better than thieving. Plenty of them are stealing right now. My teaching fellow's briefcase was ripped off right out of his office."
I wasn't sure Wade was serious. I said to him that this was a large school and that there were probably a few people here capable of anything. And there was no question that in the future some good people might become trapped in bad institutions.
"But you don't really think everybody here is a bad guy, do you?" I asked.
"Absolutely," Wade answered. "Most of them. Most of them are quite corrupt."
Many of Wade's classmates held an equally charitable view of him. By the middle of October, there were a number who snickered out loud every time Wade spoke in class. We all knew it was going to be the same dime-store Marxism, a description of how the particular doctrine we were studying had been laid down for the protection of the upper classes and their wealth. After one of Wade's more unreasoned outbursts, one of the wryer members of the section approached me at the end of class. He nodded toward Wade, expensively dressed as ever, and said, closely imitating Wade's accent, "Aftuh the revolution, ever'one will wear Yves St. Laurent."
Yet by the middle of October, I'd begun to pay more attention to all of the Guild members, even to Wade, who I knew was made silly only by passion and real concern. I felt some caution toward the people in the Guild. They were kids from Harvard and Yale, Park Avenue and Beverly Hills, who would lecture you freely on the plight of the poor. But I admired their forthrightness, and as time went on, I'd become less certain that whatever else could be said of them, I'd call them entirely wrong.
10/21/75
(Tuesday)
A difficult day. A disturbing incident at lunch.
For a while, I've felt that there's a cohesion lacking in my studying and it has seemed to me that the study group could help provide some focusing. In talking it over, I found that everyone else felt the same way. It seemed time for a meeting, to see if we could hash over the problems with the study group and consolidate purposes, and so, with the exception of Stephen, who had a date for lunch, we all got together at noon.
The complaints about the group came out at once: too disorganized, too uncommitted, rudderless, overaggressive in discussion (Aubrey's point, aimed at me, I think), and too many people.
That last was Kyle's complaint, and he kept hammering at it.
"We've got too many people. We can't have effective discussions. We can't concentrate on anything. We're going to keep BS'ing." Finally, Kyle said, "We've got to narrow the group to four people, five at the most."
The suggestion pretty plainly was that we throw somebody out, and it offended me. I was telling Kyle exactly that when Sandy Stern, guileless or guilty, suddenly spoke up.
"You're not going to throw me out, are you?" Sandy asked. "Not just because I'm in two groups?"
Two? we all asked. Sandy quickly admitted that he was part of another group which had been busy all term outlining courses and preparing review notes. He had joined our group too, he said, because we seemed more interested in high-minded, speculative talk about the law, which he felt was missing in the other.
"Hey," Terry told him, "we don't wanna do that kind of jiving around anymore. We wanna start putting it all together now.
Sandy refused to take the hint. He sat there pulling at his big scraggly moustache and proposing compromises: One day, with him present, we could speculate. On a second, without him, we could review. As a last hope, he even offered to make copies for us of the outline he was preparing for the other group.
It did no good. Kyle, pointedly, kept repeating. "Somebody's gotta go, someone has to."
I told Sandy that it should be his decision. I said that I was against his sudden exclusion and that if he wanted to stay it would be okay with me, but I also told him that I felt it had been deceptive to conceal his membership in the other group, and that so far as I knew, everyone always assumed study groups were exclusive.
Sandy debated my points but finally said that he would do whatever we preferred. Aubrey seemed to hold the crucial weight and he shook his head no. He had wanted a smaller group from the start.
With apologies issued all around, Sandy gathered his books and departed. We stayed to plan further activities for the group. But the whole event stayed with me all day. I felt a frustrated pity, angered by Sandy's obtuseness but ashamed that we had been so hard-nosed as to boot him. What difference is it to us really if he thinks he can handle being in two groups? I was disturbed by what had emerged in each of us. Kyle had been ruthless and Aubrey a little matter-of-fact. Terry all along was bothered by Sandy's mincing way and was visibly anxious to have him gone. I had hardly been stalwart in defending Sandy's right to stay.
