One L (1977)

by Scott Turow

  The reluctance of the women in the-law school about participating in these traditional and often unjust relationships was to me one of the happiest portents I saw all year. We are moving toward a time when today's numerous female law students will be female lawyers, and a prominent force in the legal world. It is to be hoped that they will bring with them sensitivities to the uses of power, of the kind which Gina described. If they do, they can make the legal world a fairer one, a place less distorted by some of the hard things men alone have tended to do to each other in the past.

  3/13/76 (Saturday)

  The Ames competition finally came to a conclusion for Terry and me on Thursday night, when we gave our oral argument. As usual I approached the event with trepidation. Terry was determined to stick to his half-assed theory about defamation and fault, and I couldn't imagine what the judges were going to do to him. In addition, there were complications now on my end of the case. Last week, the U. S. Supreme Court handed down another opinion relating to the First Amendment issue in Gant ty v. Wilson. The Court had redefined "public figure" again, and from what I'd heard, the new formulation would all but exclude the minister. It sounded like disaster for us, kind of a bitter pill after all the work.

  Had this been a genuine appellate argument, the court would have rescheduled it to allow my opponent and me to familiarize ourselves with the new case. BSA was not that generous, and so I spent much of Wednesday slogging through the opinion. I wanted to be prepared. I didn't care that much about winning or losing, I told myself, but I had no wish to leave the room feeling as faltering, careless, and inarticulate as I had after the Methods motion in the fall. I drew up a long outline of what I wanted to say.

  Thursday night, I put on my three-piece suit--another fall lesson--and drove to school. After evincing blitheness earlier in the day, Terry seemed to be having second thoughts and was now trying to write out his argument word for word. We met our opponents, both from another section. Terry's opposite was friendly, small, quick-witted. The guy on my issue, however, looked crooked. His brief had seemed good and Margo had praised it when she'd given us a copy. But consulting his cases, I felt he'd often gone over the line from advocacy to outright distortion. Looking at him now, I thought I detected the same kind of cosmetics--nice suit, neat hair, and dirty fingernails. It may well have been a battlefield reaction.

  At 8:00 precisely, our three judges filed in. Ames is sometimes pretty formal, and I'd heard about one group of student "counsel" who were bawled out for not standing when the court entered. Our judges were a little more casual. One was a student from BSA; he figured to be the toughest judge, since he'd been the best informed on the case. The second was a Boston attorney, an HLS alum. The third, and the heavyweight on the panel, was Judge Clarence Mealy, a sitting Superior Court judge who also teaches Trial Practice courses given for upper-class students at HLS. David had told me that Mealy was an exceptionally well-respected judge in Boston and I was glad for the realistic touch, even though I was a little more intimidated.

  Terry began, "May it please the court." He was terribly nervous. He was wearing a gold sharkskin suit and he shifted uneasily as he spoke, choking, wetting his lips. To start, he was able to read from what he'd prepared. Oral argument usually commences with a brief recitation of the facts and questions of the case. This is to refresh the memory of the judges.

  Terry did not get much beyond the facts, though, when the court started hitting him with questions. Like everybody else, they were having trouble making sense of his argument relating defamation to negligence. He'd finally found a case that offered some support, but it was from a minor court and from the nineteenth century, and the judges seemed to ridicule him for using it.

  "Counsel," the BSA judge told him, "I don't even understand why you argued this point." Judge Mealy, a tired-looking Irishman, appeared somewhat amused. He rocked in his chair, smirking now and then in my direction. You got stuck with this palooka, he seemed to be saying, I feel for you. I tried to remain impassive, watching Terry instead. He was getting angry and frustrated. He began smacking his fist into his palm and he took on a tough, sulky look like that of a bad schoolboy. He'd become downright surly by the time they let him go back to his seat.

  I went to the podium next. I had the usual lump in my throat, but most of the time the preparation helped me through. When questions were asked, I felt like I was able to move with the flow. I had composed a broad argument to incorporate the new Supreme Court case. I claimed that the general thrust of all the Court's opinions was that a person was a "public figure" whenever he or she was somehow involved with the well-being of a community, and that within that community communication about that person should be largely uninhibited. I think it was a pretty good argument. The judges sort of threw my points back at my opponent when he came to the podium later and he seemed to have a hard time handling them. "You're just making this worse," the Boston lawyer told him at one point.

  When he finished, there was a round of rebuttal; then the four of us left the room to allow the judges to consult. It is usually weeks before a real appellate court announces its decision in a written opinion, but in Ames we'd be getting the word after a few minutes. BSA gives students the option of getting what they call a "competitive decision." If all the students consent, the judges not only say which side won, but also rank the four, one against another, on the quality of their arguments and their briefs. Terry and I discussed "competitive decision" in advance and ruled it out as being more Harvard Law School sickness. Victory or defeat seemed competitive enough.

  In the hallway, the four of us drank beer, which BSA had provided, while we waited. Terry was feeling bruised about his treatment and I tried to console him, agreeing that the court had been rough. The guy who'd argued opposite me kept saying, "I'm just glad it's over." I agreed with that, too.

  Ames cases are constructed such that they can go either way, but in most instances this year the teams which handled our side of the Gantry case seemed to win. Generally, they lost on my point but carried Terry's, thus overturning the lower-court verdict. We won too, but the opposite way. The decision, when we were called back in, was to reverse the lower court on the grounds that Reverend Gantry was indeed a public figure. I guess I had sounded pretty good. As we headed back to the hallway with the judges for more beer and a postmortem, there was a lot of praise for my argument from the judges and from Terry and even from our opponents. The Boston lawyer seemed to be offering me a job for the summer, repeatedly asking me what my plans were. It had not hurt me any, I knew, that none of the judges had yet actually read the Supreme Court decision.

  Out in the hall, Terry soon got into another hassle with the BSA judge, repeating a lot of the things he had told Margo. I just walked away. I'd been listening to all of that for a month and I felt too good now to spoil it. It was moot court, a mythical state, a mass of frictions; but boy, did I enjoy winning. I haven't felt that kind of outright glee in victory in years. Maybe it's something else law school's done to me--more childishness--or a sign of how praise-starved I am. Maybe I just felt I'd finally done something roundly good with the law.

  Anyway, I still felt high when I got out of bed yesterday morning and a trace of the tingle remains today. I can see now what makes a trial lawyer's life go round. All those victories in the courtroom, clean and unequivocal, and the sweet purring of your ugly little enemy when he is finally satisfied.

  Because of the tension, HLS is a place where people are usually hungry for a laugh. In mid-March, two of the customary events for poking fun at what goes on around the law school took place.

  On a Friday shortly before spring vacation, the April Fools' issue of the law-school newspaper appeared. The edition carried articles reporting that turnstiles had now been installed in the faculty office building to stem the tide of students seeking to speak to their professors, and that a second campus publication, noting the Law Review's choice of a female head, had taken affirmative action one step further and instal
led a dog as editor in chief. ("Streaky woofed, 'My species had nothing to do with my being elected.") Another piece said that because students had proved so unreliable in relaying their grades to prospective employers, the registrar would now send marks directly on to the firms, from whom students could request a report in case they wanted to know how they'd done. The April Fools' issue came out on March 19. No one seemed deterred. As I say, at HLS a laugh is always welcome.

  At about the same time, the Law School Show was closing its run. The Show, a musical, is an annual event. If this year's production was typical, then Harvard Law School is one site which can be safely skipped by Broadway scouts. The number of persons within the law school with both interest and time enough to take part in the Show is so low that many in the cast come from outside. Nevertheless, the Show goes on.

  For such a supposedly sober institution, HLS is a place where grade-school-style dramatics are relatively frequent. One L sections often perform skits like the one we had given for Zechman in the last Torts class. In time I realized that all this playacting is a way that students manage to make clear the emotions that are not expressible amid the formalities of the Socratic classroom. Students can show affection, as we did with Zechman, not to mention other feelings more securely demonstrated in the guise of drama. Each year the Law School Show is the student body's most extensive opportunity to ridicule the faculty, and no doubt that has something to do with the Show's continued production.

  Many of the faculty felt that this year's offering went beyond the limits of good taste. The sexual habits of some professors were called into question, and there were a couple of teachers who took the brunt of most of the humor. The Incident was often recalled. In one scene a "Professor Preening" took a meat-ax to a student who'd answered "unprepared."

  Perini was sensitive enough about the Incident that he was rumored to have regarded the Show without much joviality. That was unusual for him. In class, humor was the only form of student rebellion he tolerated happily. He had a mild sort of banter going with Sandy Stern all year. Usually he would goad Sandy good-naturedly and Stern, flattered by the attention, would try to respond. In general, Perini had far the better of it, even when the class began to come to Sandy's aid. One day he called an answer of Sandy's "predictably confused." After he'd been hissed, Perini remarked, "I didn't know you had that many friends, Stern." But Sandy had his day. Late in the year, Perini was reminding us once more of the importance of precision in lawyer's work. Be careful of details. "Of course,you can overdo it," Perini admitted. "You don't want togo into court looking like the German army marching into Poland in nineteen forty-one." It was Sandy who shouted out from the back of the room, "Nineteen thirty-nine."

  Other professors displayed a more controlled wit. Stumped by a question in a Criminal Law class, a student told Bertram Mann he was feeling uncomfortable. "I think that's the nature of the Socratic method," Mann replied; "we stand here and make each other uneasy." Fowler, on occasion, could rise up out of his gloom and be almost silly. "Everyone knows what laches means," he told us in defining a term which had appeared in an opinion: "No one knows what laches means."

  Among students in the section, by far the most graceful sense of humor belonged to Ilene Bello, a tall, cheerful woman who wisecracked her way through most of the year. In the middle of the second term, repairs were made on the classroom in which we normally met for Civil Procedure. The class was shifted to another room, twice the size of the other, with seats in different order. Nicky found the seating chart useless. Instead, he called on us by shouting out digits, with students responding or passing when they heard their seat numbers. People were sitting scattered throughout the huge classroom and Nicky often struck on empty seats.

  "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 psychopa
thology. 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.