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

by Scott Turow

  Aside from the purposes he mentioned, I think Nicky also wanted to provide us with some of the feedback and reassurance which we’d needed for weeks. But coming when it did, his announcement fed into the mood of stress and competition created by the Methods arguments. Nicky had said it would be a real exam question, given under authentic conditions, and for that reason most people figured the test and its results would be an indubitable indication of future standing. Many in the section lapsed at once back into the kind of panic which had prevailed for the past weeks.

  Stephen grabbed me immediately after class. He was obviously in a heat.

  “We’ll meet, right? The group? Talk about Procedure?”

  Here we were again, back at the familiar emotional crossing between panic or withdrawal. Terry had already chosen the latter course. He sat behind me in Procedure and when I had asked him if he’d take the test, he shook his head.

  “No way,” he said, “I’m not working myself up for nothing. Man, I don’t put my bucks down when they’re just joggin’ around the track. I’m not taking any tests when I’m not all prepared.”

  I was looking for some more moderate response. I told Stephen I wanted to write the exam but that I saw no need for a study-group cram session. I reminded him that Morris had said only an hour’s preparation would be needed.

  “Don’t be naive,” Stephen told me. “Everybody’s crawling the walls already. They’ll study all night. We’ve got to get together just to have a chance.”

  Aubrey, even Kyle busy with Section 100, agreed. So the four of us met late that afternoon. I was not happy to be there and after an hour I left. I studied my Procedure notes briefly at home, then put them away. Moderation, I told myself. Moderation. I was still collected when I arrived at school on Friday morning. Near my locker, a group of men and women from my section were quizzing each other on Procedure. It was obvious that as Stephen had predicted, they’d studied hard. They were glib about cases I couldn’t even recall. I tried to ignore them and hustled away.

  In Langdell, in my mail slot, I found a copy of our motion brief. It was the one Peter Geocaris had been given at the argument to read and comment on. I hadn’t spoken with Peter about the argument. He’d had to leave for a class as soon as we finished, and I’d avoided him since. But to the brief Peter had appended a long personal note.

  “Your brief was not as bad as your argument,” Peter wrote, “but I would be lying if I told you to be proud of either of them.

  I have seen worse briefs and heard worse arguments, but I know what you are capable of. Frankly, I expected a lot more.”

  The note was blunt and I was not prepared to deal again with the way I’d felt last week. My first reaction was anger. I threw the brief on the floor. I think I may have kicked it. All that snotty excellence crap, I thought. Then I counseled myself: Whose fault, really? Who are you angry at? I recovered the brief, removed Peter’s note, and left the paper for Willie. Suddenly dreary again, I headed back to the hallway, where I ran into Stephen.

  “Have you heard?” he asked me.

  “Heard what?”

  “You won’t believe it.” He took me with him to his locker and removed a copy of one of the morning papers. He opened it to an inside page. There was a small, single-column article. The headline read “Harvard Law Students Protest” and in four or five inches of type the Incident and the birth of Section 100 were described. Perini’s name was mentioned a number of times, but the only direct criticism of him was contained in the article’s conclusion—a verbatim quote of the one critical paragraph from the letter which Perini had been sent by the twenty-nine of us from the class. I was mortified.

  “Why would they print that?” I asked Stephen. “Where’d they get the letter?”

  “Maybe they think we’re going to sit in,” Stephen said. He explained that a man in the section lived with a woman who was a reporter. She’d seen Section 100’s statement and had followed things from there. According to rumor, she’d called Wade Strunk, who had provided her with all the information, including the quote from the letter we had sent Perini. That was the part which bothered me. I had signed that letter and I felt responsible for what happened with it. I’d thought it was a private matter. I never intended the letter to become an element in any sort of public humiliation for Perini.

  Stephen knew no more and I headed for the Torts classroom, where there would be fresher information. I got hold of Lindsey Steiner, the woman who’d asked everyone to stay after class the day of the Incident. I’d been told she’d seen Perini this morning.

  “He’s angry,” she said to me, “very angry. I went to apologize to him, but he could barely speak. A lot of people he has contact with are going to see that. It’s a real embarrassment for him. And he was very unhappy about that letter being printed. He said it was a breach of confidence. He said he’s holding everyone who signed it responsible.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Lindsey shrugged gently.

  “He’ll cool off,” she told me.

  “And Wade was the one?” I asked.

  Lindsey looked around to see who was listening before she answered.

  “Everybody’s talked to him, but he doesn’t even understand what he did wrong. He’s so innocent.”

  Innocent, I thought. Christ. I went to my seat and stewed. I could pay no attention to Zechman that morning. Were it not for the use of the letter, I’d have felt Perini had made his own bed. But he was right—there had been a breach there. He’d been bad-mouthed through an inappropriate source. I felt guilty and increasingly depressed. Now and then, my mind wandered to Peter and my spirits declined further.

  In the interim between Torts and Procedure, the study group met again to discuss the exam. I still couldn’t concentrate. When we returned to Langdell, the addition of nervousness about the test left me feeling disoriented. Nicky passed around the blue books. I shook my head sadly as I considered mine. I clearly remembered the day a few years before when I’d finished my graduate course work in English and had exulted in having written my last exam. Nicky recited the question:

  “Discuss the case of Pennoyer v. Neff” The answer would require a brief essay on some of the prominent ideas in the subject of jurisdiction, which we’d studied for the first two months. It did not seem all that hard.

  But when I opened my blue book some kind of emotional sluice opened in me as well. Everything accumulating the past few weeks arrived as a grand swell of pain and dread and confusion. How, how, I thought, with a quick and stricken wonder, could I have returned to this low point of having to prove myself? Suddenly all I could feel was the kind of miserable dishonor and failure which had followed on everything I had done the past few weeks, and I was sure, desperately certain, that it would happen again right now. I knew it. I could not shake that certainty of failure from my mind. And so within a few minutes that prophecy had fulfilled itself.

  Three quarters of the way through the brief exam period I tore up what I’d scribbled and tried to get down something coherent. There was no way to make up the lost ground. When Nicky called time I knew I had failed—literally, absolutely flunked. I’d done it, and now the gathered shame and grief were overpowering. Much of my pain was in seeing the kind of downward spiral I seemed to be on, these worsening screw-ups, this deepening hurt and fright. I knew I had to do something about it.

  As soon as class was over, I went to the basement of Pound, where the Law School Health Center is located. There is a psychiatrist housed there, as handy as a fire extinguisher on the wall in case of emergencies.

  I was trying gaily to hold my act together when I arrived. “How loud,” I asked, gesturing toward the psychiatrist’s door, “do you have to moan to get in to see her?”

  Pretty loudly, it turned out. The nurse asked quietly if I was suicidal. No, of course not, I answered, just aching. There were plenty of people around HLS in that category. I would have to wait until after Thanksgiving to see the docto
r. I glumly accepted my appointment and went home.

  Over the weekend I remained in agony and disarray. I had never before failed an exam. That it would have no bearing on my grade did not matter. I had been confirmed in my suspicion that I was a ludicrous, miserable, unworthy failure. The disgrace turned inside me like a fierce, fiery wheel. The world as I saw it was peopled only by those whom I’d disappointed and hurt: Mann, Perini, Blaustein, Peter, my friends, my parents, my wife. And all of those feelings only worsened when on Monday I walked back into school, the scene of the crime. I went up to Harkness to have a cup of cocoa—my nerves were too shot for coffee. I was bad off. I took out my notebook and wrote the passage which appears at the front of this book.

  Somehow I dragged myself through the next week and a half. I didn’t feel much better, but I felt no worse. There were no further crises.

  On Monday, Perini became reconciled with the section again. He was slightly bitter this time. He made a comment about the kinds of things one reads in the newspaper. Then he called on Mooney. He was no gentler, nor any harder, on him than on his predecessors. It seemed an effective way to put the whole business to an end.

  Section 100’s meeting went forward. Only thirty people showed up, though, and the group promptly dissolved. Kyle, I was told, had written a letter of apology to Perini.

  At the end of the week, Nicky gave us another test. This one was a short multiple-choice exam to be worked on at home. I was more comfortable in my own study and I tried to do the test carefully.

  When Thanksgiving arrived, I was desperately grateful for the rest. Sleep alone seemed to go a long way toward healing me. Marsha, a dear friend from California, was visiting. We had Thanksgiving with her, then she and Annette went down to Connecticut to spend time there with Marsha’s family.

  I stayed in Arlington alone. I had to study. Despite all the resolutions earlier in the term, the study group was now busy assembling an outline of Mann’s Criminal class in preparation for the exam. His casebook was new and none of the commercial guides was yet available. And the course had been so disorganized that we had all been forced to agree that a collective effort was required to put it together. I knew that with only three weeks left in the semester, I’d better get my share done now.

  Over the weekend, I worked at the outline listlessly. I spent most of my time walking through the empty apartment, trying to figure out exactly what had happened to me the past month. I recognized many of the things I’ve repeated here about the demands of the student life and of Harvard Law School. I saw that yet another cost of HLS’s size is the depletion of trust, the fact that there are too many people there to maintain the kind of close bonds that could forestall some of the rumor mongering and mass paranoia that had lately been driving me nuts.

  And I’d seen some more of “my enemy,” that funny, indefinite collection of shadowy and unnerving recognitions about myself and what was around me to which I more and more willingly gave that name. The latest sighting had come in the oral argument and in Nicky’s test, where wisely or unwisely I had tried to slow down in a stampede. Now I had to admit that I did not have the strength yet to stand up on my own. Looking forward to exams in January, I saw that I should more or less abandon hope of maintaining my perspective. Health, in that circumstance, might well be in excusing myself for giving in.

  It was that kind of charity toward myself that characterized the weekend. I decided that by and large I was a sound creature. By Monday, I felt well enough collected to cancel my appointment with the psychiatrist. I’d been a little whacked out, I decided, but that was as much a reflection of the experience as of any personal crisis. I began to read in the extensive psychological literature about law school and was reassured to learn that my bad spell was hardly unique. “I have never seen more manifest anxieties in a group of persons under ‘normal’ circumstances than is visible in first-year law students,” one psychiatrist had written. As the year went on, I learned that there were many 1Ls who felt they’d tilted a little, many of them in more severe and more painful ways than I had. I know of at least one suicide attempt in my class, and there were more people than I can count who confided that they’d been driven through the door of the psychiatrist’s office for the first time in their lives by the experience of being a Harvard 1L. The fact that the psychiatrist is down there at all is indicative of something.

  No doubt, some of us who’ve had our hard times during the first year of law school are carrying around a lot of delicate psychological china that’s bound to be damaged somewhat with any abnormal shaking and strain. But I resist, in general, the suggestion that the many HLS students who sink into prolonged bouts of panic, anxiety, and despair should bear all the blame on their own.

  Late in the year, I heard Nicky Morris address a crowd of students on the topic of legal education at Harvard. He said something worth repeating:

  “I keep running into Harvard Law School graduates, people of all ages, who tell me that ‘court held no fear’ for them. A lot of them are men who fought in World War II or Korea or Vietnam, and most say that even having had those experiences, they never felt as ,scared or oppressed as they did when they were law students at Harvard; and that afterwards, by comparison, their anxiety about going into a courtroom for the first time was nothing.

  “Well, I’m glad if we can prepare our students so that they feel self-confident about performing their professional tasks. But it doesn’t fill me with pride to be part of an institution that has provided so many people with the worst times of their lives. I don’t think that’s an affirmative thing to say about this law school. I think there has to be something wrong with a place like that.”

  Nicky nodded his head as he looked at us all.

  “Something,” he repeated.

  DECEMBER AND JANUARY

  Exams (First Act)

  12/4/75

  (Friday)

  For the first time in a month, I felt some peace and pleasure this week at HLS. A moment ago I was laughing at myself. Thinking over the day, I felt simultaneously elated, depressed, and confused. I knew I could only have been at law school.

  Today Nicky Morris returned the two tests he gave us. He had the blue books spread out on the broad podium when we entered and people were instantly clustered wildly in front. Then, immediately, the comparing of grades took place, remarkably rapid and willing.

  As I’ve long recognized, I potted the discuss-the-case essay. Nicky invented an especially generous curve, nothing like the stingy thing which will be used for exams next month, and I had a C—far better than I expected. But there were only twenty grades below B in the section and Nicky said bluntly that those of us who had low marks should be “concerned.” My dismay was lessened by my previous suffering over that test and the fact that I received one of the highest grades in the section on the multiple-choice exam. When I spoke with Morris later in his office, he told me not to worry about the essay, and I’ve decided to take him at his word.

  For most everybody, though, the tests set the mood of the day. Superachievers in an era of grade inflation, many people—Stephen among them—were despondent about Bs—especially on the essay, which Nicky obviously gave greater weight. Hearing of my C seemed to make none of them any brighter. The majority, I guess, just walked away convinced that I am a dummy.

  The students with As—Aubrey was one—tried to be self-effacing but could not fully conceal their delight. Kyle was particularly pleased, and with good reason. Nicky had written a long note on his exam saying it was the finest he’d read.

  To observe the powerful hold the grades and tests exerted on all of us was a little disturbing. I can’t help wondering what kind of month it’ll be between now and January 9, when we have our first exam.

  Final exams play on a law student’s world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they’re at a distance, they serve merely to create the tensions which swell daily like tides—to read, to keep pace, to und
erstand. As exams draw close, however, in December and May, their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces.

  When we came back after Thanksgiving, I could sense the exam mood taking hold. Many of the upperclassmen, the people who’d been through exams before, seemed to have returned from the holiday with a pale, grim look. When they greeted each other in the hallways, most made jokes about how much better they’d feel in a month and a half. To a 1L, that was not a good sign.

  I was also struck by the appearance of the red books. Each year, late in the fall, the law school publishes the text of the previous year’s finals. A professor’s former tests are considered by students a good index to the topics in a course which the teacher deems most important and to the approach to legal problems to which he or she is most receptive. Students in all years pore over past exams, sometimes to an extent unrecognized by the faculty. This year, one professor repeated a test he’d used three or four years earlier and had to award a classful of As and A-pluses.

  The tests are published in two bound volumes, 1L and upper-year courses separate, their covers a shade of red so vibrant that the books themselves look a little alarming. They are left in boxes in the tunnels from which almost all were grabbed off within a day. What was most significant to me about the books was that they were published at all. That the law school would go to that trouble and expense indicated how seriously everybody, teachers and administrators, took exams; it was an official stamp, confirming their gravity.

  So the results of Nicky Morris’s tests only served to accentuate a tension which was already becoming pronounced. We were all stopping each other now at lunch, in the hallways, to ask questions about cases and concepts we’d covered at the beginning of the term. And the study groups were growing more active. Some people preferred to work alone, either because they did not want to rely on others, or simply because they felt they learned better independently. But by now, most of the members of the section had found their way into groups, almost all of which were meeting a number of times every week to swap information and outlines and to work out past tests.