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

by Scott Turow

  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.

  “You’ll be okay,” I told him now.

  “Oh, sure. I figure—the hornbook, the outlines—I’ll get up in the B range. From there, who knows.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I asked about his weekend.

  It was okay, he said. He’d gone to a party Friday night. Sandy Stern was there and they’d spent the evening talking about who was going to make Law Review. Stephen had categories all marked out. At the top were “sure ones,” which meant Shearing. For some reason he didn’t include himself in that group. He was one step below, among the “good possibilities.” There were others who he’d decided were clearly “out,” because they were not working hard enough. Andy Kitter was “out” because he had fallen in love.

  “I figure people who make Law Review deserve it,” Stephen said. “What a prize, huh? Fifty hours a week in hell.”

  I made a sound of assent.

  “I hear the firms really get down on you if you quit,” he said. “I don’t know. You’ve got the grades anyway. Well,” he went on, “these exams really aren’t bothering me. Not like first semester. I felt like hell then. I figure I’ll be cool about these. I don’t feel any anxiety yet,” he said. “Not yet,” he said, before he got off the phone.

  Late in April, the registrar’s office made available forms and pamphlets so that the as and 2Ls could register for courses for the following fall. Amid the gathering fears roused by exams, it was nice to know that someone actually thought we would reach the second year.

  Like many o
f my classmates, I had frequently looked forward to being an upperclassman. For one thing, there would be more free time. We’d all be beyond that struggle to familiarize ourselves with the law’s strange language and logic. The work would be easier, and there’d also be less of it to do. At HLS, second-and third-year students are usually not allowed to enroll, even voluntarily, for as many course hours as are required in the first year.

  For 2Ls and 3Ls, much of that unoccupied time goes into extracurricular activities, including a wealth of student organizations that work on law-related problems which affect the world beyond HLS. Three student-edited legal journals cover developments in the specialized fields of civil liberties, international law, and legislation. Student research groups, like the Legislative Research Bureau, harness the free legal manpower floating through the law school’s halls to delve, at the request of those affected, into contemporary legal problems. There are also organizations, such as the Legal Aid Society, involved in the direct deliveiy of legal services to the poor.

  Nearing the end of the year, many 1 Ls were eager to participate in those groups next fall. And we could see other appealing freedoms in the year ahead. Often we had spoken wistfully of the more relaxed atmosphere in upper-year classes. In some, the Socratic method is forsaken. Professors lecture, taking questions from the floor when they finish. Where the Socratic method is employed, it is sometimes treated with disdain. In December, Gina reported that she had sat in on a Commercial Transactions class in which nine persons consecutively had passed. The professor had employed the screw-your-buddy tactic, calling on the student beside the one who’d failed to respond, and had ended up going down an entire row. “Pass.” “Pass.” “Not me.” “Not me, either.” “Sorry.” “Maybe next time.” Gina told the story to a group of us at lunch and we were all gleeful. Those would be the days.

  Most important, the curriculum in the second and third years is far more flexible. About 150 upper-year courses are offered, and not one of them is specifically required. Every student decides on his own what he or she will take. For the second year, the faculty recommends a series of what they call “basic courses”—Constitutional Law, Accounting, Corporations, and Taxation, which is essentially a study of the provisions and policies of the U. S. Internal Revenue Code—but you are free to disregard those suggestions. Some students view the inclusion of Corporations, Taxation, and Accounting in the faculty’s recommendations as an effort to direct students into business law. But even professors like Nicky Morris, politically radical in their perspectives, agreed that the basic courses dealt with material important in almost every area of practice. Even a criminal prosecutor, for instance, could not handle many kinds of fraud and embezzlement cases without knowing something about a corporation. Morris, however, was not as encouraging about the courses themselves.

  “You have to take Corporations,” he explained to the study group one day late in April when we had lunch with him, “because the stuff is so boring that if you aren’t threatened with an exam you’ll never make yourself read the hornbook.”

  Nicky’s attitude toward Corporations was symptomatic of sentiments toward the work of the second and third year in general. It may all have looked rosy to a 1L, but 2Ls and 3Ls seemed to regard the last two years as being little more than a forced march, and many of the faculty had not much more enthusiasm for what went on.

  Problems in the second and third years of law school are not unique to Harvard. Professors Herbert Packer and Thomas Ehrlich, both of Stanford, writing for a Carnegie Commission study on legal education, pointed out a sense of shortcomings in upper-year education everywhere, and named that as one of their prime considerations in recommending that law school be abbreviated to two years.

  As a first-year student, I am hardly able to pose as an expert on the inadequacies of the second and third years. I can, however, after my months in the hallways, report the consensus of upper-year students’ complaints. One problem is that the subject matter is often far from compelling. Usually the courses are much more specialized and technical than in first-year classes—Corporate Policy Planning, Labor Arbitration, Maritime Law, are examples. Another difficulty is that employers are knocking on the door, calling students out, and many are eager to move on. Classroom doings are likely to seem abstract, dull, and inactive when compared to what happens in practice. New clinical courses, which give upper-year students detailed instructions and experience in trying cases and representing clients, are often far more popular than traditional classroom fare.

  But what looked to me to be the biggest trouble was also the most obvious. In order to reach the second and third years, students must pass through the first year, and by then many have already had the stuffing kicked out of them. They have been treated as incompetents, terrorized daily, excluded from privilege, had their valued beliefs ridiculed, and in general felt their sense of self-worth thoroughly demeaned. If you get knocked down often enough, you learn not to stand up, and after being a Harvard 1L, a silent crawl to the finish line looks to many students to be the better part of valor.

  Looking around the hallways, I often saw the 2Ls and 3Ls as a sad, bitter, defeated lot. I met repeated instances of those attitudes all year: Peter Geocaris’s wounded ruefulness about the Law Review; the many 2Ls and 3Ls I consulted in the spring who told me that there was not a course at HLS worth taking; or the entire third-year class, who on the eve of graduation elected as Class Marshall a man who had pledged to remind every class member annually of the degrading manner in which they had been treated, so that none would ever give a dime in alumni contributions to the Harvard Law School.

  The 2Ls and 3Ls recover, I’m certain. David has told me that most of his classmates reported a great thrill in starting practice and in discovering again that they were the talented people they had thought of themselves as being before they came to HLS.

  But I’m not sure if that is not too late to dissolve some of the ill effects.

  “It makes me so unhappy to see what happened to all the people Sonny started with,” the wife of a 3L friend said to Annette and me one night near the end of the year. “They’re all such good people, and they’re all so cynical now. They just do everything they have to and they ridicule it at the same time. They all swore the first year they’d never go to corporate firms, and now they just took the job because it was sort of expected. And most of them have already promised themselves they’re going to hate it. It’s just classic alienation.”

  As for me, I knew enough now about HLS and myself not to vow that I wouldn’t fall into any of those typical attitudes. I would just do my best. I tried to select my courses for next year carefully. A lot of 2Ls and 3Ls told me that was pointless. Second-year and third-year registration is often a large-scale repetition of what went on with first-year electives in December: oversubscribed courses, waiting lists, the registrar pushing students out of classes like checkers. I had heard the same rumor a number of times that one 2L had been bumped from so many courses the preceding fall that he’d simply withdrawn from school for a year.

  Still, I persisted. I checked on each professor, conferred with upper-year students, sought faculty advice. I registered for the basic courses and also for classes in Legal History, Evidence, Law and Philosophy, Antitrust, Labor Law. As I prepared my schedule I followed two ground rules, which seemed to me the most important in making law school palatable: One was that I would not submit myself again to a teacher who ran his classroom like the Star Chamber. I did not care if a professor was known as the greatest formulator of the law since Hammurabi—if he was said to treat his students harshly, I passed him by. Second, I tried as often as possible to choose classes with small enrollments. Upper-year courses are often taught in groups as large as 250. Facing numbers like that, I knew no professor could deal humanly with students.

  Maybe my plans for next year would not work out. But I saw no point in conceding early. As it is, if the folklore is in any way accurate, I have two years to learn
all about feeling hopeless, feeling bored.

  In the last week of April, Nicky Morris made an announcement in the wake of which the year dissolved into disgrace. That was no fault of Nicky’s. He meant well. But it was typical of the reactions which had attended him all year that things did not play out straight.

  As we neared the end of the year, I had come to regard Nicky Morris as a teacher of exceptional generosity. He was more aggressively concerned with his students’ well-being than any other professor I knew of at HLS. He was unflinching about sharing his time with us, in his office or after class. In the practice exams he gave occasionally, I saw a sincere effort to lessen our anxieties and provide the feedback we so badly needed. With his frequent criticisms of the HLS grading system, I felt Nicky was hoping to demystify and lessen in importance what was for many of us the most painful aspect of the year. And in his classroom approach to Civil Procedure and law in general, I perceived Morris as attempting to make legal education a richly intellectual enterprise, provocative and appealing to those going through it.

  I admired Nicky Morris enormously, and many members of Section 2 shared my sentiments. But more students—although they enjoyed the class—had less regard than I for Nicky personally. They found his hipness phony, and in one of those inevitable student slanders referred to him as “Beat Nick.” His frequent talk about grading, they said, was a deliberate attempt to add to grade pressures, an indication of how much stock Nicky himself put in academic standing. And in his classroom conduct, despite the easygoing procedures like passing, those people insisted that Nicky was egotistical and insensitive, eager to put his students down. –