One L (33 page)

5/13/76 (Thursday)

Last Contracts class with Perini. He has been fearsome all week, complaining about absences and roasting the people he's called on. He does not want us to go out with the impression he is soft or that the exam will be easy.

Today, though, he was mellow. Students have been collecting gifts for him. They were presented at the beginning of the hour—a portrait of a famous Contracts commentator, a large rusty steel coil so he would “have a nice spring.” Then the class rose to sing to him:

He followed with a rousing lecture on assignment of contracts—the procedure for selling your rights under an agreement to a third person—then closed with a schmaltzy peroration. It had its nicer moments. He apologized to Sandy Stern for past insults; he told us not to panic on the exam and said—as no one else has—if we do just blank out with fear, to come see him. He told us what a good group we were, but he could not resist a parting crack about the Incident, and its transformation to a public event. “It's been hard,” he said, “to be constantly defending my behavior to people who don't understand what goes on in here.” And he also resorted to a heavy sentimentality which approached bathos. He told us that we were all his family, that we were all his friends.

“He's got a lot of nerve,” Gina said afterwards, “terrorizing me all year, then saying he's my friend. He's not
my
friend.”

Wade, I understand, compared today's remarks to Nixon's farewell speech.

I don't know why I can't forgive Perini for his excesses; he has his talents as a teacher. The cruelty, I guess. The class rose to give him a standing ovation as he left. I could not bring myself to get to my feet.

5/14/76 (Friday)

I'll never enter a classroom again as a first-year law student. Final classes today.

Fowler, with rare warmth, offered some fatherly advice about the exam before he finished: “You people worry too much about these examinations. I'm still not sure what we test—time management, perhaps. Your problem is that you all want to be number one and no one can be in this kind of group. Oh, someone will be, by the numbers, but not really.”

Half an hour later, Nicky wound it all up. He told us he has worked for years to teach law in a way which he feels reveals the inherent interest of the subject matter. He warned us of the stultification we would likely feel as upper-year students and offered to do what he could—supervise papers or other kinds of research.

He was walking the length of the room as he spoke.

“There is an immense amount of talent in this group,” he said. “I have had my best year yet with you and I thank you for that.” He kept right on strolling and went out the door. He left all of us on our feet, applauding behind him.

Then the realization: It was over. Our year together. Exams are personal, you and the books and the test you write. This was really the last moment for Section 2. I kissed Karen, hugged Gina. I shook hands with Terry and Stephen and Aubrey. I thought about the kind of wonder and admiration with which I regarded my classmates in those first few weeks, and then about what has happened to all of us of late. Harvard Law School, I thought. Oh, Harvard Law School.

I went home feeling numb and a little depressed.

Spring exams are another of the traditions of the first year of law school. A few years ago, things were far worse at Harvard, and at many other schools, than they are now. Students would take five exams in five full-year courses; there were no tests beforehand and students had no indication of how they were doing. In many instances, the exams were given on a “closed book” basis, which meant students could bring nothing with them into the examination area—no books at hand for comfort, no pretense that students weren't expected to have the body of law in a subject memorized cold. In the spring, first-year law students would go even crazier than we did. Friends who were at Harvard and other law schools in those days have repeatedly told me the same stories about suicide attempts and about students moving into motels to get away from the madhouse in the dorms.

For us, midyear exams and the knowledge that each final was “open book” lessened some of that pressure. But still it was no cakewalk. I found the experience, coming on the heels of everything else, a lot like being sent out to run a four-minute mile after just having finished the marathon. We had four tests inside of seventeen days, thousands of pages to digest and hold together. At the end of the first term, by comparison, we had nearly a month to prepare for our tests in Torts and Criminal. I had no sense this time of any elegant confluence of knowledge taking place. The house was being built, but it was a rush job, with a lot of bad corners and no fine seams. I went over outlines, old tests. The study group met on a couple of occasions. For the most part, it was just cramming, day after day. Sixteen, seventeen hours. Half an hour for dinner. Six hours to sleep.

The first exam, four days after classes ended, was in Law and Public Policy. The night before, Gina called me. She sounded kited with fear, and for an instant her anxiety seemed to travel down the wire and take root in me. I'm okay, I told myself when I got off the phone, I'm okay. I slept soundly that night, and every other. One whole year, but it looked as though I was finally getting the better of my fear.

The Policy test, another eight-hour exam, was all right. Sternlieb had handed out a case study about the Public Health Service in advance. It was the setting for one of the two questions, which asked what steps we would take inside the organization if we were trying to push a program of neighborhood health centers. Writing my answer, I felt I had finally done something worthwhile on a law school exam—a careful, well-reasoned response. For me, I decided, these tests were a crap shoot: Sometimes I'd screw up, sometimes I'd pass; now and then I might even do something I was proud of.

I headed to school for the Property exam, a week later, feeling almost cheerful. Maybe I'd do something worthwhile today. I didn't. It was one of those four-hour jobs and I just babbled on, fueled by adrenalin. In the aftermath, there was a lot of controversy. Some years ago, Fowler had published a law review article evaluating a proposed zoning ordinance for a town in Illinois. One question on the test asked students to evaluate a proposed zoning ordinance for a town in Michigan. An “open book” test at HLS means no holds barred, and several students had come into the exam with copies of Fowler's old article, from which they more or less abstracted their answers. Kyle had gone at once to Fowler to complain. Fowler treated the matter indifferently and asked Kyle to leave the office.

Many people had also been dogged to the end by the Estates in Land. Terry was able to answer only two of the four questions. Stephen also felt he had not done well and was also unhappy about his Con Law exam earlier.

“You heard it here first,” he told me, “Stephen Litowitz will not make the Law Review.” He brightened in a few days, however, when he'd surveyed the other chief contenders—“the supercompetent people” was the way Stephen put it—and found that they too had had trouble with the test.

Nicky's exam, two days later, was more or less as promised. Everybody had his outlines and crib sheets ready. While working on the test, I looked a few times at the Procedure outline we'd put together. After all of that, I suppose it proved somewhat useful.

Facing the Memorial Day weekend there was only one test left, in Contracts on the first of June.

6/1/76 (Tuesday)

So it all comes down to Perini. It is only fitting that he provided our travail at the end.

I just could not handle studying this past weekend. The way Perini had taught Contracts—one rule followed by a million exceptions—meant prolonged efforts at memorization, nearly unbearable after this three-week grind. I pored over the hornbook, but I could only sit half an hour, forty minutes at a time. Nor do I have enough respect for Perini left to care much about his evaluation.

I saw Kyle skulking through the hallways when I got there this morning before the test. He is normally so robust, but I guess he felt it was all on the line here, and he was cowering like a wounded animal, literally walking hunched beside the wall. I did my best to rattle him, came on chipper as a sunbeam. I tried to detain him in conversation while he was obviously chafing to go look at an outline one more time. Oh, I was the very soul of menace, and I still don't feel ashamed.

Then I went into the test room. I come to these four-hour numbers with a virtual traveling commissary: earplugs, paper, four pencils, four pens, three rolls of mints, two packs of cigarettes, a cup of iced coffee, a Coke, two chocolate bars, a pencil sharpener, an extension cord for my typewriter. As I unloaded all of this equipment I took a lot of joshing from around the room. Thirty-five or forty of us would be typing. It was nice that for a minute we were all bound in laughter again.

At nine the proctor handed the exam out. It would be unlike Rudolph Perini not to give the hardest tests at Harvard Law School. The questions covered nine single-spaced pages—Nicky's exam, by comparison, was three sides doubled. Before the test I was told that we would be taking the same exam as another section, with two differences: Our test would have five questions instead of four, and the other section would have eight hours.

I went through the exam in the same desperate rush. I didn't pretend to do much thinking. At 11:15 I looked up the first time and realized it would all be over in two hours. I was giddy at the thought. The last question was a disordered series of phrases from various nursery rhymes. Perini asked us to describe the possible contract they might form, what the problems in its enforcement might be, and what common interpretative dilemmas were suggested. Perini, I thought, you are still not cool.

When time was called at one, I walked back and forth at the front of the room applauding. I hooted, I hollered. I went out to the arcade where BSA was serving beer and drank four cups fast. Aubrey was also pie-eyed.

“Well,” he said, “all that stands between you and a J.D. is six thousand dollars.” He meant the tuition.

With Terry, Gina, and Mike Wald, I went out to lunch. When I got back, I emptied my locker into my backpack and called Annette, who'd volunteered to pick me up.

On the way upstairs from the phone, I ran into Phyllis Wiseman. It hurt me to see her. After holding to that steadiness, that distance, all year, she had lost her grip. For her, the final holdout, the last month has been too much: the stuff with Kyle, the dismal atmosphere, and the crunch and exhaustion of the tests themselves.

She was worried that she had not done well, that her family, her friends would not respect her. She was badly depressed.

“I did a little better than so-so last term, and now,” she said, “I just mixed it all up…It's always so sad around here.”