One L (6 page)

“And what does the court mean by ‘intent to harm'?” Zechman asked the tall, blond man who had stated the case. “Is it the kind of moral wickedness of a man who has a grudge against another and deliberately runs his enemy down in the street with his auto?”

The man in the back said he thought the court meant something different from that.

“Perhaps so,” Zechman said, “perhaps so, but what exactly does the court mean then? What state of mind is sufficient to make this little boy liable for battery? What kind of judgment is it that we make? If he's not wicked, why do we blame him? Was he merely not paying attention? Is that intent to harm?”

The questioning was gentle, soft-spoken. But by the end of the period there had been no answers. Nor were there any firm resolutions to the series of questions Zechman put to us in the next few days, inquiries about what courts meant by “negligence” or why the injuries caused by certain kinds of activities had to be compensated, whether there had been negligence or not. How could it be, Zechman asked us, that in some situations you could run a pedestrian down and not pay a penny, and yet be forced to bear all the losses when a toaster which you'd merely sold exploded in a freak accident?

The responses from the class were puzzled, tentative. Zechman would digest each, then frame another question. Usually they centered on elaborate hypothetical situations Zechman had devised (“hypo” for short, a term which for weeks reminded me, a doctor's son, of syringes); and the hypos themselves sometimes seemed wildly peculiar, only adding to our confusion. Was it assault if a midget took a harmless swing at Muhammad Ali? Was it negligent to refuse to spend $200,000 for safeguards on a dam which could wash away $100,000 worth of property?

When bewilderment on a subject seemed to have peaked, often with the class baffled into silence, Zechman would move on to another topic. But he never made a positive statement, never gave anything which resembled an answer, not even a hint. He just stood up there in his black suit with an expression of muted concern and kept asking questions; and as confusion grew, so did dissatisfaction. No one was quite sure what Zechman wanted from us. Were we stupid? Were the questions bad? What were we supposed to be learning? It was almost as if Zechman had set out to intensify that plague of uncertainty which afflicted us all.

By Friday, the level of anxiety in the class had mounted to a kind of fury. Most people were willing to agree that Zechman was earnest and extremely patient. He was kindly in his interrogations. He'd never once told a student he or she was wrong, and he seemed almost reluctant to call on us off the chart, preferring to question the class as a whole. But a number of people claimed that they had not taken a single intelligible note in the three days of class. Karen Sondergard, the tall blonde with whom I'd spoken after Perini's first class, told me that she had been so anxious and confused after Thursday's class that she had gone home and wept. Everyone seemed to have arrived at an assessment like the one that Terry gave me after Friday's meeting.

“The guy can't teach,” Terry said. “No wonder they laid him off for twelve years.”

Nicky Morris, on the other hand, was a hit at once. From the start it was obvious that we would be on a different footing with him than with the other professors.

“I'm Nicky Morris,” he said when he started the first class, “and I'm very glad to be here. I like teaching Civil Procedure.” He was the only teacher who took the trouble to introduce himself, although perhaps he did it because there were students in the room who still did not believe he was the professor. When I'd pointed Morris out before class to the man who sat next to me, he'd been incredulous. Morris had been an all-Ivy halfback at Dartmouth and he still looked the part, tanned and trim and strongly built. He came to the first class in a pair of blue jeans and a red polo shirt; his dark hair, although smoothly styled, was long. He leaned against the podium, talking with a group of students, looking like a jock chatting with the cheerleaders as he rested confidently on the coach's Chevy.

In front of the class, he remained casual, hands in his pockets, idly strolling as he talked. It was plain that in this class there would not be the same atmosphere of adversity, nor the same distance. Nicky was young—in fact, at thirty-one, he was younger than two or three students in the section. He dressed as we did. He even spoke colloquially—he said “thing” and “dealie” and “y'know.” And besides the affinity of shared manners, there was a subtler alliance struck between Morris and the class. From the start it was apparent that Nicky was an outsider at HLS, just as we were as newcomers. He was freely critical of the law school and of legal education in general.

“You are going to have an enormous power to do bad things when you finish your education here,” he said. “When you get into practice, you'll be shocked at the incredible opportunities you have to mess up other people's lives. That's not funny,” he told us, “although for some reason most law school professors don't like to talk about the destructive capacity you'll all hold as lawyers. I hope we can talk about that in here, and I also hope we can talk about some of the good things you can do, which, unfortunately, are often a little harder to accomplish.”

As for the running of his own class, it was unorthodox. Morris said that he preferred to select students off the seating chart because that equalized the opportunity to speak in class. But if we didn't want to talk for whatever reason, we merely had to say “pass” when called on.

“I won't hassle you,” Morris promised. “Don't feel you have to make any excuses. I don't believe in coercing you into having something to say.” The only thing he did ask was that we try not to raise our hands when other students were talking.

Morris had a reputation as a theorist, often high-flown and abstract in his teaching. Civil Procedure deals with the uniform set of rules courts use to conduct their business in all noncriminal actions, and Morris, according to what Peter Geocaris had said during registration week, tended to teach the course as a kind of philosophical inquiry into the nature of rules themselves. But in the first few days he was graciously down to earth. He understood how lost we felt, the struggle we were having with language. Through much of the first session, Morris simply threw the floor open to questions. Most dealt with cases we had read for Procedure, but queries on any topic were in order and it was not surprising that many people asked questions about Contracts, where we had all felt far too intimidated by Perini to risk exposing our ignorance.

And the section was grateful. “I love him,” Karen Sondergard told me after our last class of the week on Friday. “He's just wonderful.” There was general assent that Morris's class had been a relief. For many of the members of Section 2, their first week as full-fledged law students had not been a period of exhilaration anything like the one I had gone through. A number—even most—seemed to have found it sheer oppression. The work, the pressure, the gnawing uncertainty had been too much. During the week, I had heard complaints of insomnia, fatigue, stomach trouble, crying bouts, inflated consumption of food, liquor, cigarettes. Nor did I feel remote from everybody else's troubles. It was easy to see how my high could have been translated into something as extreme but not as pleasant. We listened to each other sympathetically. That was the one consolation. We were all in this together.

In general, that kind of good feeling had continued to prevail among us, but in the first week there had been some changes in our dealings with each other. For one thing, we were suddenly talking of nothing but law. People stopped asking me about my background or how I liked New England. The classes seemed too stimulating and difficult to allow talk of much else. We were all explaining, comparing, seeking each other's help. Out of class, school became an environment of legal talk, almost all of it well-spoken. I reported to Annette each night my general wonder at how enormously articulate everybody seemed. And people were beginning to inject that new vocabulary into their conversation, speaking Legal to each other. It was strange at first to hear classmates saying in the hallways, “
Quaere
if that position can be supported?” or employing Legal in other contexts—“Let me add a
caveat
” to mean “Let me give you a warning.” People were self-conscious about how oratorical and windy they sounded. They uttered a little hiccup or a laugh when they tried out their Legal, but most of us persisted, practicing on each other.

It was Nicky Morris who most neatly summed up what we were all trying to do in using legalisms. In the last meeting of Civil Procedure that week, a woman answered a question Morris had posed. “The court does not have subject matter jurisdiction over the person,” she said.

“I'm not sure I know what that means,” Morris told the woman, “but I'm still glad to hear you talking that way. After all,” he said, “you can't be a duck until you learn to quack.”

9/14/75 (Sunday)

Work, work, work.

I've been at it all weekend, struggling to finish the Legal Methods memo so I can struggle the rest of the week to finish the daily assignments.

I keep waiting for things to relent somehow. I'm blown out. I've never experienced mental exhaustion like what I felt by the end of each day this week. The ceaseless concentration on books and professors, and even on classmates who never went low-key, left me absolutely blithering when I got home each evening. The weekend has not been that much better. I'm still too excited to sleep much and the stuff is always in my head. I feel as if I've been locked in a room where all the walls say “Law.”

I enjoy it—I enjoy it. But it's still an emotional merry-go-round. Studying, I often feel as if I'm being borne aloft, high just on the power of enlarging knowledge, making connections, grabbing hold. Then, suddenly, I'm close to dread. Tomorrow we face Perini again; when I picked up my Contracts book, I felt a quiver in my gut. I've just spent the last forty-five minutes marching around the study, rehearsing what I'd say if I were called on for tomorrow's case.

I'm running so hard that I keep putting off even a few minutes for genuine reflection about what I'm up to. I feel as if I am doing some enormous scrimshaw—fine and minute and detailed—from six inches away, without any chance to step back to see the actual design. It's all darkness and eyestrain and a constant chipping away, and I know that the bone I'm working in is my own.

Maybe it'll get easier soon. Last night we went to the orientation dinner of the Harvard Law School Community Association—the married students' group—and the topic of conversation all evening was how hard people work as 1Ls, especially in the beginning. The dean talked about it in the speech he gave, and so did the association secretary. It was the subject of dinner conversation as we ate our meal.

“That first week or so,” one man, a 2L, said, “those were the longest days of my life.”

A woman sitting at the table said, “Amen.”

Amen.

On Monday, Aubrey Drake stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I wanted to join a study group. I had met Aubrey during registration week. He was older, near thirty, and he had introduced himself to me because he had been at Amherst. He'd graduated four years before I had, but we had friends in common and we seemed to take to each other quickly. He was an urbane man, tall, dark-haired, good looking, with a kind of cultivated charm which had been lost on my generation of students in the political chaos of the '60s.

“It's nothing formal yet,” Aubrey told me about the study group. “Just some people getting together at lunch to talk it over.”

Study groups are another of the basics of the first-year life. A small number of students, usually between four and eight, meet regularly to discuss common difficulties which have arisen with course work. There is no set regime for study group operation. Some groups merely hash over random questions; others use their time together to work out formal exercises; some spend the year developing long course outlines which are exchanged among group members before exams. Most of the faculty encourage the formation of study groups. They afford each student an opportunity for extensive talk about legal problems, something rarely possible in class. And aside from their educational value, study groups have a kind of therapeutic function, offering a much valued element of stability amid the uncertainties of first-year life. The other members of your study group are the people to whom you can always go with questions, the only students in the school whom you know have committed themselves to your support.