Status Updates From One L: The Turbulent True S...

As we did, they will bring with them their academic accolades, glittering like rows of military medals; they will bring a hunger for the law. They will bring their own great talents, energy, ambition, intelligence, charm. They will bring the their enemies unmet…”They will be One Ls.”

We all had at least one summer nightmare…and we each admitted to wonder—and moments of real pride—when we thought about the persons we were last fall.

There are people who managed the year with more grace than I did; others less. But all the conversations I have had with my law-school friends over the summer have returned, almost obsessively, to the year past and the question of exactly what it was that happened to us. Something exalted. Something fearful.

That driven quest for prominence which brings us there, leads us, once we arrive, to an almost inescapable temptation to scramble, despite obstacles and ugliness and bruises, for what sometimes looks to all of us to be the very top of the tallest heap. So we become vulnerable, and the place does little to protect us from ourselves.

My enemy, that greedy little monster, is still in there rattling his cage. I guess I will be contending with him always. Knowing that, I must admit that I made many of the rough spots in the past year far harder for myself. I met up with a lot of my own ugliness, and learned more than I wanted to about how deep it goes. I suppose that is part of the education, too.

Too much of what goes on around the law school …seeks to tutor students in strategies for avoiding, for ignoring, for somehow subverting the unquantifiable, the inexact, the emotionally charged, the hose things which still pass in my mind under the label “human.” …I came to take that quality in legal eduction…make me less a person than I’d like to be, that foe I’d come here to meet.

The ultimate risk of allowing students to make their first acquaintance with the law in such an atmosphere [caused by heavy-handed Socraticism], in that state of hopeless fright, is that they will come away with a tacit but ineradicable impression that it is somehow characteristically “legal” to be heartless, to be brutal, and will carry that attitude with them into the execution of their professional tasks.

For me it was an experience of great extremes. What was bad was awful. But what was good often approached was the ideal. I was regularly inspired and invigorated by what I was studying, and I seldom lost the feeling that I was making good use of myself.

It will probably take a couple of days for me to believe it. The first year of law school. It seemed sheer myth when my friends lived through it. Now I have, too. It is over. It is over.

One day I found myself pacing back and forth in the law-school gym, muttering, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” trying to keep in mind that I had some worth which would outlast exams. But I felt it was important not to give in. I knew where I stood now. I knew what I was against. I had finally met my enemy, I figured, face to face.

I know that if I gave in again to that welling, frightened avarice as I had…I would pay for a long time in the way I thought about myself.

It’s a tough place, I told myself. Bad things are happening. Work hard. Do your best. Learn the law. But don’t suffer, I thought. Don’t fear. And for God’s sake, don’t give up your decency.

All along there had been a tension between looking out for ourselves and helping others each other; in the end, I did not expect anybody…to renounce a wish to prosper; to succeed. But I could not believe how extreme u had let things become, the kind of grasping creature I had been reduced to. I had not been talking about gentlemanly competition…innocent striving to achieve. There had been murder in my voice.

Then suddenly I was speaking from the frenzied center of everything that had gripped me in the last week. “I want the advantage,” I said. “I want the competitive advantage. I don’t give a damn about anybody else. I want to do better than them.” My tone was ugly…it took me a while to believe I had actually said that. I told myself I was kidding. But I knew better.

That congested fear of failing and screwing up, and on the other side, of wanting desperately to do well, had knotted inside me again, more powerfully than at any time since last No-vember. Over the weekend I began to smoke again. I woke up one night in a sweat.

..one young professor characterized Socraticism as "placing a premium on being able to outdraw a student at twenty feet."

…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.

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: …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…

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.

In order to reach the [upper] 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.

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.

I had looked forward to being an upperclassman. For one thing, there would be more free time. We'd all be beyond that struggle to famil-arize 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.