Samara’s Reviews > One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School > Status Update

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.

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.