Law of the Jungle

I was inspired to write on this topic by a charming young woman whose grades have virtually guaranteed that she is a lock for law school next year. In all the excitement of congratulating her, I thought back on my own experiences in law school. And SHAZAM! Today’s topic.

There is an old joke about lawyers coming out of Jewish families. A lawyer is a Jewish mother’s son who can’t stand the sight of blood. (In my case, very descriptive.) The truth is there was never a chance of my becoming a doctor. I really can’t stand the sight of blood, mine or anyone else’s. Couple that with the sciences, especially chemistry, not being strong subjects and you have the makings of someone who has no chance of seeing the inside of a medical school other than as a patient, experimental subject or cadaver.

I remember as a kid loving the courtroom scenes in the old Perry Mason show starring Raymond Burr. I’m not that big of fan of mystery stories so I’d say to me parents to call me when the courtroom scenes came on. (And, by the way. If you murder someone and Perry Mason is the lawyer for the innocent person who is accused, DO NOT GO TO THE TRIAL. Guaranteed, you will feel compelled to confess, thereby ruining your whole nefarious plan.) Anyway I liked the court scenes and always had it in my mind to go to law school. This desire was overridden by the compulsion to become an aviator. Because the Air Force was paying for my education with my promise of becoming a navigator, the idea of delaying commissioning for another three years was a non-starter.

After I got out of the Air Force, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I settled on getting my master’s degree in library science (MLS). There was a joint program where you would wind up with both an MLS and a Juris Doctor but I passed on that. So I became a librarian. Periodically, I would mutter something about going to law school and someone would say, “Well why don’t you apply?” I always had a ready excuse until one day when I muttered it and got the question, I had no excuse.

The first step towards law school is the Law School Admission Test. I don’t know how it is now, but when I took it, it was basically a test of logic and logical thinking. (Yes, I know what you are thinking. How does doing well with logic contribute to the practice of law? Short answer. It don’t.) Thanks to a friend who is a mathematical genius who taught me the process of logical thinking, I did well enough to be admitted to the University of Connecticut Law School in September 1983.

UConn is one of the law schools that has a day division and an evening division. Because I was a grown-up with a family and a real job who needed the paycheck, I opted for evening division. Day students finish in three years and have the entire summer off. Evening students take four years and have a summer session course. The biggest difference, however, is the kind of students that the respective divisions attract. Day, the fast track to private practice, attracts the best and the brightest college grads. Many of them have no idea what to do with their lives, so law school is a good place to go to defer dealing with real life. (Gosh, Mark, can you be a LITTLE more judgmental? Why, yes, I can.) The title of this piece, the Law of the Jungle, refers to the cut-throat nature of the way those students carry on. You’ve heard all the stories about hiding books or cutting pages out just to sabotage other students. Well, evening division, for the most part, attracts people like me. We were a little older, we knew what working for a living was like and what having spouses and children were all about. More important, we had learned that much of life requires cooperation. I liked to use a phrase I learned in Air Force training: cooperate and graduate. The Law of the Jungle prevailed in day division.

Law school’s three years, generically go like this: First Year they scare you to death, Second Year they work you to death, Third Year they bore you to death. Let me tell you, Fourth Year you just want to shoot yourself. All the people you started with have graduated and you’re there for ONE MORE YEAR. One more year. By this time your family has almost forgotten what you look like, you barely know what supper not purchased from the lunch truck tastes like and all you know is you JUST WANT IT OVER.

Back to Year One. This is where you start learning to think like a lawyer. If you’ve ever seen the beginning of the TV show The Paper Chase, you’ve heard Prof. Kingsfield, the Harvard professor portrayed by John Houseman (Harvard, by the way, is one of those too snooty for an evening division law schools, so is Yale), “You come in hear with heads full of mush and when you leave, you leave thinking like lawyers.” There is every bit as much thinking indoctrination as there is in military basic training where you need to forget everything you knew and begin thinking the “right” way. (To this day, I lament the fact that I can’t NOT process things through that legal filter.) One of the highlights of that first year is when you get to do a Moot Court appellate argument before your teacher and two of the teaching assistants acting as the judges. Here’s a hint. If you are in the last group of the day, abandon hope when ye enter those portals. One of the TAs admitted to me after the fact that they were bored after hearing the same argument over and over so they gave us a really hard time for sh*ts and giggles.

At the end of that first semester, a group of us got together to study. One of them was the HR manager of a local business and we met in their conference room. He kept making pots of coffee and I kept drinking it. We finished up near midnight and I went home and went to bed…to bed, not to sleep. About 2:30, I was lying there wide awake with my heart racing and wondering if you can have a heart attack without it hurting. Then it occurred to me that about two pots of coffee had induced a caffeine rush that would not quit. Lesson learned about coffee late in the day.

After grades were published after first year, I was shocked to get a phone call from the editor of the Law Review. It seems that my grades were high enough to qualify and would I want to join? I said I would get back to him. Law Review, for those of you who don’t know, is the prestigious student-published journal. (Recall what was made of President Obama being the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review.) My initial reaction was, “Oh great, just what I need: a ton of more work and daily interaction with the young ‘uns in day division. But then my wife and I talked and I decided that if I didn’t take it, I would regret it later. So, there I was, joining Law Review. (Funny story about how I got the call. The top three evening division students were offered it. My best friend, the person with whom I took almost every course and who I studied with and talked with and laughed and cried with throughout the four years, had been number three and she turned it down. I was number four. I asked her, years later, if she regretted passing it up and she said not one bit.)

Second year began as first year had ended. It almost was a seamless process. The biggest difference was that now I was on Law Review! (Yes, that and 75 cents, at the time, would get you a ride on the New York Subways.) The upside was that the Law Review offices had lots of good nooks and crannies with couches and comfy chairs where I could hide for an hour before class and catch a few winks or read. The editor to whom I was assigned, was a charming young woman, ten years my junior in age and life experience but one year ahead of me in law school. We chatted for a while on topics for my case note (which would be my contribution to be published). When I decided on the case, much to her credit, she told me that she recognized that as mature thirtysomething (not exactly how she put it but it was what she meant) she realized that I did not need to be put through the pain of submitting an outline for approval and that I could start writing whenever I was ready.

Classes, meanwhile, seemed almost an anticlimax. I’m not sure if it was the familiarity with the milieu and the process, but I don’t recall any angst, aggravation or worry from classes. Oh, there was one bit of annoyance I recall. Excuse a mini-rant for a moment. Professors who write their own textbooks and make you buy theirs when there are better texts on the subject annoy the hell…no, they PISS ME OFF. The professor we had for Trusts and Estates was even worse. He was unable to get his textbook published, so he had the Law School duplicate copies of his cut and pasted manuscript and we had to buy this “textbook” for this course.

When you are one of the second year Law Review students (translation: drudge) you had the opportunity to do the most mind-numbingly boring task ever concocted by guilty man: cite-checking. A moment for explanation. If you have ever seen any legal writing, you will note that the footnotes, in smaller type, often take up more of the page than the text. Footnotes seem to be the sine qua non of Law Review writing and everything you mention had better be cited to something in some way. So, there you are, crawling around the dusty shelves of the library, checking every single footnoted source from some third-year law student’s case note to make sure that what he or she has cited actually says what they claim. That was a charming weekend.

Meanwhile, there I am working on my own case note (on and Apple II+ computer with a special internal connection that allowed me to use the Apple II word processing program). I’ll be the first to admit that the first couple of drafts were not good and needed a good bit of re-writing. Somewhere around the fifth re-write, when I realized that my charming young editor was reversing certain sections every time I submitted the draft, she and I had a discussion. It turned into a rather heated discussion until I proved my point with copies of all five drafts. She finally admitted that she was trying to get me to slow down. I really could not understand why. Then I found out.

To be continued….