Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

Sometime in the fall of 2010, I dropped a stack of first-year law books onto a scale, then fetched the second armload and dropped it on there too. The idea was to calculate somehow the degree and duration of pressure the bad disk in my neck could withstand before it burst. But I’m no good at math, and so I bargained with the disk instead. Three years, I told it. That’s what I need from you.

Thirty-three months later, the disk is intact and so am I, more or less, even if the gaping breaches in the gray matter are fully exposed, and virtually everything I thought to be true is cast into doubt. But that’s law school.

Prolonged stretches of boredom punctuated by seizures of panic that a single misstep might cause the whole house of cards to collapse. That’s law school. A vague sense that this might just be a colossal scam, that there may never be adequate return to wipe out unspeakable debt and make the whole enterprise a wash. That’s law school. Rare bonds of friendship, the kind common among old campaigners who exist to assure one another that all perception is skewed in here, after all, and that we will live to tell about this. Maybe we’ll even laugh about it. That’s law school, too.

Law school is a long moment of desperation from which you might emerge whole in spite of your own self-sabotaging efforts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Law school is wounded ego soothed now and then with a thin balm of success. Law school is arrogance in the rightness of your position, inflated in direct proportion to the hard-won realization that there is no black and white and that sometimes your hubris is all you have.

Law school is furious vicissitudes of judgment in which you conclude on an alternating basis that this was either the best or the worst thing you ever did. Law school also is the prelude to what, by all accounts, is The Worst Summer of Your Life. I have had more summers than some, and the coming weeks will tell whether the one spent preparing for the bar exam eclipses the others that were less than perfect.

I can contemplate all that tomorrow. Because I get what passes for a sheepskin until the real thing is in my hands, today can be one of the days on which law school was the best thing I did. Whatever it turns out to be, it’s all right. Trust me. I’m a juris doctor.

Wash Teeth, if any, and Draw Milan

January, even a good January, can be merciless. January pokes at the sediment until it finds the motionless mass that is you, rousts you out off the ocean floor and drags you wincing back to the surface. January went and did it again, pulled me and my third-year colleagues back for the second half of what conventional law-school wisdom holds is the year that bores you to death.

I am less bored with law school than inured to its attention-seeking whine. A 3L has things to do.  Time is elusive and patience is thin. There are bar applications and job applications, forms and photographs and all manner of mysterious fee, and yet law school whimpers for its due. We are more done with law school than it is done with us, but the feeding tube is out and the morphine drip is in.

Whatever ground is left to cover, I am changed in fundamental ways. I catch an old Twilight Zone, the one set in a gentlemen’s club at a time when that meant cigar-chewing men in book-lined dens and overstuffed leather. An old colonel annoyed by a young man’s incessant chatter promises him a half-million dollars if he will refrain from speaking a word for a solid year. Time was, I would have marveled at the masterful storytelling both for its own sake and for what it said about human nature and desperation and the pull of the dark impulse. Today, I switch off the set thinking breach of unilateral contract and shake my head at the detrimental reliance at the heart of the whole affair. This is where law school bows out and the world takes over. We’re inexperienced as hell and equipped with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but there are things we won’t know until our boots are on the ground. We know, for example, that the Uniform Commercial Code was authored by the devil himself, but the full depravity of it is a mystery until then.

Those of us who suffer from competing streaks of perfectionism and indecision know that when the twin traits intersect they can produce a deadly philosophy that says until it can be done perfectly, it cannot be done at all. I resolve to improve, and begin to experiment with lists. I turn to the Internet for inspiration, the way one does, and run across two lists of interest. One is a 1490 to-do list culled from a small leather notebook purportedly carried by Leonardo da Vinci: “[Discover] the measurement of the Castello,” “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.” “Draw Milan.” The other is a 33-item list of New Year’s resolutions compiled by Woody Guthrie in 1942: “Wash teeth if any.” “Help win war – beat fascism.” “Love everybody.” “Dream good.”

My list reflects neither the erudite aspirations of Leonardo da Vinci nor the sweet humanity of Woody Guthrie. For 30 days or more, it was a series of tedious tasks capable of distillation into just one: gather up the shreds of paper that document your existence on earth, shove the whole of your life into a nine-by-twelve envelope and dispatch it to an omniscient force empowered to assess the suitability of, if not you, then at least the paper you, for the practice of law. Now that my bar application is submitted, however, I have renewed hope for this list thing. With the bitterness of January gone and the number of weeks in this final semester diminished by four, the list could channel chaos and uncertainty into something that resembles order. If nothing else, the list can be a way of re-centering oneself. The things we deem important say a lot about who we are. I will start the Great 3L List with borrowed ideas that constitute something of a Woody-Leonardo hybrid: Study hard. Be kind to people and animals. Live with integrity. Dream good.

If you’re seized by third-year apathy, remind yourself that it’s only law school talking. Should you reach the point where you no longer care, tell yourself it means you’re good and ready to move on. Make yourself a list. While you’re doing that, I’ll be washing my teeth and drawing Milan.

Viewed in the Light Most Favorable

I don’t need a calendar. I know the season, more or less, from the undefined ache that flares along my jaw line in the weeks leading up to final exams. It must be November, for that’s when I curse myself for taking on too much, for denying my own limitations lest someone else tell me what they are. In another week, I’ll be convinced that my grasp of the law is far too tenuous to survive any sort of scrutiny. But I’ll still be a third-year law student, which means I’ll be operating on the sweet fumes of apathy and resignation. I’ll find solace in the common third-year notion that if law school were going to break me it would have done so by now, character inquiries and bar examinations notwithstanding. My attention will have turned to real-world concerns, like whether there’s a real-world job trading real-world currency for a student-loan slave in an economy that’s in the toilet. I don’t require excess, but I require enough.

I’m fresh off one of my semi-annual tirades on postal abbreviations when I consider my own tendency to escape the overwhelming big picture by focusing on detail. To understand that, you need to understand that third year can be a lonely enterprise. You scan your classroom and encounter a sea of unfamiliar faces. You never know whether you’re the only one who has days of going through the motions and nights when the whole heaving continent closes in. In those moments, lost in that broad gray landscape that separates the truth from a lie, you retreat to those things you know to be true. And one of the things I know to be true is that big honking two-letter acronyms may facilitate the delivery of mail, but don’t do a thing for the flow of a sentence. The old professor who said never yield to the U.S. Post Office on that score also said never, under any circumstances, to use the word “enhance.” And I never have. But law school has a way of eroding even the brightest of your bright-line rules. My speech today is peppered with double negatives and twisted phrasing. Hey, I could venture, that protrusion in the middle of your face is not inconsistent with a breathing apparatus.

I know I digress. It’s not about the odd neuroses that defined us before law school, or the new ones that have supplanted them. It’s about a vague craving for certainty and the rambling thoughts that occur to you when you understand there’s no such thing. We should go for a drink sometime, Two-Thousand-Nine Sharon and I. We could talk about this law-school thing and linger for a time over the prospect. She could tell me the way she thinks it will be, and I could tell her the way it is. Knowledge is power, she would say. Contracts are hard, I would counter. And on it would go like that until she said something trite like it’s all in the attitude, and I would punch her right in her breathing apparatus. And then I would feel badly, because I would know she is right. I would help her to her feet, tell her to gather her senses, and get herself to law school. View it in the light most favorable to you, I might say in my newfound lawyerly nomenclature. You will mostly love it, I would say. There will be days you will hate loving it, but you will love it nonetheless. Uncertainty takes care of itself.

            Two-Thousand-Twelve Sharon and her classmates are thumbing through a stack of paper handouts and listening to a bar-admissions panel remind us that we need not only pass the bar exam, but be adjudged of fit character to practice law. We’ve heard this numerous times and, without fail, we leave the forum convinced that every past misdeed is the one that will doom us. Every glass of spilled milk is the one that renders the past three years moot and precludes our entry into the ranks. Only when we’re good and paralyzed are we assured that our failings will be viewed in the light most favorable to us. Experience does, after all, weave itself into the tapestry that makes us who we are.

I could go on about the bar exam itself, its essays and its multiple-choice questions crafted with an intent to deceive, but there will time to ponder all that. I have final exams to study for, and the Real Housewives of Wherever to distract me from time to time. Two-Thousand-Twelve Sharon is still a third-year law student, and her nerve center has restored itself to a default setting of basic function: Eat. Sleep. Think about postal abbreviations. Don’t fight her on this. She’s a volatile third-year law student, equal parts trepidation and bravado, and that’s all the stress she needs.

The Year of Living Arrogantly

Suppose you have a mannequin in your trunk, she begins. Say it’s a nude, a male, and say you can’t close the lid without you tie it down with twine, and so you’re driving down the road with mannequin privates showing out your trunk. Can you get arrested for that?

Having spent the summer clerking for a criminal-defense attorney, I know that when the question is whether you can get arrested, the answer is always yes. But I also know there are times when it pays to be selective in one’s inquiries. And so I opted for the middle ground, responding with some vague speculation about whether mannequins are patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community and following it up with the disclaimer that trills as easily off the tongue as name and address: Can’t give legal advice.

I dismissed the exchange shortly after it occurred midway through the summer because I hadn’t yet entered the profound existentialist funk that generally ushers one into the third year of law school. But then I started to wonder whether the skill it takes to answer that question and myriad others like it is the skill I’ve been working to master. It was a momentary sense of uneasiness coupled with the realization that that caveat about not being qualified to give legal advice, a hallmark of professional responsibility among law students, does not hold water forever. I don’t know why I thought I should document my symptoms, but I tore a sheet of paper from a legal pad. Sluggish, I wrote. Suffer from apathy of unknown origin. I consulted an attorney I know, who diagnosed me with an acute case of third-year malaise. Take two milligrams of suck it up and don’t call me in the morning.

It’s the year that bores you to death, they say, that final year of law school when you grow numb and disgusted with the whole affair and prickly at the suggestion that all those dire reports of anemic job markets and inflated placement statistics and visions of student-loan slavery might just have some relevance to your life. By all accounts, it’s the year we phone it in, the year we’re entitled to take offense when our names are called in class, turn to some second year and say take this one won’t you, and, while you’re at it, make me a sandwich.

But that’s not the whole of it. This is also the year we presumably experience a renewed sense of forward momentum fueled by a reuptake of oxygen into bloodstream and brain. It’s the year we load up our plates with last call for opportunity in the event we don’t eat again. The mandatory sessions on managing stress and coping with increased predisposition to alcoholism are behind us, and the only things standing between us and a license to practice law are two sets of finals and a little detail I like to call the bar exam. Humility will have its day, but these are heady times.

And so we’ll shrug off the lethargy for a while longer and indulge ourselves another year in a law-school cocoon that is alternately terrifying and safe. Should your affairs grow complicated in another 14 months or so, look us up. With any luck, we’ll be qualified to dispense legal advice.

Nancy and Them

We met them in the summer of 2010, which was either a day or a decade ago. It’s hard to say when you live in that strange time zone peculiar to law school and the armed forces, a suspended reality in which connections coalesce and dissolve at the mercy of intense temporary assignments.

They had survived that intimidating first year of law school and thus seemed infinitely wise. By and large, they still do. Tonight’s fresh crop of graduates from the Brandeis School of Law will always be a year farther down the road than we are and hence a shade more seasoned. This is significant even though, in real time, a year is no time at all. In this context, where the not-so-subtle pressure of indoctrination triggers seismic shifts in perspective within a matter of weeks, a year is all the difference and then some. In time, we would come to understand that their secrets were not so much secrets as time-tested strategies handed down through generations of law-school culture as surely as that threadbare maxim that the first year of law school scares you to death, the second works you to death and the third bores you to death.

And so we who were scared to death latched onto their coattails, hoping to learn from their missteps lest we make them our own, and adapting their recipes for success to fit our own ingredients. We listened to their assessments of this professor’s penchant for toying with first years and that one’s predilection for brain-twisting fact patterns on final exams. We tracked their progress for harbingers of what was to come. Now they’re moving out to study for the bar and pound the pavement for jobs, and we newly minted third years are moving in. I’m told each year’s crop of students bears its own unique stain. This newly graduated class -- or at least those members of it that I know well – possesses varying degrees of brilliance, generosity and self-deprecating humor, which is just the way I like my mentors, generation gap or no.

Law school threatens to break you down at startling intervals. If you’re as lucky as we were, someone with a whole two semesters more under his or her belt will come along to reassure you that it’s not as bad as you think it is, that you are not in your right mind and that all that doomsaying is just law school doing what law school does. I made a mess of class actions, I lamented.  I totally tanked the Erie Doctrine last year, one of them shrugged.

I wonder what becomes of us now that we no longer share the day-to-dayness of dwelling in the law-school foxhole. Are the new graduates so finished with law school that they are also finished with us, along with our relentless one-more-year chatter? Or are we done with them first, smug in our new status as the most battle-scarred students in the house? My hope is that neither is true, that those two overlapping years somehow cemented a relationship or two and that we will reconvene periodically to show off our law-school scars and bore the daylights out of anyone and everyone who wasn’t there.

Congratulations, boys and girls. If nothing else, we’ll see you in court.

The Paper

I called it Ayatollah for a day or two, and then abandoned the urge to give it a name at all for want of one that reflected its truly sinister nature. It was just as well, as a name would have granted the thing an unearned voice apart from my own and a power with which it might have seized even greater control of my life. After that, I just called it The Paper.

The Paper is a treatise on an obscure and all but doomed provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have offered cheap long-term care insurance to people who might eventually have used the money to stay at home and delay the need for an expensive government-funded bed in a nursing home. More importantly for my purposes as a law student, it represents an opportunity to fulfill my upper-division writing requirement.  It has also robbed me of my even temper, temporarily displacing my congenial disposition with an uncharacteristic surliness.

As a houseguest, The Paper was not altogether intrusive in the beginning. It slept a lot. Occasionally, it would stir and rise up blinking with a certain listless hunger, but then it would curl back onto itself and resettle into a gray mass with its face against the wall. In three weeks, though, it started to smell. In four, it turned on me in earnest. I would come home to find it had eaten my food, rummaged through my closets and rearranged my furniture.

 I procrastinated, and then I tried to bargain with it. When that didn’t work, I procrastinated some more. And then I went back and tried to kill it with kindness. But it had these antennae that were sensitive to fear. It would curl a lip up over its fangs and grin, knowing that each day it was gathering a strength and intelligence that outmatched my own. At night, I would chain it to the kitchen table. It would chew through its restraints and wake me with a boot on my throat.

As legal discourse goes, 26 pages (33 if you count endnotes, and why wouldn’t you?) is nothing. But it’s not the kind of writing where you invent people out of whole cloth and leave them to spin out their destinies on the page, nor is it the rough draft of history that constitutes a news story. Here, there is no truth without accuracy, and close enough is not nearly close enough. The endnotes alone demand a precision of format that would challenge a watchmaker. In the end, there is nothing to do but to accept the fact that it must be done. You wade in and wrestle back the tentacles until only one of you is standing.

I admit I am given to hyperbole. I understood I might have employed an unwarranted degree of melodrama when people with whom I have little more than a nodding elevator acquaintance in the building where I work started to inquire as to how The Paper was going. That can mean only one thing. At some point, in a desperate moment that didn’t even commit itself to memory, I have pinned a virtual stranger to an elevator wall and articulated the injustices of law school.  I decided to keep it closer to home. I took to texting a friend who was embroiled in her own writing project. We exchanged progress reports several times a day, making vague promises to pop corks on fine champagne in the event we managed to meet on the other side of our papers.

It all reminded me of a past life cobbling cryptic notes into what used to be described as a magazine-length piece and the angst that would always accompany the process. The memory dates to a time before law school, if there really was such a time, peopled with journalistic ghosts who still occupy the fringes of my life, but whose disengagement from all things law-related renders them momentarily irrelevant. My habit when I sat down to write was to stare at the blinking cursor for a time, and then turn to the colleague who occupied the desk just to the left of mine and plaintively call his name. “Let me guess,” he would mutter with a mouthful of bologna sandwich. “This is the one that’s going to kill you.”

As it turned out, this was not the one that would kill me. The day has come, as it always does, when you fling open the windows, wave a little sage around the room, breathe in the sunshine and find that all is well again. The Paper is fully formed, or as fully formed as it is likely to be, ready to go forth and either stand or fall on its own merits. For now, it lies in the hands of the professor and the three classmates he assigned to critique it. For all I know, they are at this moment yanking down its pants and stuffing it into a locker. After the way The Paper treated me, I am not even sure I will leap to its defense. That’s what I call justice.

Defending Those People and Sleeping at Night

I’ve seen my share of courthouses and haven’t walked into one yet that didn’t smell of a complex blend of antiseptic and morning breath and standard-issue misery. Even the new ones acquire an odor that seeps into the pores of that low-bid government tile and is one of the peculiarities of practicing law that they can’t recreate in law school. A trip to one courthouse is more or less a trip to them all, all places where lawyers stride in and out of conference rooms and clients shamble aimlessly at their heels and jurors loiter in hallways checking their watches.

I know this by virtue of a previous incarnation as a journalist, but mostly I know it because I am a second-year law student with one foot in the classroom and the other in the courtroom, where I carry the coat of a criminal-defense lawyer and soak up the subtleties I always missed from my place in the cheap seats. It’s what I do with some 20 hours a week not spent enumerating the advantages of a revocable trust or parsing the intricacies of healthcare reform. If you’re a law student, regardless of where your proclivity lies, the criminal-justice system is not a bad window on how all this academia works on the ground. As fields of expertise go, it is the law the most closely situated to the heartbeat and it is also the law that most closely resembles a street-corner shell game. Or at least that’s the way it looks from my vantage point, unjaded by years of dreary deal cutting and more than a little prone to outrage. People who will need fulltime work in the not-so-distant future should be wary of carving out niches, but I do like it when the stakes and the adrenaline are high, and my limited exposure to criminal law affords me at least that much.

I’m idly running all this through my head as my boss and I pull onto the interstate and head for some county courthouse where he is to try a DUI case and I am to observe. He thinks it will be good experience for me. Now the law is crafted to cover all contingencies, and generally does until some aberrant set of circumstances demands it be tweaked or scaled back, broadened or honed to a finer point. But there are contingencies from which no artful language can save you and for which the legislature is of little use. These are the stalled engines and the vomiting toddlers and, in our case, the expert witness clutching his chest on an emergency-room stretcher an hour prior to trial. The lawyer hangs up the phone and rethinks his strategy aloud. There is reason to believe the court will not take kindly to a continuance and so the defense must prepare to go forward, witness or no. If our client has followed direction, he is waiting hat in hand to have his day in court. I can see the gears turning in that lawyerly head as he articulates his stance, and then takes up the government’s racket and nimbly returns his own serve. Jesus, I ask him, how did that even occur to you? Just thinking the way they think, he shrugs.

As a person accustomed to taking two adverse positions and carving some truth out of the middle, I have had to work at this notion of aligning myself with one side or the other, using strategy to accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives, whatever they may be. It’s important to know the other side so well that you could turn on a dime and argue their wrongheaded, unfounded position for them if you had to. It’s a technique I have the luxury of honing in the undistracted solace of the law library or at my kitchen table. To watch it done behind the eight ball in rush-hour traffic and against a ticking clock is to marvel at the skill of, say, an accomplished skater, when you’re still clinging to the rails.

That’s when it occurs to me that, at some point in your second year of law school, there is a subtle shift in the dynamic between the law-clerk you who is dispatched to the courthouse to fetch this or file that, and the would-be lawyer you, who is not a lawyer at all and who nonetheless has developed a sort of plucky hubris that says you get the idea and can take it from here, thank you very much. But this is the moment for which the law has been biding its time, the moment in which it gets to remind you that you don’t know one damned thing about one damned thing.

I’m learning, though. I’m learning the fine distinction between innocent and not guilty. A person who is not guilty is perhaps not innocent in the traditional sense of the word, but is culpable in a lesser way or for a different lapse in judgment than the government would maintain. A criminal-defense attorney is not always in a position to defend his client’s actions, but he has to defend his rights. It’s a maudlin sentiment more fitting for the pageant runway than for life in general, but a sovereign that wants to put a person in jail should at least be required to prove its case. And society deserves as much protection from overreaching prosecutors wielding a machete where a scalpel would do as it does from its own criminals.

We get to the courthouse and he explains to the client that there might or might not be a trial, but that he is ready nonetheless. As it turns out, though, the universe craves balance. A prosecution witness is sidelined as well, and the judge herself is hospitalized with some kind of swollen eyes. A stand-in judge tells us to come back another day. My boss laments the wasted trip. He tells me it’s always a victory when your client walks out of the courthouse with untethered wrists, but it’s hard to settle for a rained-out game when you knew you had a home run in you. I have not gotten to see a trial, but, just as he predicted, it has been good experience.

The law may be black and white at the margins, but is altogether gray in the vast landscape in between. And if you don’t buy into that theory, just give it time. Before law school is through with me, I’ll be crawling up into your head and arguing with myself.

Mile 13

I have a sister who runs, and I don’t mean casual pre-breakfast jogs to stimulate the circulation. I mean the self-flagellating, carb-loading, whey-measuring, cross-training, run-til-you-puke-because-it-feels-so-good sort of running that to me is symptomatic of a personality disorder. She has the musculature of a cheetah and the discipline of a monk and, I have long suspected, a seamless panel in her torso that conceals only circuitry and wire. It’s a makeup that serves one well in a number of contexts, and I consider it now because a colleague has repeated the worn maxim that law school is a marathon and not a sprint. The best marathoners are built for the long haul and the slow burn. We second years have covered enough ground by now to work a permanent shift in the disposition, and yet there’s as much distance ahead as there is behind, and that’s if you discount one post-graduation mean season in which life consists solely of preparation for the bar exam and another on the ropes waiting for the results.

If that smacks of negativism, it’s only because a law student doesn’t feel the magic every day, and the days spent reanimating the brain after those idle Christmas weeks are among the least magical of them all. We’ve shown up for our first spring classes, albeit with bed heads and sleep in the corners of our eyes. Back, as Bob Dylan once put it, but not back all the way. I find that, in my zeal to upturn the overfilled plate of the fall semester, I have gotten too far out of my head. I neglected to pace myself as well as I might have last term, and, in my relief to be done with it, have cast my splintered interests too far afield. Reining them back into focus requires some muscle. Still, that vague sense of stolen time from a year ago is gone, and in its place is a happy resignation. Law school is the needle planted in my vein, and all that reasonable double-speak the fluid dripping from an unsightly pouch that swings from a pole and trails me wherever I go. I no longer bargain with law school over lost time or the propriety of its demands, and I’m surprisingly good with that.

I am good with it even when my head writes checks that my body can’t cash and I lose sleep over which commitment can best weather the short shrift. I’m OK with it even when I read another version of that perennial trade-journal story that says anyone smart enough to get into law school should be smart enough not to go. I’m OK with it because I can make the black and white arguments, but to navigate the gray space where the lion’s share of the law lives requires more than a surface commitment. I’m OK with it because the dogged nature of any given challenge more or less corresponds to the reward of knocking it down.

For those of us who tend to think of every moment as a weigh station on the road to something else, who are forever chasing some nebulous point on the horizon where all is well and we’re content to maintain the status quo, there’s nonetheless a satisfaction in conquering the here and now. My sister and her circle of running enthusiasts explain it this way: when the world serves up an amorphous, indefinable pain, long-distance exertion lends it a tangible dimension, something it’s possible to vanquish and overcome. I relate to that in the sense that I can do an hour on the treadmill if there’s a glass of pinot noir in the offing, but it makes more sense in law-school terms. The more intense the chase, the sweeter the victory tastes. And, even though humbling moments abound and straight answers are scarce, there are triumphs along the way. Last semester alone, I discovered a penchant for the courtroom and drafted a brief I like to think was instrumental in persuading a judge to rule the way my boss wanted her to. And, in all that time, I wished ill to be visited upon only one professor, and it was only fleetingly and only that one time, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even mean it.

By all accounts, the genuine fatigue in a 26-mile marathon sets in around mile 20. That’s when they say you have to dig deeply for something you’re not even sure is there, the point at which you settle into a crippled saunter that might as well be a walk. Given that, mile 13 is not an altogether bad place to be, and another 13 is hardly anything at all. I can already taste the pinot noir.

Purple Daze

For some two weeks now, I’ve been suspended in the last surreal phase of the emotional lockdown that characterizes final law-school exam season. That means I shove my feet into faded-blue terrycloth slippers and pull on what is now known as my finals sweater, a bright purple rectangle of chenille fabric constructed for utilitarian purposes with no nod to aesthetics at all. I can’t remember how it came into my possession, but it’s the kind of sweater people pad around in when they’re sick, a comforting, affirmative statement that whatever self-consciousness you might once have had is long dissipated, and it perfectly suited for the study of law.

The prolonged wearing of the purple sweater is proof that I have entered the final throes of final exams. I know, because I’ve been here twice before, and the progression goes like this: three or four weeks prior to the first exam, the internal momentum that’s been building all semester reaches critical mass and the stress manifests itself in some physical way, typically a toothache or a twitch at the corner of the eye. What follows is an intensified, vaguely agitated phase in which I alternately pace the kitchen floor and hover in the glow of my laptop over 12 weeks of cryptic class notes. It is shortly after this that I notify my non-lawyerly friends that I will be incommunicado until further notice and that I will make it all up to them in December (or May, as the case may be). This is the phase where I begin to dream terrible dreams of what should become of my grades in the event my toothache should devolve into abscess or I am befallen by some other misfortune or, for example, lose my sense of direction and become incapable of locating the law school again.

This, too, is when I begin to find the notes. We second-year students have endured two exam seasons already, and we’ve learned to recognize certain communal symptoms, principally the unshaven, myopic focus interrupted on occasion by the detached exchange and the uninhabited gaze. Aside from that, though, each of us bears his own peculiar indicia of pressure paired with unique coping mechanisms, and the writing of notes to myself is evidence of mine. I find myself writing them with increasing frequency since I started law school. Leather-bound planners, smart-phone calendars and beeping digital to-do lists are all for show. The real story of my wildly fluctuating emotional temperature is told in a scattered collection of sticky notes with lint where the adhesive used to be. I pull on a coat I haven’t worn since last winter, shove my hand into the pocket and draw out an expired coupon or the torn corner of an oil-change receipt bearing words that must have meant something at the time I reduced them to writing. Positive energy, one might say. Find out what this is, demands another, with a bold arrow pointing to a faded pencil sketch of what could be anything from a formula for calculating punitive damages to a drawing of some insect I spied on the front step. Perhaps I fear all the new information going in will cause some of the old to slip out, that the firmly rooted hearsay exception now firmly rooted in my brain will dislodge some less-consequential fact, like, say, the password to my iTunes account. Perhaps I fear that crumbling in the gray matter that will put me on the receiving end of the disconnected look I’ve given to certain members of my family, on the side where the strain of undiagnosed mental illness tends to run. I can’t be sure. Self-analysis is a luxury a law student can ill afford.

Finals season can work on you and work on you like that if you let it, until you finally give in and resort to living in the unlaundered purple sweater with the toothpaste smear on the shoulder and console yourself with the knowledge that there are many, many ways of making it in this world that do not involve the practice of law.

I’ve yet to take a law-school exam in which I didn’t pause about 100 minutes in and flirt with the idea of crushing the thing under the toe of my shoe, packing up my belongings and strolling into the sunlight, leaving the law to wend its own way out of whatever hypothetical gridlock our professor has invented. Invariably, I dismiss the thought and soldier on. We all do. For all their emotional brutality, exams roll around infrequently enough for the pain to subside and for you to think, after another season on the ropes, you might just have another one in you.

I am now down to one – Evidence – or, as I will be calling it until 9 p.m. Monday, The Beast. This weekend, I will gin up the stamina to pull on the purple sweater once more, for I am on the ropes, but I believe I have another one in me. Hand me a paper napkin, so I can make a note of it. Then call a cab, hand the note to the driver and tell him to drop me off in mid-December.

Mock Trial is Your Life

My co-counsel hasn’t slept in five days and I haven’t showered in two. I glance around the room and conclude that no one has shaved in a week or more. My adversary glides toward the witness box, evidentiary rules tucked like a neat row of arrows in a quiver at his hip. I object. I strenuously object. But he is nonplussed. In a fluid motion, he draws Rule 801(c)(1)(d) from its sheath, the screaming arrow flies and my objection rattles in neatly split halves to the courtroom floor. Like that 1970s sitcom disc jockey whose reflexes only grew keener as he ingested more alcohol, my opponent’s precision is heightened when he is unencumbered by a need for sleep.

“From now until the second week in November,” our coach has announced with gravity, “mock trial is your life.” I quickly do the calculations in my head. If mock trial is to have my life, I must first barter it back from the splintered interests to which I’ve mortgaged it already.

It’s worth noting here that second-year law students lose a sizeable share of their sympathy stock. As demanding as the first year is, it’s all standard-issue stuff. Virtually every moment is accounted for, but every activity is required, mandatory, non-optional, de rigueur. There’s no way short of retreat to lessen your burden. After that, though, your wounds are largely self-inflicted, and the patience of those who once wished you well can begin to grow thin. But law-school resume builders appeal to that competitive streak that flares on some days and lies dormant on others and more or less defines us all. Perhaps you don’t need this thing or that, but you’re compelled to chase it nonetheless, for to do otherwise is to acknowledge limits, a thing law students are loath to do. We don’t like to lose, either, and that brings me back to the Intrastate Mock Trial Competition.           

I’ve tried out for the team with the partial aim of polishing my courtroom presence. Effective litigation is more than having good law and a modicum of truth on your side. It’s the casual gesture that is not casual at all. It’s the pregnant pause scripted to appear unscripted. It’s a process of animation, a thousand calibrated parts disguised as an extemporaneous whole. I watch my more-experienced teammates and I envy the controlled delivery of one and the dramatic choreography of another. If it isn’t Atticus Finch shooting arrows at the heart of your argument, it’s Jack McCoy indignant at this affront to justice. I lull myself into thinking that what looks easy in the hands of a master will be easy for me as well. Points marshal themselves into such seamless narratives in my head, and yet they are flawed in the execution. I deliver my opening statement and am reminded that I’m afflicted with nasal tonality and uneven breath. Curse these hollers and the dialectal havoc they wreak.

Weeks have passed since the eight of us received our mock-trial-is-your-life mandate, and there is no overstating the truth. Classes, clerkships, research, ancillary obligation and all manner of physical and emotional need have been little more than distractions pulling our attention from The Case. Even an early final exam and, for some of us, a first try at the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam were only temporary sojourns from our new, all-too-real homes in imaginary Marshall City in the sovereign state of Marshall. We travel to Lexington for the competition this weekend, and I suppose we’ll find out who’s guilty and who’s not. Win or lose, I’ll post it to the asset column. If law school has taught me anything, it is that any argument asserted with authority is a potential winner, and that my capacity for shamelessness is greater than I ever imagined.

No River in Egypt

“How’s law school?” she chirps into the phone.

“Not bad,” I murmur.

What my friend doesn’t know is that I have partaken of too much law again and awakened with a throbbing head full of hearsay. The sun is still low on the horizon, but I’ve been up for hours already, gulping French Roast and struggling to recapture the flow of a judicial opinion that has unfurled with seamless lucidity in my sleep and is now so much nonsense in the morning fog.

I once confined these overindulgences to certain nights of the week in the name of maintaining balance, but the second-year slate of classes and clerking and ancillary obligation has run routines more disciplined than mine right off the rail. The odd thing is that, despite all the dense reading and the circular logic and the resume peddling and the schedule with the 30-hour appetite and the 24-hour budget and the unspoken mandate to conduct oneself like a lawyer, whatever that means, law school is, by and large, just as I told my friend: not bad at all.

Veteran accounts of the first-year experience are largely in sync: transitions of volume and pace, and adjustment to the notion that a law-school project is never truly finished, only tamped down to a smolder, for there is always a smaller nesting box to open and a tangential path to explore, all conducted against a background hum of fear that, despite your best effort, you will turn out to be more chaff than wheat.

But year two is the year of the individual, the year of tailoring the experience to fit one’s own needs. Yes to this project, no to that one, try out for this team, let that one go, careful, now, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. It’s a convenient system for those who know where they’re going, and mildly disturbing for those looking to cut their suits to fit the cloth of whatever employer comes down the pike. This is also the point at which you let down your guard long enough to see that your colleagues have let theirs down, too – if indeed they ever had them up – and are transforming from fellow boots into fledgling counselors with their own agendas and idiosyncrasies, their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses. I’m of a mind that there will be a seat for most all of us at the table, for virtually every human endeavor is, at some point, a legal one.

Law school can be a place where wildly divergent worldviews find common ground, and the kind of lawyers we will be depends in some measure upon character bent and whatever cross-section of the populace we represent. You have your showy blowhards, your wise observers, your peacocks and your Pied Pipers, your unassuming scholars, your chameleons, your hybrids, and so on. On occasion, you have your petty flamethrowers whose incendiary rhetoric says more about a desperate desire for relevance than some vile and isolated window on the culture. But this is law school, no field of shrinking violets, and those rare shows of bigotry rarely go unchallenged, even where the speech is so pedestrian, so utterly devoid of fact that swatting it down is like shooting a gnat with an elephant gun. Say your peace and cut your path far and wide from the source. That sort of thing tends to foul its nest all by itself, generally sooner rather than later.

The point is that the law is another of those occupations in which the line between what you do and who you are is blurred at best. It’s a phenomenon readily apparent to those who have watched us go from well-rounded conversationalists to insufferable one-trick ponies. It starts with the casual exchange over the uncharacteristic Scalia dissent and escalates until there you are, at 3 in the morning, scrolling for a fix on scotusblog.com. You try to keep it social and convince yourself you can, until legalese is the only arrow left in the quiver of your vocabulary. The price of curry powder at Kroger is shocking to the conscience. The take-a-number, take-a-seat system at the DMV is arbitrary and capricious. It goes on and on like that, until the civilians in our lives shrink to the sidelines and seek solace in one another’s company while we votaries of the law crave our own one-dimensional kind.

There are days when I think an intervention is in order. The trouble is that the people with whom I spend most waking moments are as much in need of one as I am. There has to be a 12-step program at the end of all this, with higher powers to acknowledge and some sort of amends to make. But all of that comes, if at all, after the bar exam, which is out there gathering force like a baby hurricane in the Atlantic.

One of my professors suggested recently that J.D. candidates would righty undergo four years of full-time study rather than three. “There is just,” he says, “so much law.” There is so much of it and yet, increasingly, we find there is never enough. We still think we can put it down whenever we want. And we still think denial is a river in Egypt.

All the Shiny Things.

I’ve read a lengthy Supreme Court decision that includes two concurrences and a dissent when I glance back at some notes I have penciled into the margin.

“He can’t be serious,” I have written, drawing a bracket around the comment and bisecting it with a bold arrow that encroaches onto the words of Clarence Thomas, who thinks a state should be free to make its own rules (or not) when it comes to things like guns in schools and animal cruelty. If you’re of a mind, then, to grab a puppy by its hind legs and fling it under the wheels of a tractor-trailer, better to be in Mississippi and risk a $10 fine and 100 days in jail than to face a Colorado felony.

I stand by the sentiment, but I’m startled at the violent nature of my own hypothetical. Such thoughts do not occur naturally to me. But all the reading has given me a green-apple bellyache that tampers with the temperament.  I dwell on it for only a moment, because it has randomly occurred to me that I’ve never been able to parse the distinction between an alligator and a crocodile. Best put aside the puppy and consult Wikipedia.

I think about law school and how it does roll on with a fullness that rises in the throat in a way that can mimic the sensation of drowning. Suddenly, I’m gripped with a morbid curiosity as to the mechanics of drowning. In just what order do the organs shut down and is it true that the last moments are not unpleasant at all? Google only knows.

This bent to distraction is not uncommon among second-year law students. First-year assignments are so voluminous and one’s grasp of the art so rudimentary that there develops a hyper-vigilance against what could otherwise become a fatal flaw. But we are faster now, better at distilling our cases down to their vital components, and with that comes a slight loosening of the reins that must nonetheless be kept in check, lest the stamina wane and the once-rapid pulse slow to a belabored thump.

Generally, the biggest distraction in law school is law school itself. That is to say, one’s laser focus on dissecting the hearsay rule and its myriad exceptions is prone to the intrusion of a nagging sense that there is a missed deadline lying undiscovered, a research project in an upturned hourglass drained of its last grain of sand, a whole body of work potentially lost to an undefined but ticking statute of limitations. By and large, these are the necessary and useful distractions. The danger lies in the trivial pursuit, the pull of the intellect toward what is known in some circles as “shiny-object syndrome.” It’s the trail of useless knowledge that begins with the Washington Post link on the Facebook page and ends with a rundown of Vladimir Putin’s workout routine. If it’s not undue interest in the dust bunny behind the fridge, it’s whatever happened to the Season 1 Project Runway winner.

Should you find yourself in such a circumstance, it’s best to gin up a little of that first-year discipline. When the brain repels its steady diet of evidentiary rules and dense constitutional text, allow it to settle and devote the interim to identifying and improving your weaknesses. It may be law-school anathema to admit it, but we all have them. My verbal sparring, for example, needs work. I like to think I’m better on my feet than I was that Saturday in spring when we delivered the tremulous oral arguments that are a first-year rite of passage. The past 12 months notwithstanding, I’m still prone to the occasional stammer, to leap great synapses of logic and unleash a string of disjointed words in the hope they will coalesce on their own steam. Reading and arguing are the twin components of law school, and so there is no shortage of opportunity to practice. The idea is that you will be trained to indulge opposing viewpoints and become facile in your responses to those who would throw you off your game. In an occupation that demands frequent shape shifting, there is always another hand raised, another head shaking, a constipated grimace accompanied by an “I disagree,” and suddenly you’re in danger of folding like a two-dollar lawn chair. Sometimes I disagree with myself, sometimes in the same inner exchange. No matter. Symptoms of schizophrenia in one setting constitute self-assuredness in another. This, too, must be checked, however, as the swollen law-school ego invites puncture and the cocksure strut is the harbinger of death.

By the time you reason through it all and strike your own delicate balance, it will be time to start reading again. Focus because you must, even though it isn’t always easy. There are so many shiny things.

As Your Attorney, I Must Advise You.

“Negotiable Instruments and Secured Transactions,” he said, drawing bold red circles on my copy of the spring-semester course listings. “You need both. But do not, under any circumstances, take them in the same semester.” The attorney who gave me this advice paused for effect and drew his bifocals to the end of his nose. “You will die.”   Because he said it with the gravity of a pharmacist warning against a lethal cocktail of drugs, I recorded the admonition in my own shorthand: Negotiables + Secured = Die.

This has become my new pastime, soliciting advice from lawyers on how to navigate the remainder of my law-school career so that I might emerge, if not unscathed, at least with scars in places that don’t show. If I can cobble it all into something of a roadmap that will lead to my passing the bar exam on the first try, I reason, it will have been worth the effort. Were I able to assemble these shreds of wisdom into tangible form, I would fashion myself a shadow box like the one I once reserved for a collection of shot glasses, stand back and regard them as a whole in the hope that a singular truth might reveal itself.

“Evidence!” my boss cried with no hesitation at all. “Most important class in law school.”

“Yes,” his new associate added urgently. “Pay attention!”

As second-year students, we are afforded an autonomy that still feels unwieldy to the grasp.  Our presence no longer demanded at structured study sessions and mandatory forums on managing stress, our movements no longer restricted to the conformity of the two-section pack, we roam the halls like nocturnal drones in a building that feels like nighttime even when it isn’t and the faint smell of first-year angst lingers like napalm on the air currents. The leash can feel long indeed, and I find myself craving direction from time to time.

I struck up a conversation with a lawyer while running errands at the courthouse. When I mentioned I was a law student, he leaned in as if he were about to give me the pass code to his online banking account and said in a conspiratorial whisper: “Trial Practice.”

In his novel “The Trial,” Franz Kafka introduces his protagonist to a corn merchant who has risked everything on the outcome of a court proceeding, has retained five lawyers and is negotiating with a sixth. “I need them all,” the merchant replies gravely when asked why one should need so many lawyers. “I don’t want to lose my trial, that goes without saying. Consequently, I can’t afford to ignore anything that might help me.”

After a time, though, this begins to feel like an exercise with no discernible point, like recording license plates as you peel down the highway purely for the sake of compiling a list. Michigan, Indiana, Florida.  Show-Me State. Show Me What?

When I regard that imaginary shadowbox and its odd collection of advisory knickknacks, what stands out is not a singular truth, but a cumulative generosity that grows from the willingness to share a whole set of hard-won truths bought and paid for with experience. What emerges, despite the adversarial nature of the beast and the incessant crossing of swords that powers the justice machine on a daily basis, is an overriding sense that, at this peculiar intersection of time and space, at least, we are all individuals, all rowing the same boat.

That’s when I come to understand that success in law school is of one’s own making. You are handed the same tools of the craft as everyone else, but the sculpture you create will be your own, will bear little if any resemblance to the others. And there exists a certain comfort in the knowledge that it doesn’t have to. In the end, if a lawyer lives within, she develops independently and ultimately finds her own way.

That’s not to be construed as legal advice, mind you. I am a second-year law student wholly unqualified to dispense such a thing. But I’ll accept it all day long.

Dream, Baby, Dream

In the dream, it is always exam day and I am hopelessly late or lost, if not both. I am slogging up from the Third Street lot, limbs leaden and breath coming in short rasps. Somehow, the pages of my outlines have become loosed and are fluttering in all directions. I chase one into the street and bend to retrieve it just as it flies out of my grasp. This goes on and on, me pivoting and bending and clawing at the air as the pages scatter more widely. In the strange illogic of the dream, it does not occur to me that it is too late for them be of use. I finally reach the law school and discover that my classroom is not where it was the day before. I duck into a warren of offices, one mute dean after another looking at her wristwatch and slowly shaking her head. They keep directing me into a byzantine brick hallway, where I spend the rest of the night looking for non-existent classrooms.

Every law student has had the dreams, which generally crop up at exam time. An attorney I know whose bar card has been snug in his wallet for years vividly recalls a law-school dream in which he had been exiled to a remote outpost to take his Civil Procedure exam and lost all his time plodding through quicksand to get there. My own subconscious once conjured up a troika of professors in tattered Civil War garb, slowly twisting toward me on broken hips, heads swathed in bloodstained bandages. I chose not to delve too deeply into the pathology of that one.

What puzzles me now is not that I have the dreams, but that they should resurface here in the waning days of summer, with classes not to resume for another two weeks. And then I remember the bar exam, which was administered in recent days and which has worked its way lately to the forefront of my thinking. For one thing, not all of those who underwent that grueling two-day process are faceless would-be attorneys, but people I actually know and root for. One called a week ago seeking the return of a study aid he had loaned me for a summer course. When I inquired after his state of mind, he responded in a thin voice. Of his jumble of unintelligible words, I could make out only two: “medical school.”

As you might expect, the format mirrors that of the law-school exam, for which a career in, say, journalism may or may not be adequate preparation. Where the news abhors redundancy, the law finds solace in its embrace. An effective law-school essay explains beyond all rational need for explanation, states the obvious and then states it again. The tapestry must be unraveled one fiber at a time and rewoven into a seamless analytical whole. Throw in a nuanced observation here and there. Be brilliant and original and thorough. Your time starts now. In the new dream, I am the Susan Lucci of the bar, more renowned for serial failures than for a single success.

The thing about the dreams, though, is that you wake up in the gray light with your life just where you left it and you discover that what you thought was true is not true at all. Such is the nature of law school.

A year ago, we wandered around as the strangers that we were with our free highlighters and our flash drives and our fists full of popcorn and split into teams for an awkward round of Brandeis trivia. I reflect on the composition of that group today and recognize some folks I’m reasonably sure would help me hide a body without asking a lot of questions, in the unlikely event the need should arise, and I’d do the same for them. This is so, despite our disparity of gender, race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic background. Oh, and age. Intensity of shared experience overshadows the rest, I suppose. That, too, is the nature of law school.

The cliché goes like this: the first year of law school scares you to death, the second works you to death and the third bores you to death. I am months removed from the vision of the wounded professors and am no longer fearful, but I am hardly bored. Early in the summer, I would dash from a morning class to the car and head to my downtown job as a law clerk, a drive that conveniently matched the length of time it takes to consume a cinnamon-raisin granola bar. Nights and weekends not devoted to study fed the needs of a professor hungry for research assistance. Soon there will be more class work and a journal article to conceive and bring to fruition. Perhaps you, too, have spent a summer with one foot in the past and the other in premature apprehension of the future. We must now pull both into the present for what shall, absent a better suggestion, be known as The Year of Working Feverishly. We can be bored next year.

Net Operating Losses

She was allotted more time than her contemporaries, so those who mourned her passing were mostly acquaintances of the second and third degree. They know her stories only through us, a clutch of middle-aged cousins who spent no small amount of time wedged shoulder to shoulder in the passenger seats of her two-toned Chevy. You should have seen her back then, breeze lifting the dark waves framing her Jackie Onassis shades, chin lifted at a dignified angle. Houses may always be cleaned tomorrow, but the carnival is in town just today.

That was my Aunt Edna, who introduced me to microwaveable meals and fake Christmas-tree snow and the rewards of low-maintenance pet ownership with her series of fungible goldfish. That was Edna, too, whose worried, angular face leaned into my peripheral vision every time I stirred on a sickbed, and Edna who procured for me both ear piercings and a 64-count box of crayons when I wasn’t supposed to have either.

That she was childless is nothing more than a technical accuracy, as she ushered the children of her six siblings into adulthood as surely as anyone who was ever biologically entitled to call herself a parent. We were the spokes of a rattling family wheel that would have shattered long ago if not for her presence at the hub.

She cherished her civil-service job on the Fort Knox switchboard because it was her ticket out of the tobacco field, and she never lost track of technology when it came to telecommunications. It was easy to deem her calls too frequent and her inquiries too probing until the day she could no longer make them. Perhaps the only thing that pleased her more than the telephone was to be taken for younger than she was, which is the reason her medicine cabinet was stocked to the day she died with L’Oreal hair color, shade 6½-G.

That was Edna, who says “are you all right” and who means “are we all right,” because we are of the same stuff, you and I, and my contentedness is conditioned upon yours.

She was beyond the age at which death can be called unexpected, but losing her turned out to be the first blow of a double punch. The second I never saw coming.

Advances in medicine have lulled us into believing even delicate surgical procedures eminently survivable. And so, when a friend contacted me a few days before he was to undergo heart surgery, I followed his lead and deemed it a low-level threat, a surmountable barrier to be anticipated in a guy with bad genetics and a lifetime of bad habits. I realize now he might have been spinning the truth, a skill he honed to a fine edge, thanks to a lengthy career in public administration. He told me he was thinking of a simultaneous hair transplant and sought my advice on whether he should go Elvis or Fabio. Setting aside his near-unhealthy obsession with white-jumpsuit Elvis, I recommended a circa-1978 Meat Loaf and he seemed to love the idea.

If he knew it was goodbye, he didn’t let on. Had I known, I might have offered something more profound than thoughts on Meat Loaf’s locks. Then again, I might not have changed a thing. This was Charlie, after all, who knew as much about the Chinese Boxer Rebellion and the Rocky Horror Time-Warp dance as he did about land use and economic development. This was Charlie, whose prized possessions once included a Washington Redskins jacket he got from a street vendor for fifty bucks and who is indirectly responsible for my having added to my DVD collection a copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space. He may also have been the least pretentious man I ever knew. When Charlie the corn-fed Midwesterner migrated to South Florida to live among the polo players and manage the tony village of Wellington, he promptly called to report his self-conferred status as the ugliest man in town. He endeared himself to every journalist he ever worked with, not least because his city halls leaked like sieves. It’s an effective strategy when your employment is subject to the whims of bickering local officeholders. “Sunshine is the best antiseptic,” he’d grin, handing over a sheaf of papers. “This one ought to blow up good.”

To differing degrees, each of these people occupied the margins of my life in recent years. Losing them renders me untethered in different ways, stripping the structural supports from different rooms of an emotional house. My tax professor says the books must always balance. But such absolutes seldom hold when life meanders off the black-and-white ledger and into the gray. My account with Aunt Edna is especially unbalanced. It always will be.

If I’m to relate these events to law school, it’s to offer a reminder that no journey proceeds without its potholes. A law student’s cloistered existence is still prone to interruption now and again. With luck, it will be nothing with the gravitas of death, but it will be something, more likely an intermittent series of minor setbacks that spoil the concentration like sour notes in the symphony. Fractured relationships, professional miscalculations, mechanical or physiological failures all intrude to remind you that, despite all the sympathetic nose powdering a law student attracts from his loved ones, life is not necessarily all about you. The key is to keep your back to the wind and keep moving. Adopt a platitude if it helps -- n with the positive, out with the negative, or something along those lines.

If the New Age theorists are right and the release of energy that accompanies death somehow shifts the balance in the universe, then the axis tonight is tilted toward uncommon love and generosity of spirit. Somewhere the phones are ringing again. The department-store shelves are relieved of L’Oreal 6½-G and the spirits are doing the Time Warp.