A Letter To A Law School Professor

Dear Professor Silver:

I’m a first year evening student, and on my second night back this semester I happened to pick up a copy of last semester’s Restatement and I read your article about the Renaissance Lawyer Society, and the personal problems many lawyers are having with lawyering that this organization is addressing. It was quite serendipitous that I found your piece at that moment, as I was actually looking at the paper to find out how I could submit a piece I’ve been formulating about my own intense experience with these things in only my first semester at Touro Law School.

I wanted to write about the disorienting feeling that I and my fellow students have encountered as we became inundated with the dozens of cases to analyze and the plethora of principles of American jurisprudence that is the culture shock of first year law school. I’m a commercial fisherman by trade; I was spending my days this semester on a 42′ boat picking, packing and cutting fish 10 miles out of Shinnecock Inlet in seas often running 6-8 feet. I’ve been doing this for most of my life, but I never knew seasickness until this semester – and I began to get it every time I opened up a case book.

This was very strange to me, because before I enrolled at Touro perusing case law was one of my favorite hobbies. However, I had always done this with issues I had a vested interest in. I came to the conclusion that my own bewilderment was because we are being taught – required, in fact, at the penalty of grade point deduction – to absolutely not naturally identify with particular parties in a case or sides of an issue when we read, and this is thoroughly new to us. It is as if we are learning to identify and understand the physical laws that act upon the individual material bodies of the universe while we float in the weightless and frigid vacuum of outer space. I’m getting seasick just thinking about it.

But these “individual material bodies” that have been acted upon by the laws we are aspiring to ascertain are real people – the cases bear their names. And these cases are very often windows into the worst moments of their lives. Few people are happy to be before a court of law, and few even of the winners of civil cases would chose to experience the benefit of the verdict and award, rather than to have had the event that brought them there never to have happened. I began to have this sense of being an intruder in a massive mausoleum of shipwrecked lives as I walked the halls and perused the aisles of the Touro Law Library. And I began to wonder if I could survive law school with this kind of sensibility at work within me.

One evening in the cafeteria I was reminded of a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan while observing several classmates collaborating on the open universe problem we had been assigned in Legal Methods I. One classmate, who is employed as a paralegal, was proudly brandishing the printouts of the cases he had decided were the ones important to the ascribed hypothetical fact pattern, emphatically calling out the identifying case names. Captain Miller’s squad, in the Hollywood hypothetical, was also given an open universe case. Like a team of associates in a large law firm, they were given the task of representing the mother of a soldier whose three brothers were killed in action. Winning this case meant putting their own lives in the same peril James Ryan was in in order to deliver him safely home to the arms of his grieving mother, while they themselves would still have to stay and fight and possibly die. None of them liked it, or would have volunteered if given the choice – but, soldiers, like law students and associates in law firms, have little choice in such matters.

The scene I am referring to is when the squad, now less one companion (killed, by the way, when he gives in to his sense of compassion and attempts to help a little French girl who reminds him of his niece,) sits down in view of dozens of Airborne Rangers at a rallying point in a clearing in post D-Day Normandy to nonchalantly search through a pile of dog-tags. These belonged to Rangers killed in action and the squad was hoping to get a way out of the “case” by finding that Private Ryan was already dead. Wade, the medic, shook them out of their self-centered disinterest by scoldingly pointing out that, while they were jokingly tossing the bloody metal medallions around like so many discards in a poker game, “The whole Airborne is watching!”

“Could this be the source of lawyer jokes?” I wondered. I began to see us students and practitioners of American lawyering as flocks of birds swooping down into these forests of the terrible moments of peoples lives that are law libraries, searching for the tasty tidbits that are sometimes fruits on the branches, sometimes parasitic insects, sometimes the sap still seeping from ancient wounds – whatever will help us with the assigned hypothetical fact pattern. And we must cheerily and quickly flit from tree to somber tree to survive. I began to wonder what law school would turn me into, and whether it was something I wanted to be.

On the day before the Contracts I final, I was given a saving moment – a real life changing epiphany. I had been almost drowning in my notes, case briefs, restatements and outlines for weeks. This was to be the last final and the end of the horrific first semester. And I needed a break before the grueling three-plus hours of essay writing was to begin that Monday night. I accepted the invitation to accompany my girlfriend and her mother to a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Moriches Choral Society at a local church.

I had been bemused and frustrated by the subject matter in this field of law, particularly because of its amorphous nature. Contracts law seemed to be herds of amoeba-like entities that have a common nucleus – an agreement between two parties – that constantly change shape. Each and every principle seemed to be a matter of debate and contention in every case; the casebooks, the restatements – and all these volumes were all about determining one thing – whether or not there was an enforceable agreement. I watched and listened to this symphonic and choral performance before me, with all its instrumentation and arrangement and the sub-themes that played and replayed in seemingly endless variation – all in accompaniment of the elegantly sung theme of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the story being that this is the New Covenant – the unbreachable Contract between God and Man. It occurred to me – was quickened unto my spirit, to put it into Biblical terminology – that contract law is like a symphony. It is the endless intertwining of common law principles all centered on the essential human theme of exchanged promises and their effects on people. The courts are listening for a certain harmony of these principles to determine whether or not the agreement rises to the level of being an enforceable contract.

And so, I went into my Contacts I final with a real sense of peace.

This revelation has expanded to encompass all the Law to me. It occurred to me that American common law jurisprudence is the result of what we all – all of us in our cultural past and present – have decided is the proper way to treat each other. I then posed the question as to when we all do this within our primarily mundane and uneventful lives. The answer came back that we do this in our dreams. This is when we act out the potential within our fears and desires, and determine by our reactions what is acceptable behavior and what is not. It is the only safe place to do this kind of experimentation.

And so, if I may be so bold, being a first year student of law and all, as to offer a conclusion – a personal and (I hope) original adage in this regard:

The source of the Law is the vibrant symphony of human interaction composed by the People in their sleep.

May I also suggest that a course of study in the Anthropology of the Law should be required of all first year law students.

Thank you, Professor Silver, for providing me with an avenue with which to get this off of my chest. Please feel free to respond.

Chuck Tekula