Law School

I've decided not to go to law school about fifty times in my life, and I'm still happy with all fifty decisions. But why did the subject come up so often?

Let's face it, becoming a lawyer is one of the few ways for liberal arts students to command a large income. The best law schools don't hold your English or history degree against you; quite the contrary. And the skills of analysis and verbal expression that you honed in those programs are actually useful in the law. So it's a winning hand, economically speaking; and maybe the only one you've got, because a liberal arts academic history will always be held against you in the business world proper.

So the idea starts dancing in you head while you're still an undergraduate, usually. At that point it wasn't more than the glimmer of an idea for me, and it was effectively scotched by my reading Scott Turow's non-fiction account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L, which is an entertaining book, but very harsh on the subjects of the institution, the profession it trains for, and the values it inculcates. It planted the notion in my mind that law school was perhaps primarily a form of indoctrination, into a professional system whose premises I did not share. Do I believe in the rule of law? Of course. And law as an intellectual system and a humane science holds fascination for me. But there has always been this nagging feeling: You don't want to go there.

Contact with actual lawyers only strengthened that feeling. I've had much such contact over the years, and it has all underlined the popular and, alas, correct perception that law is the most miserable of professions. The over-work in BigLaw is legendary and, yes, horribly inhumane, but that's not the worst of it; I think the worst of it is the moral malleability that corporate law requires. It really can feel like a form of whoring oneself. No corporate attorney ever advanced himself with a client, no in-house counsel ever advanced herself with a CEO, by telling them "No." What they want to hear is, Yes, there is a legal rationale or justification for what I want to do, however tortuous the logic may be; torturing the logic as necessary is what the attorney is paid for. At the farthest reaches, this system generates John Yoos and Jay Bybees; but even in its more ordinary manifestations, it is a system that sickens many of those who participate in it -- and remember, those liberal arts majors were rewarded at one point for their sensitivity. It takes three years of law school to beat most of that out of them, but the vestiges that remain are enough to make many attorneys very conflicted indeed.

How do I speak with such certitude, if I never actually joined the profession? Well, the law did get me, in one sense. Like many young writers, artists, and under-employed intellectuals in the big city, I got into paralegal work, because it paid better than all my other options. It was during those years that I entertained, again and again, the concept of going to law school once and for all -- especially as I was demonstrating a flair for the discipline, and got to do work like writing briefs that usually went to young associates. BigLaw firms tend to hire very well educated, intellectually able young graduates that they can train as paralegals, rather than those who have trained to be career paralegals. The tensions I felt about law and about law school were thus very common among my peers; we were all going to move on eventually, but in what direction? About half the paralegals I worked with at a major firm in San Francisco did go on to law school; the other half of us mostly became teachers or professors.

I've been thinking a little about this subject because of the DVD release of the first season of the wonderful series The Paper Chase, which began its life on CBS in 1978, was canceled after one season, and then was revived and taken to its logical conclusion of graduation on Showtime several years later. The subject of professional education was too arcane for a network show, but found a more natural home on cable. John Houseman, who had won a supporting actor Oscar for playing the fearsome Professor Kingsfield in the film version of The Paper Chase, reprised the role (rather softened, which is important, as we'll see) in the series.

I've never read John Jay Osborn's original novel, but I have seen the 1973 film, and it is very similar in many ways to Turow's One L (which post-dated it; Osborn and Turow both attended Harvard Law, but about a decade apart). The movie would not make me want to attend law school. But the series would, and that difference in tone is illustrative of a fundamental difference between film and series television.

I spoke in my last post of the importance in series television of the pleasure of the milieu. If the film basis for a later series lacks that quality, it generally has to be added; if it is present in the film, it has to be strengthened in the series. The Paper Chase, the series, is much homier than The Paper Chase, the film; just as M*A*S*H, the series, is much homier than MASH, the film. They sort of have to be, if you are going to keep coming back.

So Kingsfield had to be softened, the school had to be softened, the drives of the students had to be eased a bit, the profession had to be given more of a glow. One commenter (undoubtedly a lawyer) at the IMDB complains that "most of the cast of the TV show seem way too nice to be law students. Harvard law students are not only competing for grades but aspire to become leaders among the world elite and possibly enter politics. Not members of the Glee Club about to embark on a public relations tour." Well, yes, but also, d'oh. This is a TV show; it's not going to lure viewers by putting before us the assholes that most Harvard Law students become. The movie can do that, because it's over in two hours; just as the regular military types can be assholes in MASH the movie, but in the series have to be either likable (Lt. Colonel Henry Blake), potentially likable (Maj. Margaret Houlihan, who grows in that direction as the series progresses), or, at worst, buffoonish and ineffective (Maj. Frank Burns). In the movie, Father Mulcahy is a cartoon of the inadequacy of religion; in the series, he's kind of a saint. And so it goes.

The Paper Chase, the series, is in its way a triumph of niceness, just as invitingly well-done as All Creatures Great and Small. It embodies the suspicion that many of us sometimes have, that we are actually freer and happier as trainees than as the trained, no matter how hard the training is; and it has a lovely feeling for the appeal of abstract concepts, of books and the "paper chase," the stuff of being a student. The pilot episode comes up with a terrifically clever resolution of its situation (ambitious student Hart being "shrouded" and thus silenced by Kingsfield); the second episode has a climactic emotional scene between Hart and fellow student Ford that makes me tear up. It's a strong show, and it's great to have it back.

POSTSCRIPT: The third episode "A Day in the Life of...," which I re-watched tonight, is a sparkling piece (written, like some other episodes, by Osborn himself), about a day in which everything goes wrong for almost everyone -- as is bound to happen in an intense graduate program. I eventually got my Master of Arts in Teaching in a wonderful program at Boston University, and I certainly remember days like that!