‘A Skull Full of Mush’

By ANN ALTHOUSE
The New York Times
February 20, 2007

“The Paper Chase” is the book you’re supposed to read before you go to law school. “Paper Chase” or “One L.” Me, I read Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year of law school, “One L.” I’d seen the movie “The Paper Chase” when it came out in 1973, but not because I had any thought back then of going to law school. I didn’t. It was just a good movie about a young guy’s struggle with an authority figure, like so many other movies we saw back then. The authority figure just happened to be a law professor.

When I was applying to law schools in 1977, I really didn’t need an anti-authoritarian novel about a young guy who lets a love affair with the professor’s daughter eat into his study time. I was married and — it seemed then — a little old for that sort of frippery.

I was 26. What I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead. “One L” — which was new then — laid out the facts about law school and got you just scared enough to fire you up for the challenge.

But last Friday, I found myself at New York Law School, at a conference on writing about the law, and the lunch-hour speaker was the author of “The Paper Chase,” John Jay Osborn Jr.

Osborn, who, like me, is a law professor, came to tell us why his protagonist, James Hart, folds his first-year transcript, unread, into a paper airplane and sails it into the ocean and why, less metaphorically, law students hate law school.

Do law students hate law school? When I went to law school, I told myself I loved law school. It was a pose, a strategy, and I knew that. I was being pragmatic.

But Osborn says they hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer,” said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of “their own narrative,” as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to “reclaim” it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose, like the domineering grading system that Hart pitched off in the form of a paper airplane.

Osborn knocked that other book: “ ‘One L’ doesn’t have a H[e]art.” He believes in the ways of fiction. There ought to be a hero to show us the way to live. And we need a villain like Kingsfield, whom, Osborn said, he concocted for dramatic purposes. I preferred the memoir, the account of an ordinary man as he encounters some interesting, fallible human beings who did the work that both Osborn and I do now.

Though none of the law professors I know are much at all like Kingsfield, Osborn chided us law professors for making our students so unhappy: stop calling on them; listen only to volunteers; don’t dictate how they should think; let them tell their own stories.

Law should connect to the real world. But that doesn’t mean we ought to devote our classes to the personal expression of law students. The cases we read for class are always based on factual disputes that arose in real life. In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching cases on standing doctrine, which prevents the courts from articulating the law in the abstract and ties the judicial power to resolving concrete controversies between genuine adversaries. If it’s not real enough, it’s not a case.

So law is not abstract unless one makes the mistake of turning it into an abstraction. We law professors tend to worry about seeming like Professor Kingsfield. But we ought to worry less about that prospect and more about preserving and respecting our own tradition of teaching from the cases.

The students who come into our law schools are adults who have decided that they are ready to spend a tremendous amount of time and money preparing to enter a profession. We show the greatest respect for their individual autonomy if we deny ourselves the comfort of trying to make them happy and teach them what they came to learn: how to think like lawyers.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. She is a guest columnist this month.