Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up - Rick Lax (2008)

"Write what you know."

That is the advice most writing teachers give.  Or at least that was the popular wisdom back in the late 90's/early 2000's.  Later on, there was a twist: you should write what you know, but also what you can learn and confidently write about as if you've experienced it yourself.  I do not think I will ever be able to do the latter, and for that reason I may never be a successful novelist--though that does not mean I will ever give up on my dream.  I know I wouldn't be able to write a law school memoir unless I went.

And it is a good idea, at this point in history, to publish a law school memoir.  Because the landscape has changed.  Rick Lax published Lawyer Boy in 2008, probably right around the moment the markets crashed.  Did he graduate in 2008?  I have no idea.  And one of my major complaints about Lawyer Boy is that it's only about the first year.

So it's basically very easy to sum up: One L but at a TTT turned TT set immediately before people started using those acronyms.

It could have been so much better.  As it is, it's pretty good.  It's definitely a page-turner.  But I don't think anybody who didn't go to law school or is planning on going to law school will find it very intriguing.  That is the problem with the law school memoir as a genre.  Still, I think Lax made better use out of his law degree than a lot of disappointed graduates nowadays.  At least it gave him good material for a book.

Then again, there is one non-nitpick critique I can make of this book: it loses steam in its second-half.  Lax seems to rush through the story of the spring semester.  Part of this is understandable: his school was not crazy and probably enrolled 1Ls in 3 credits of Constitutional Law and Contracts both semesters, instead of 5 credits in one semester.  So there's not a lot of new stuff to mention except Torts and Property.

But now we get to the fun part: comparing experiences.  Because it really is sad, how similar every law school is to every other one, regardless of ranking.  It's one of the reasons so many people criticize the proliferation of law schools today--because they are just so easy to plan.  There are too many of them and I have been saying for a couple years now that the ABA should limit the number of new graduates entering the workforce because that is the only way to prevent a highly-indebted unemployed glut of new graduates applying for the same few entry-level jobs that get posted.  The market will fix itself, some believe, and while overall enrollment has dropped, I think it's still way too high.  If it's unfair to close schools, then each should just be forced to reduce the size of their first-year class to a quota.  It might sound like a totalitarian regime, but it would be better for those choosing to enter the profession in the long run (it is really depressing to go through such hell for 3 years, take on a load of debt, jump through dozens of hoops, only to be laughed at because you're useless) and at the very least it would make for an interesting Supreme Court case.  I digress.

Rick Lax went to DePaul Law School.  I almost went there.  Now that I have chosen to live in Chicago, I wish I had gone there.  But I did get in and I could appreciate some of the details.  The book starts out very strong, with Lax describing why he wanted to go to law school in the first place, what it was like to take the LSAT, and what it was like to choose his school:

"I realized that my full-time immaturity shtick would one day inevitably turn from cute and charming to sad and creepy.  I realized that I couldn't live with my parents forever, that I needed a place of my own, and that magic wouldn't pay the bills--the ones I'd presumably have if I had a place of my own.  I realized that I had to go to law school...because it's not like I was going to get a job or anything." (9)

Of course, plenty of people on the internet will laugh at that paragraph as a supreme exercise in irony.  But this was in 2006 (or so).  Lax wanted to go to University of Michigan, which is where he went for undergrad, where his father went, and which was closest to home.  But he couldn't get in.  I could say the same thing about myself and NYU:

"Getting into the University of Michigan's undergraduate program was tough--I'd needed to transfer in.  Getting into their law school, I recognized, would be almost impossible.  The Supreme Court made that much clear in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.  The case's opinion begins: "The [University of Michigan] Law School ranks among the Nation's top law schools.  It receives more than 3,500 applications each year for a class of around 350 students."  In Grutter, the Supreme Court held that state universities have a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body, and that this interest justifies the use of race as a factor in admissions.  But even without affirmative action, plaintiff Barbara Grutter, who had a 3.8 GPA and 161 LSAT score, probably couldn't get into the University of Michigan Law School today.  In recent years, the average incoming University of Michigan Law School student has had a 3.7 GPA and a 168 LSAT score." (12-13)

Lax got the same score as me: 163 and we didn't get to go to our dream schools.  But this is pretty much where our stories diverge.  He also applied to UNLV, DePaul, University of Chicago, NYU and Columbia.  He got rejected everywhere except for the first two.  And it probably would have been better for him to go to UNLV in the long run since apparently he lives there now (I know this through Twitter and I will post this review @him and hope not to get trolled) and it is probably the best place to make a living as a magician--which is the "hook" of this book.

Because see--if I wanted to write a law school memoir, there wouldn't be a "hook."  It's that extra little something that makes a literary agent think that your book is going to be special or memorable or something.  And some of the magician anecdotes are funny, but sometimes it feels a bit like "padding."  First there's the appendix, which has a couple tricks that I am pretty sure you wouldn't be able to do just from reading it (I think with magic you need an in-person demonstration from someone willing to show the secrets).  Second there are the numerous jokes about how no self-respecting person chooses magic as a profession, which okay, was probably true in 2006, but in 2014 no self-respecting person chooses law as a profession, unless they are sure they're really, really smart and are going to be in the top 10% or going to one of the very best schools.  Sorry--must contain my cynicism.

But the details about DePaul are pretty priceless, and as a resident of Chicago, I can say the book is certainly true to life.  First, there is the t-shirt:

"As expected, the University of Las Vegas accepted me, and even threw in a $9,000 annual scholarship.  DePaul University College of Law in Chicago trumped that with an $18,000-a-year offer, accompanied by a 100 percent cotton XL school T-shirt."

I got the same one with a $20,000-a-year offer, four (?) years later.  So still, we're in the same boat.  However, there is a sad anecdote later on that I have trouble believing:

"On Monday, I wore my complimentary XL DePaul T-shirt to Con Law...as did Dan and two of the other serious students.  I figured we'd all run out of clean clothes at the same time.
'Lookin good, Rick,' said Dan.
'You, too.'  I turned to Nadeeka, who wasn't wearing a shirt, and said, 'It's DePaul T-shirt day.  You didn't get the memo?'
She hadn't.
'Congratulations,' Dan said.
'On what?'
'Your scholarship.  You got the shirt with the scholarship, right?'
The shirt went with the scholarship.  Ah.
'You mean they didn't make you pick between the two?'
At the start of the semester, everybody must have assumed a handful of Section 2 students just happened to buy the same ill-fitting DePaul law school T-shirt.  By the second week of class, most people had figured out what the T-shirts meant.  By that week, wearing the shirt was no longer considered just a fashion misstep; it was considered a statment about the wearer's refusal to hide or apologize for her intellectualism." (82-83)

I think it is just incredible that DePaul would be so callous as to give scholarship students T-shirts, and non-scholarship students nothing.  Perhaps the practice changed after a few years, but it just strikes me as a really cynical (maybe the wrong word?) thing to do.  I got mine, and I liked wearing it to class because it was sort of a message like "fuck you, I hate this place and wish I went to DePaul" but I don't think anybody got it (and truthfully I didn't hate my school--just my first year, and I hate myself for what happened after--I actually have ridiculously fond memories of my second and third years).

Which is why I felt like Lawyer Boy was missing something.  Of course, a lot of people say "1L is all that matters" and sure that's true for jobs--but I felt that the ending of the book was inaccurate.  Lax writes about people getting jobs at big firms as if they're working there the summer after their 1L year.  That's not the way it works!  It's misleading.  Maybe a couple of his friends got to do that, but I know basically no one that worked at firms during their 1L summer.  Then again our school gave out a (fairly generous, at the time) public service grant so maybe most people did that because it was close to a livable wage.  Basically this book ends like 1L is the end of law school and that's just not true--there's two more years of crap, and at least in my experience, the social aspect gets really interesting at that point because people stop spending 90% of their free time studying (maybe 90% is inaccurate but it felt like that for me) and start having social lives.

Still, it was funny to read about how similar our experiences were.  One notable example was this introductory exercise, a welcoming speech from the Dean:

"Head Dean Glen Weissenberger spoke last: 'You've heard a lot about us, the faculty, and you've heard a lot about DePaul, but now I'd like to talk to you about something else: you.  All two hundred and forty of you.  Some of you came here from state college; some of you came here from Harvard.  One of you has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, another of you has one in materials engineering.  One of you even designed spacecraft parts for Boeing.
'One of you is the president of a gospel choir.  One taught English in Ghana.  One survived testicular cancer.  One lost over one hundred pounds in two years.  One was attached by sharks.  One worked for NATO in Kosovo as a counterintelligence agent with the U.S. Army.
'One of you is a professional magician, and that particularly excites me because I used to be a professional magician, too.'" (52)

Any of my classmates will recognize this ritual.  It is almost as if the law schools feel obligated to perform this tradition--just like the obligation to retain the same first year courses, though some of them (*cough*property) are basically niche areas filled with arcane nonsense.

Weissenberger was later dismissed from the law school in 2009, so apparently Lax used real names.  I'm not so sure about the other professors.  While most of the professors are generally treated quite well in the book, the Legal Writing professor seems like one of the biggest jerks on the planet.  I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an accurate portrait, but I'd be surprised if Lax didn't use a pseudonym.  While Legal Writing assignments are graded anonymously, there is a fair amount of discussion of how the professor knew which assignments Lax had turned in, and so maybe it wouldn't make a difference if Lax used a pseudonym or not: the professor obviously must have known it was written about him/her.  But apparently Devenpeck is a pseudonym.  This is only interesting to me because Turow used pseudonyms for his professors, and as I toy with the idea of writing a law school memoir, I tend to wonder about the "libel" aspect.  I wouldn't write anything bad about any of my professors, but I still feel weird writing about them, period, whether using pseudonyms or not, in a memoir.  But if you don't use pseudonyms, you're pretty much obligated to only say nice things.  Whatever.

The only other aspect I want to mention is that Lax seems to exhibit what a good percentage of my law school classmates also did: complete disregard for fiscal responsibility.  This is mainly due to where he chooses to live, and how his parents are able to pay for it.  Also I don't think he mentions taking out any loans.  So a very important part of the puzzle is also missing for aspiring law students.  This is also why I wish the 2L and 3L years were also included in this book.

One other thing I like about this book is that Lax provides snapshots of some of the cases he studied, and generally he picks out interesting ones (while also including a fairly concise summary of Marbury v. Madison, though I think someone else probably did a better job).

Finally, Justice Scalia is not mentioned until page 206.  At least he gets mentioned.  But any law school memoir in the late 20th or early 21st century has to say something about Scalia.  The thing I like most about him is that most law students hate his philosophy, but still love him because he can be a very witty writer.  Justice Douglas is not mentioned at all, and I will still persist in calling him my favorite.  He may not be the wittiest (though there is usually a humorous sentence or two in each of his opinions), but I still think he's one of the few who lived his life according to his judicial philosophy, and so he is automatically interesting.  

In the end, I can only give a lukewarm recommendation for this book.  I don't want to say "not recommended" because I think it does about as good a job as can be expected, and I shouldn't judge it because I wanted to see it do something differently.  However, I would be curious to know why Lax didn't want to include the 2L and 3L years.  Maybe that is a blessing, because perhaps the law school memoir that is an exhaustive account of the entire thing has yet to be written.  Perhaps I haven't really been looking for it, or just wouldn't want to read it, but I have to believe that a law school memoir published in 2010 or later from a non-T14 student/graduate could be a contender for the Pulitzer Prize due to tragic content.  I pray for all of us--that we make something of our lives, and that they are not cut short by psychosomatic tragedy.

Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts - Mark W. Smith (incomplete)

Note: This is Not the "Disrobed" Written by Judge Block, and I Would Much Rather Read that One

by Jack Knorps

Perhaps the problem with America is that we don't really give deference to the voices that speak in opposition to ours.  It pains me, greatly, to leave that scarlet word "incomplete" in the title of this post (I  have not had an "I" since Proust, je pense) but Mark W. Smith is no Mark E. Smith and I can hardly bear to waste anymore of my time reading this book.  I got through 33 pages.  I thought it would be a fun review to write, but I was wrong.

I have written at length on the "right" and the "left" swinging of the Court, but this book is a waste of my time because it is dated!  It was published in 2006.  If Smith did not get his wish then I'm sorry for him, but from his writing he appears to be an extremely radical conservative.

In the basement of the Brooklyn Law School library, there is some graffiti in the men's bathroom.  In the handicapped stall somebody wrote, "My s*** feels like: -a Scalia opinion (painful and offensive)."  I don't know who wrote that (it wasn't me--Scalia actually amuses me more often than not and I find him to be charmingly erudite, if politically "unattractive"), but if they are a terrorist then we should find him and torture him by forcing him to read this book.  That would be perfectly constitutional, actually. (I think.)

This book is dated because it opens up with Smith's Blackberry blowing up over Harriet Miers' failed appointment to the Court to replace Justice O'Connor (how charming to think, by the way, that there might have been a Justice Miers rather than a Justice Alito--Alito may be just about as conservative as you can get before entering lunatic land, but he is a much better writer than Smith--more respectable, at least).

This book has a chapter called "No More Souters."  I can guess what it says.  I didn't get that far, nor did I get to the titillatingly-titled fourteenth chapter, "Do You Sodomize Your Wife?" I made it to the first mention of Justice Douglas and Justice Brennan, and I stopped:

"Just look at how liberal justices decided when to use the power of the courts--and when not to.  In Williamson v. Lee Optical (1955), for example, the Supreme Court upheld an Oklahoma law preventing opticians, as opposed to licensed optometrists or ophthalmologists, from fitting lenses to eyeglasses.  In short, the Court rejected any suggestion that opticians or their patients had a right to enter into a voluntary economic transaction without the blessing of the state.  In his opinion, Justice William O. Douglas concluded, 'The day is gone when this Court uses the [Constitution] to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought...."For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the Courts."' (emphasis added).
Yet it was the very same Justice Douglas who a decade later wrote the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, striking down laws that restricted the sale of contraceptives.  Apparently, in the eyes of Justice Douglas, only economic conservatives needed to 'resort to the polls' when government regulators curtailed their liberties; social liberals could absolutely resort to the courts 'for protection against abuses by legislatures.'  Justice Douglas and the rest of his left-wing cronies on the high court obviously took to heart Emerson's line that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'
Liberal justice William Brennan approved of the same double standard.  As constitutional scholar Bernard Schwarz explained, Brennan practiced 'judicial deference in the economic realm' but 'believed that the Bill of Rights provisions protecting personal liberties imposed more active obligations on the judges.  When a law infringed upon the personal rights the Bill of Rights guaranteed, Brennan refused to defer to the legislative judgment that the law was necessary.'
Why should Justice Brennan defer to government actions in the economic realm but not in the social or personal realm?  What about the constitutional guarantees to the right to keep the fruits of your own labor?  Did the Framers of the Constitution jettison the original Articles of Confederation to guarantee the 'fundamental' and 'unalienable' rights to abortion and buggery and the right to be free from hearing the words 'under God' uttered in the Pledge of Allegiance?" (31-32)

Actually Douglas used the words "the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," which, yes, is part of the Constitution, but does not comprise the entirety of its text.  And Smith perhaps does not seem to worry about rogue "eye doctors" that would create things like the Opti-Grab and make people go cock-eyed.  But plenty of people try to practice law without a license.  I am sure that Smith would not worry about rogue "baby doctors" that would perform "back-alley abortions with coat hangers"--no, we can have every baby carried to term, and if the mother is irresponsible, well she can put it up for adoption, I guess.  Shame on her--she should at least need to suffer for 9 months and we should DEFINITELY BRING MORE PEOPLE INTO THIS WORLD BECAUSE IT'S GREAT!

Writing this review is like shooting fish in a barrel.  The part about Romer v. Evans is priceless.  Jeffrey Toobin may write books about the Court that read like "Con Law for Dummies," but Disrobed is truly written for the lowest common denominator--that is, someone that does not consider the other side's position because they know they're right.

It is quite funny, however, to think of this book as dated though it was published just seven short years ago.  Smith probably blew his brains out when Obama won the election and put Sotomayor and Kagan on the Court.  Or at least he probably got really bad migraines for a while.

I am guessing, however, that Smith did not lose very much money in the Great Depression, Part Two (the first of which he asserts was drawn out--not ameliorated--by the New Deal), but he does believe that allowing banks to fail back in the day was a bad thing--not sure how he could get what he wants.  Reading this is like listening to Rush Limbaugh.  One is saddened that people who are obviously capable of publishing a book, or speaking for hours on end and entertaining millions of people, can have their voices heard so loudly, and can propagate such myths and fool the masses into believing whatever sounds good for their agenda

I love the part in Romer v. Evans where Scalia references the Chicago Cubs (I think I have written about this on Flying Houses several times before) and talks about how gay law schools are.  I had to skip ahead to "No More Souters" to make sure that Smith was not in fact gay because then he might actually be ridiculously clever--but I guess I am wrong:

"But now we know the kinds of judges we need to look for--principled conservatives who want to protect traditional American rights and values and who will focus on results rather than merely process--how do we find our Judicial Reagans?  As any of my ex-girlfriends can tell you (and certainly as any of Bill Clinton's can), a woman knowing what she wants in a man is a far cry from her actually finding one who meets those criteria.  It's the same with conservatives who are selecting judges: There's no guarantee we'll appoint Judicial Reagans just because we have certain qualities in mind." (124)

I have a serious problem with people that like drama for the sake of drama or fighting for the sake of fighting.  There is a book called "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" and Justice Douglas made a similar point in Points of Rebellion: let us keep fighting because we don't know what else we are supposed to do with ourselves.  There is a civil war going on in this country, but it is hidden, and for good reason: it would tear families apart.  Many of my friends are conservatives--or libertarians--which I believe is just code for "reputable Republican."  Smith repeatedly refers to the "loony left."  But writers like him give Republicans a bad name.  I can agree to disagree, but I am not going to write an entire book accusing my enemies of being insane and taking the Supreme Court to task.  It's a foolish endeavor.  It has been foolish for me to read this book and waste my time with it.

I will say that the book--while written extremely poorly--at least uses pretty decent grammar.  It is more than I could say for Pygmy, but I am sure that even the "terrorist kid" in that book (or whatever he is) is a nicer person than Smith seems to be.

"Do You Sodomize Your Wife?" was apparently asked to Justice Scalia at NYU Law.  Smith says that Scalia "does not argue that sodomy is good or bad, fun or unfun, moral or immoral, or anything of the kind.  He instead believes only that such questions should be resolved through the democratic process, not by a small cadre of unelected judges."  (210)

That may be so but Smith does not give Scalia's answer to that question, which was probably quite witty--instead, Smith just calls the question an "intellectually vapid query" and focuses on the question itself rather than the answer: which is that Congress does not equal Democracy--Congress may be called democracy but it should be clear to any high school student that the democratic process is controlled by moneyed interests and the Court is really our last resort to protect against tyranny--and moneyed interests do not always respond to the increasingly diverse needs of Americans.  I personally prefer a world where I have a choice between The Strand, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, but I guess I'll probably be able to find something decent at Barnes & Noble anyways....

I have said all I can about this book.  I regret checking it out because it forces me to make a terribly unattractive statement: it's okay to stop reading a book if you think it sucks (or if it just makes you so angry that you feel you have wasted your time).  Now I really have to go study Crim Pro, Sec Reg, Tax, the MPRE, and whatever other fun stuff I do.  Luckily I do not need to "take a side" in these activities.