How Must First-Year Law Students Behave On the First Day of Law School?

For the prospective first-year student, what will occur in the classroom might loom as the most shrouded of law school mysteries. Without actions to remove the shrouds, it can remain a mystery, for what a particular course requires, let alone what to expect from the class, is information the student must often determine alone.




An opening passage from the novel The Paper Chase, by John Jay Osborn, Jr., contains a classic depiction of the first-year law student's first-day fears:

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Most of the first year students, in anticipation of their first class at the Harvard Law School, were already seated as Professor Kingsfield, at exactly five minutes past nine, walked purposefully through the little door behind the lecture platform. He put his books and notes down on the wooden lectern and pulled out the seating chart. One hundred and fifty names and numbers: the guide to the assigned classroom seats. He put the chart on the lectern, unbuttoned his coat, exposing the gold chain across his vest, and gripped the smooth sides of the stand, feeling for the indentations he had worn into the wood. He did not allow his eyes to meet those of any student-his face had a distant look similar to the ones in the thirty or so large gilt-framed portraits of judges and lawyers that hung around the room. . . .

At exactly ten past nine, Professor Kingsfield picked a name from the seating chart. The name came from the left side of the classroom. Professor Kingsfield looked off to the right, his eyes following one of the curving benches to where it ended by the window.

Without turning, he said crisply, "Mr. Hart, will you recite the facts of Hawkins versus McGee?"

When Hart, seat 259, heard his name, he froze. Caught unprepared, he simply stopped functioning. Then he felt his heart beat faster than he could ever remember its beating and his palms and arms break out in sweat.

Professor Kingsfield rotated slowly until he was staring down at Hart. The rest of the class followed Kingsfield's eyes. "I have got your name right?" Kingsfield asked. "You are Mr. Hart?" He spoke evenly, filling every inch of the hall.

A barely audible voice floated back: "Yes, my name is Hart."

"Mr. Hart, you're not speaking loud enough. Will you speak up?"

Hart repeated the sentence, no louder than before. He tried to speak loudly, tried to force the air out of his lungs with a deep push, tried to make his words come out with conviction. He could feel his face whitening, his lower lip beat against his upper. He couldn't speak louder.

"Mr. Hart, will you stand?"

After some difficulty. Hart found, to his amazement, he was on his feet.

"Now, Mr. Hart, will you give us the case?"

Hart had his book open to the case: he had been informed by the student next to him that a notice on the bulletin board listed Hawkins v. McGee as part of the first day's assignment in contracts. But Hart had not known about the bulletin board. Like most of the students, he had assumed that the first lecture would be an introduction.

His voice floated across the classroom: "I ... I haven't read the ease. I only found out about it just now."

Kingsfield walked to the edge of the platform.

"Mr. Hart, I will myself give you the facts of the case. Hawkins versus McGee is a case in contract law, the subject of our study. A boy burned his hand by touching an electric wire. A doctor who wanted to experiment in skin grafting asked to operate on the hand, guaranteeing that he would restore the hand 'one hundred percent.' Unfortunately, the operation (ailed to produce a healthy hand. Instead, it produced a hairy hand. A hand not only burned, but covered with dense matted hair.

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"Now, Mr. Hart, what sort of damages do you think the doctor should pay?"

Hart reached into his memory for any recollections of doctors. There were squeaks from the seats as members of the class adjusted their positions. Hart tried to remember the summation he had just heard, tried to think about it in a logical sequence. But all his mental energy had been expended in pushing back shock waves from the realization that, though Kingsfield had appeared to be staring at a boy on the other side of the room, he had in fact called out the name Hart. And there was the constant strain of trying to maintain his balance because the lecture hall sloped toward the podium at the center, making him afraid that if he fainted he would fall on the student in front of him.

Hart said nothing.

"As you remember, Mr. Hart, this was a case involving a doctor who promised to restore an injured hand."

That brought it back. Hart found that if he focused on Kingsfield's face, he could imagine there was no one else in the room. A soft haze formed around the face. Hart's eyes were watering, but he could speak.

"There was a promise to fix the hand back the way it was before," Hart said.

Kingsfield interrupted: "And what in fact was the result of the operation?"

"The hand was much worse than when it was just burned. . . ."

"So the man got less than he was promised, even less than he had when the operation started?"

Kingsfield wasn't looking at Hart now. He had his hands folded across his chest. He faced out, catching as many of the class's glances as he could.

"Now, Mr. Hart," Kingsfield said, "how should the court measure the damages?"

"The difference between what he was promised, a new hand, and what he got, a worse hand?" Hart asked.

Kingsfield stared off to the right, picked a name from the seating chart.

"Mr. Pruit, perhaps you can tell the class if we should give the boy the difference between what he was promised and what he got, as Mr. Hart suggests, or the difference between what he got, and what he had.

Hart fell back into his seat. He blinked, trying to erase the image of Kingsfield suspended in his mind. He couldn't. The lined white skin, the thin rusty lips grew like a balloon until the image seemed to actually press against his face, shutting off everything else in the classroom.

Hart blinked again, felt for his pen and tried to focus on his clean paper. His hand shook, squiggling a random line. Across the room, a terrified, astonished boy with a beard and wire-rimmed glasses was slowly talking about the hairy hand.

There are indeed professors who give assignments to be completed for their initial class meeting. To avoid the feeling of being behind on the first day of law school, it is prudent to find out at once where assignments are posted to determine what preliminary reading is required and what books must be purchased. In fact, it would well be worthwhile to arrive at law school a day or more before classes begin to have an informal opportunity to poke around the classrooms and law library before the halls are flooded with a mass of bewildered students.

If an initial reading assignment involves anything more than introductory material, it could indicate that the professor will be the type of teacher who plunges forward with machinelike efficiency to complete the concluding assignment on the last page of the syllabus by the final class of the semester; or it could be a terrorizing tactic to chill any notion the new students might have of their own legal brilliance. One Yale Law School professor was known to assign for his first class the case of Fay v. Noicir-a long federal habeas corpus case that even third-year students find difficult to decipher. Needless to add, after a frantic night of trying to make sense of Fay, the chilling effect was substantial.

The purpose behind this type of tactic is to illustrate dramatically to the class that law school is going to be a rigorous experience, even for the best of students. This is a fair warning. But the student should never let an initial assignment or any other terrorist tactic send him into a panic of despair about his ability to survive in law school. In this type of situation, as in many others during the first semester, the student's response could be compared to that of a swimmer caught out at sea: if he maintains his calm, breasting the waves, he is more likely to stay afloat and reach shore than if, overwhelmed by the enormity of the ocean and the limits of his swimming ability, he thrashes about, convinced that each breaker means doom. The student must maintain a certain tolerance for ambiguity and the unknown, while taking all reasonable steps to reduce the dimensions of the ambiguous and the unknown.

Lest it be thought that it is only the average student who could be so easily intimidated by a professor or who could so easily encounter periods of self-doubt, hear the words of the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the quality of whose mind was recognized as extraordinary even among those who disagreed with his philosophies. In describing his first class at Columbia Law School, Justice Douglas remembered his professor:

Herman Oliphant, with his pointed nose and piercing eyes. ... He had the skill of a brain surgeon in dissecting a legal problem. It was Oliphant who, on my very first day in Law School, embarrassed me before the class of 365 students. He came into, the room, placed his notes on the lectern, polished his glasses, and then paced the room- up one aisle, around in back, down the center aisle where he stopped at my row. I was on the aisle and, therefore, an easy victim. He asked my name, had me stand, and then asked, "Mr. Douglas, what is an estoppel?" My mind was blank. All I could say was, "I know it's not anything you find in the woods. Whether it is a legal principle or a disease, I haven't the least idea." I sat down, crushed and humiliated; certain that I was doomed as a lawyer.

It should be noted that despite this painful classroom debacle, Douglas survived to make the Columbia Law Review by the end of his first year and to graduate from Columbia second in his class. It might also be noted that despite this experience, when Douglas himself upon graduation became a professor at Columbia and later at Yale, he employed the same hard-bitten techniques associated with the Socratic method, admitting later that "I tended to treat the class as the lion tamer in the circus treats his wards.'' Perhaps in just such a fashion are law school traditions passed on in perpetuity.

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