The Classroom Is No Place for a Fair Fight

October 28
(Wednesday)

Landrow had scheduled a make-up class the night before Halloween. When I arrived, I found a party already in full swing. People were slapping pizzas onto paper plates, laughing, sticking cups under a beer tap at the front of the room. All of it a complete, pleas­ant surprise.

“Okay, get some pizza and beer and take your seats,” Landrow announced, slapping his hands. “Let’s get started. Feel free to come down and help yourself as we speak.... We might be able to wrap up a little early, but we’ve got some material to cover first.”

No one was moving very quickly. I helped myself to dinner and took my seat in the rafters to enjoy it. I had room to spread out. As with most make-up classes, a number of students were absent for one reason or another. They may have forgotten. They may have figured someone else’s notes were good enough. They may have had another commit­ment or reasoned that the professor couldn’t in good conscience base an exam question on a class scheduled when they may very well have had other legitimate commitments.

“Where’s Ted?” I asked Jonathan.

“He swore the make-up was at seven.”

Although Landrow had told us to help ourselves to food and drink during class, no one did. There wasn’t time. Landrow took off like a demon. Over the next sixty minutes he covered the topic of general character evidence. He told us about collateral issues. He explained impeachment for bias. He showed how one proves bias under the Federal Rules and under the common law. He must have marched through a dozen questions. There was no letting up.

When it was over, I felt like I’d been through an exam. My hand was so cramped I had trouble making it open and close. Phil Miller, a mem­ber of the Law Review, asked me in the beer line if I’d gotten everything down. I shook my hand and laughed. It had been a grueling pace. On many points I had scarcely any idea of what Landrow had been rattling on about, but I got it down, every word. I would just have to make sense of it later.

Jonathan said, “There’s supposed to be a policeman here. Whenever beer’s served on school property, a policeman’s supposed to be present.”

We finished our drinks and walked down to the lounge, speculating on the risks the university faced should someone stumble into the path of a streetcar or drive into the Mississippi on the way home.

I was in no mood for studying. Katie certainly wouldn’t be study­ing—Loyola had Halloween off—so I called her to see if she wanted to go to a haunted house. It was something I had been promising for the past couple of weeks. She was all for it. I asked Jonathan to come along. He thought about it, then declined. Ordinarily, he said, he didn’t mind being a third wheel, but with his recent breakup, he didn’t feel like being reminded of it just yet.

We walked outside together and stood in front of the law school. The building looked magnificent in the faint floodlight: calm, stately, proud. I had enrolled at Urbane without visiting the campus, knowing little more about the school than its reputation. The morning when I first saw the school was like Christmas as a kid. It was a thrill. I hadn’t felt that kind of thrill in years. I had trouble getting to sleep the night before. I was up at the crack of dawn. I remember sitting in the car in front of the building and urging Katie to look. It was fabulous: red brick with pillars, standing on a lot of bright green grass with shrubs by the entrance shaded by giant oaks. How nostalgic would I be years from now? How would I remember Landrow and his jokes, his black Corvette and his pizza party? How would I remember three years that were fly­ing by in the blink of an eye? When I was frazzled with work, sitting behind a desk late into the night, would I remember a leisurely Friday afternoon listening to other law students play guitar and sing on the school patio? In the floodlight, the building looked truly impressive. I didn’t mind standing there on the front walk receiving the casual glances of passers-by. I had all the time in the world.

“That was inappropriate of Muder to come down on Arny like that in class, don’t you think?” Jonathan said, more a statement than a question.

“The classroom is no place for a fair fight,” I had to admit. Although others had evidently seen the incident coming, what had happened that day in Pollution Control had caught me completely by surprise. In Re:, the law school newspaper, had come out with a letter criticizing Muder for using class time to encourage students to participate in a job fair for minority students interested in environmental law, and I had somehow missed it. My first hint of trouble was when Muder began class with an attack on an unnamed student, a student who, she said, had sought her out on numerous occasions to discuss other matters, but who hadn’t had the courtesy to check facts with her before going public with criti­cism, The more she spoke, the more incensed she seemed to become. These things have a way of getting around. There are people downtown who would love to get their hands on something like this. Then suddenly she was finished, ready to get on with class.

“May I respond,” a student near the front asked. His name was Arny Peterson. I didn’t know him well.

“After class,” Muder said.

You could almost hear the crackle of electric sparks from the other students.

Muder reconsidered. “No, let’s clear the air,” she said. “After all, we are studying the Clean Air Act.”

And Arny met resistance on each point. Each statement of his just seemed to straighten the nail for Muder’s hammer, which dropped with driving force again and again.

“The whole thing,” Jonathan said, “was about jobs. When people are poor and struggling, there’s always trouble. People do things they might not otherwise do when their livelihood’s at stake. Landrow beats that drum all the time: You put a guy on the stand and he’s got a wife and kids, a mortgage and a car payment, and he’ll say what he has to say. It’s not lying, necessarily. He may think he’s telling the truth. He’s just say­ing what he has to say.”

The episode with Muder made me think, made me realize, I suppose, that all this talk about jobs was real, that things were really rough out there. Nobody seemed to have a job. There were people on Law Review without a job. Tommy didn’t have a job. Jonathan didn’t have a job, either. He said he had sixteen rejections posted on his refrigerator.

“I’ve been getting interviews with the bigger firms,” he said. “I think I’m competing with people who’re better qualified than I am.”

He may have been right. He was probably in the top twenty percent of the class. He had gone to UCLA. He had spent some time in a trav­eling actor’s group. And he was an Eagle Scout. People probably wanted to meet him. The acting background might have hinted at the ponytail, but such things don’t appear on one’s resume, so Jonathan went to one interview after another, and the rejections would soon cover every appliance in his kitchen.

“I’m not interested in the big firms,” I said, “I don’t think I fit in there. I’m looking for a nice medium-sized law firm.”

“I thought if worst came to worst, I could just take a public interest job. I didn’t know that would be so difficult.” He laughed.

“Isn’t it funny? It’s easier to find a job working to destroy the envi­ronment than find one keeping it clean. Is it a problem with the profes­sion, the culture, or what?”

“A wise man once told me that the most important thing in life is the relationships we form with others. I thought that was pretty smart.”

I thought it over.

“Of course,” Jonathan added, “I was pretty drunk at the time.”

“Yeah.”

There was an awkward silence.

“How’s your casenote?” I asked.

“I was late getting it in,” he told me. “I was in the computer room putting the finishing touches on it. Nick Sutton was there working on something. I asked him if I could have some more time, and he said, ‘No problem.”

“That’s cool.”

“But when I gave it to him, he said something that bothered me.”

“What?”

“Well …”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Oh, I thought you were doing a comment.’”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“I don’t know. Just the way he said it.”

“Your casenote has a good chance of getting published, at least.”

“I don’t know.”

I told Jonathan about the interview I’d had with April Newton. “But don’t say anything about it to Tommy,” I cautioned him.

“Why?”

“Because he could’ve done the same thing,” I said.

“I suppose that’s right.”

On the way to the haunted house, I asked Katie what a wise man looked like. Did he wear a beard? scraggly clothes? I pictured Jonathan in a poet’s bar talking to a wise man. I used to go to poetry readings as an undergraduate. I remembered a young man reading about distant places. Young men always seemed to talk about distant places. I sat with my friends at the end of the bar near the back of the room. An old man near us shouted, “Ever been there?” We laughed. The poet continued: More lovers, more exotic ports. “Ever been there?” the old man cried. We laughed again. The bartender made the old man finish his coffee. I felt bad for encouraging him. Perhaps he was wise. I imagined that most wise men were old, single, alone, poor, sitting in bars drinking coffee. Now he was out in the cold. There was just a hint of snow in the air. I watched him through the window walking away, down the cold street, toward his own tropical island.

Excerpted from LAW SCHOOL RED INK WHITE COLLAR BLUES
By Kenneth David Westphal
Copyright by First Part Press Ltd
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Any use, in whole or in part, without express written consent, is prohibited