QUITTING THE BAR, TWICE : What the law taught me about faith

Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Heather King

Somewhere around the last years of my drinking I decided to go to law school. It was not a very well thought-out plan. One night I was holding court in my usual loud-mouthed fashion on my barstool at Boston's Beacon Hill Pub when someone remarked, "You ought to be a lawyer." At the time, I was so bereft of my own ideas, so starved for direction, that I took the chance comment of a virtual stranger and determined forthwith to build my life around it. Yes, I thought to myself, I should be a lawyer! I conveniently set aside the small facts that, in spite of a social service degree, I had never done any kind of work other than waitressing, that I was incapable of going without a drink for the eight or nine hours a regular job required, that I was not even sure what lawyers did.

Since my hangovers ruled out all possibility of commuting, I focused instead on the fortuitous circumstance that a law school was handily located just two blocks from my apartment. Once I was accepted--I applied to just that one place--I figured that, somewhere along the line, I'd have to study so hard I would naturally cut down on my drinking. Somewhere along the line I would be transformed from a person with a nervous system so sensitive that, when sober, merely being addressed by a fellow human being almost caused me to hyperventilate, into a bold, assertive, self-confident advocate for victims of racial oppression and gender discrimination. Somewhere along the line, I would stop being disenfranchised and clueless and start being privy to the inner workings of The Law. Not the law of right-wing, terrorist Amerika, of course--for even in the early eighties, I was nothing if not a good child of the sixties--but the Thurgood Marshall, Brown v. The Board of Education, ACLU-type of law, the sacred kind of law that dug right down into the essence of how we live, in order to effect change, help people, make the world a better place.

I had always secretly suspected that everyone but me had been handed a rule book at birth. This sense of alienation and deficiency, this intuition that I had missed some kind of essential truth available to everyone else was, in fact, the very reason I so ceaselessly craved the oblivion of alcohol. Now, for the first time in my life, I told myself, I would be at the very heart of how things worked.

People sometimes ask me, "How could you have gotten through law school drunk?" My answer is that there is no way I could have gotten through law school if I hadn't been drunk. One of the first things we were plunged into, for example, was the moot court competition, a nerve-racking, nail-biting event that entailed researching and writing a brief on an assigned topic, presenting it to a panel of black-robed alumni, and, while an assembled throng of professors and classmates watched you squirm, attempting to respond to a barrage of supercilious, hypothetical, unanswerable questions such as, "How do you propose to reconcile the Rule against Perpetuities with the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur?" or "What is the proximate cause of a counter-offer?"

We prepared for months, researching esoteric points of law, polishing our papers, and listening to endless tips from our earnest legal-skills professor, who was fresh out of law school herself. She could not impress upon us firmly enough the solemnity of the occasion, the august company, the credentials of the corporate lawyers, appeals court judges, and Harvard professors who had deigned to rearrange their busy schedules and grace us lowly students with their presence. We women were not to wear our skirts too short or our heels too high or our earrings too dangly. We were all to dress in conservative colors, speak in a modulated, pleasant voice, and say "thank you" at the end.

"Now, are there any last questions about how to conduct yourselves from the podium?" she asked.

I raised my hand from the back of the room.

"Yes?" she nodded.

"Can we smoke?" I asked.

I'd wanted to lighten things up a little bit but instead, chalk in hand, the professor literally froze in horror. She didn't even get that it was a joke--hardly anybody did--and that was when I saw that the worst thing about The Law was going to be that it lacked all sense of humor.

Time bore me out: as the months passed, I searched in vain for a subject that wasn't deadly boring, dry as dust, and leached of every detail of the kind that makes things interesting in real life. The contracts questions featured companies that manufactured widgets: I wondered what the secretaries ate for lunch. The real property examples had a hypothetical estate called Blackacre: I pictured what kinds of trees might grow on it. I did manage to work up some affection for a few first-year tort cases. There was the aunt who sued her five-year-old nephew for battery. When she had gone to sit down in a lawn chair, he had snatched it out from beneath her and she had fallen, fracturing her hip. There was the woman who sued a stock boy in a grocery store for intentional infliction of emotional distress because she had asked him the price of an item he was marking and he had replied, "If you want to know the price, you'll have to find out the best way you can. You stink to me." There was the jilted lover who had thrown lye in his girlfriend's face, completely disfiguring her, and to which the legal textbook writers, in an unprecedented show of human interest, had thoughtfully added a footnote saying that when the guy had finally gotten out of jail, she married him. Opening yet another bottle of rotgut wine I knew would lead to yet another blackout, yet another savage hangover, yet another attack of excoriating guilt, I particularly identified with that gal's gluttony for punishment.