Loot court: how Harvard Law devours its young - Harvard Law School

Washington Monthly, June, 1992 by Jonathan Rowe

Kahlenberg's narrative voice engages trust. Aware of his susceptibility to blandishment and lucre, as well as his insecurity about straying from the pack, he wisely avoids the moralistic high horse, and his assessments of others are measured and thus convincing. he had the foresight to take detailed notes of his job interviews and the like, and this gives his account a novelistic sense of character and scene. He captures ably, for example, the awkwardness of law firm interviews at which he really has nothing to say, and where the main reason for being there--the money--is the one thing that can't be discussed.

Nor does Kahlenberg make excuses: for dropping out of Legal Aid after he marries, for grubbing with the rest for a cherished spot on the law review, or for pursuing clerkships and law firms like a third-generation Sammy Glick. He was all too willing to be seduced, he says. But his honesty gives him standing to deplore the hypocrisy among the student body. The same Lefties who wax indignant when a professor wonders aloud whether it's always fair to exclude a victim's sexual history in rape cases will turn around and refuse to share lecture notes, for fear of helping a rival get ahead. Then they'll cut their hair to impress the recruiters at the corporate firms. (The thing to bear in mind about the ruckus over the law review parody is that three years from now most of the students involved will probably be working to advance the interests of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans.)

At one point, Kahlenberg walks into a meeting of the Law School Democratic Club in search of a constructive alternative to the Crits. There he hears a black student he calls Jackson Shelby proclaim that "For black people, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between indentured servitude and slavery." "I shook my head," Kahlenberg recalls. "Jackson would be taking his Princeton coffee mug in the summer to Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, a Pittsburgh law firm, which had no black partners and only one black associate among its 118 lawyers. Was this radical rhetoric a way of atoning for his embrace of the establishment?" (My Penn classmate who led the law school protest against Nixon's bombing of Cambodia had spent the previous summer researching franchise law for a law firm, and in a month or so after graduation was similarly employed.)

The faculty, meanwhile, is generally too distant to care. One of the enticements of Broken Contract is the chance to see some of the nation's legal big shots up close. A little to my disappointment, Alan Dershowitz, the legal Zelig found frequently at the side of big-bucks misdoers like Mike Tyson and Leona Helmsley, comes off as basically a good guy, who encourages moral qualms among his students. "Look to your left and look to your right," he tells first-year students. "Because by the time you graduate, there will be no Left." (I wonder, though, if Dershowitz's own lucrative cases subtly rewrite this message: Have qualms, but represent the rich anyway.) Lawrence Tribe, the noted constitutional lawyer, has a boyish enthusiasm and even forgets when the class is supposed to end. Anthony Lewis, The New York Times columnist, is an engaging raconteur but has little time for his students. His only comment on a paper Kahlenberg has poured himself into--delivered over the telephone because Lewis is so busy--is "fine." (Then, too, maybe that's the price of seeking to be anointed by people like Lewis, as opposed to getting a more personal if less prestigious education elsewhere.)