Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1992 by Jonathan Rowe

In Dickens' Great Expectations, there is a law clerk named Wemmick. Wemmick is a mere functionary by day, brusque and legalistic. But when he crosses the drawbridge to his home at night he becomes a different man--his own man: an avid gardener who cares lovingly for his aged father.

Wemmick's bridge is a central theme in a course taught by psychiatrist and author Robert Coles at Harvard Law School. It represents what Coles sees as a deep split in the psyches of many of his students: the values they will embody as high-priced cogs at corporate law firms and the social causes they tell themselves they still support. In Washington terms, it is the gulf between Lloyd Cutler's water-carrying for corporations and his efforts on behalf of worthy causes.

Why, Coles asks his students, do you think you have to trudge off into divided lives? Aren't there other paths--like those followed by Atticus Finch, the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, or in real life, Ralph Nader? Most in the class listen but don't hear, says Richard Kahlenberg, a 1989 Harvard Law graduate who recounts how he narrowly escaped the lemming-like march out of Harvard into the world of corporate law.(*1) "I entered committed to public interest law," he recalls, "but after three years I came within one day of joining the vast majority of my classmates in practicing law at a large corporate firm, a career which I, along with most of them, would find lucrative, prestigious, challenging, and ultimately unsatisfying."

Broken Contract is the story of how Harvard Law School fosters lives divided by Wemmick's bridge. It starts with Kahlenberg's buoyant if wary idealism and concludes with a twist on the ending of The Graduate: Offer in hand from Covington and Burling, Kahlenberg has until April 15th of his third year to come up with a job on Capitol Hill that will save him from a fate he both wants and doesn't. In between, it's a kind of Pilgrim's Regress, in which the son of an idealistic minister, whose heroes are Ralph Nader and Robert Kennedy and who spent a year in Africa before enrolling in law school, gets spiritually derailed by an institution that supposedly represents the zenith of the American legal tradition. Kahlenberg's public service aspirations have an elitist bent; he wants a prestigious position in Washington, only with the good guys. Even so, Harvard Law, and the culture of law generally, do much to evoke the worst in him and little to evoke the worthy.

Though debunking Harvard Law is not exactly new territory, Kahlenberg deals quickly with the tyrannies of the Socratic Method and addresses the larger social point. How does this place manage to take hundreds of the nation's brightest young people, most of whom enter with Leftish politics, and turn them into apologists for the very interests they intellectually oppose?

This issue has been lost in the recent commotions at Harvard Law, including the current one over a callous parody of a feminist article in the Harvard Law Review. These disputes have essentially been intramural: about who teaches at Harvard, what they teach, and whether people there are sensitive to one another. These are all important. But Kahlenberg probes the question that should matter to the rest of us: What do Harvard lawyers contribute to their society after they get out?

The point is not that private practice is always evil, but that so many who enter Harvard get turned away from their original goals. Seventy percent enter saying that they want to do public interest work; 95 percent leave to work in law firms, banks, and the like. This is quite a feat, especially at a time when, to hear conservatives tell it, academia is teeming with Marxists bent on tearing the system down. Harvard Law has its share of Marxoids, known there as proponents of Critical Legal Studies. But Kahlenberg shows--and this is probably his most important insight--how the Crits help create the corporate hired guns they deplore. Deconstructing the law, they deconstruct their students' idealism as well.

Fare Harvard

Much of this story has less to do with Harvard Law School than with the nature of the law itself. I went to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and it was nothing like the Harvard that Kahlenberg and others have described. It's about half the size, with about a third the pretense. The teaching was very, very good, and I never once felt intimidated or bullied. I was a mediocre student, yet one of my professors--a New Deal trustbuster, Louis B. Schwartz --took a personal interest in me and got me started in public interest work. To some extent, those who strive for the ultimate credential of a Harvard degree get what they deserve, and Kahlenberg isn't oblivious to this point. He's aware that the dread he feels at being called on in class and the overwhelming tension that grips him when the first-semester grades come out stem from the beast in him as well as the one in the school.

Yet even at the benign (at least for me) Penn, it was a lot easier to be drawn away from one's social convictions than to have them encouraged and reinforced. In ways hard to convey, the study of the law tends to diffuse the native sense of right and wrong. "Thinking like a lawyer" means thinking about the 49 things that don't much matter rather than the one that does. In my third year, I signed up for a course in corporate tax, not to become a tax lawyer, but because I thought tax would be a way to understand the workings of the coporate machine. In this spirit of espionage, I took my seat the first day. The professor was Bernard Wolfman, whom I vaguely knew to be involved in liberal causes. Yet we immediately plunged into the murky waters of corporate reorganizations, buy-outs, and the like, and never came up for air. I had no idea what the companies we studied produced or how the takeovers would affect localities and customers. I felt like a trainee in the engine room of a submarine, learning to attend to one gear while the sub plowed on to points and for purposes unknown. Even to raise questions about the social impact of these tax maneuvers would be unmanly. We were discussing important business here.