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

But with the exception of Robert Coles, who isn't a lawyer, and Alan Morrison, Nader's top litigator, who taught a course at Harvard (and who was making $40,000 a year when he probably could have been making 10 times that in private practice), few of these people really push the moral question. For the most part, the school functions as an enabler, providing students with the self-justifications and spiritual numbness they will need when moving on to Blow, Blow & Blow. During his first year, Kahlenberg attends a meeting with the school's public interest adviser (a position since eliminated), who cites estimates from Cutler: 95 percent of the nation's legal time is spent serving the wealthiest 10 percent, 5 percent on the poor through legal services, and virtually nothing on the 160 million Americans in the middle.

"I almost raised my hand to ask why Lloyd Cutler's Washington law firm spends thousands of dollars every year recruiting law students to represent the wealthiest clients if Cutler was really so disturbed," Kahlenberg writes. "But I thought it might be impolite."

Crits and bloods

The Crits are not much better than the rest. They begin with a valid theoretical point: The law is not neutral and objective, but rather reflects the economic interests and power relations that give rise to it. (So what's new?) But where a Nader goes out into the world and tries to right the balance, the Crits write arcane pieces for law reviews, all the while enjoying the handsome salaries and prestige of an institution with which they profess fundamental disagreement. The effect on students is a nihilism that encourages them to just shrug their shoulders and think, "What the hell?"

Kahlenberg's account gibes with my own experience teaching magazine writing at New York University. Contrary to what I expected, my students were acutely tuned into problems of poverty, the environment, and so forth. If anything, they were more informed and sophisticated than I was at their age. But many were also jaded, as though by a surfeit of bad news. I began to wonder if the innocence of the fifties hadn't done us early Baby Boomers a favor, by giving us a naive faith in America that enabled us to feel personally violated--and therefore moved to action--when we discovered things were otherwise. For these kids there seemed to be no such discovery, and hence much less sense of violation.

Kahlenberg is at his best when he confronts dilemmas that may on the Left can't muster the honesty to acknowledge. He confesses to twinges of resentment at affirmative action, for example, when he realizes that the minority students standing in line with him to pick up packets for a law review competition are starting with an automatic leg up. In America, cops and other blue-collar workers are much more likely to taste the bitter side of affirmative action than liberal lawyers are, and Kahlenberg grasps the political implication. (The thing he admired most about Robert Kennedy was his ability to speak to blue-collar concerns with a progressive populism that was very different from the elitist liberalism he finds at Harvard.)