[This essay, in a slightly different version, appeared as "Troubled Beings: Reflections on Becoming a Lawyer, 26 U. Memphis L. Rev. 1303 (1996) (a symposium issue — "Law and Literature: A Collection of Essays on John Grisham's The Rainmaker]

First, something about the author. I confess to having gotten tripped up somewhere along the way. Lawyers, judges, law teachers and students of law often act as if they comprise a community of common interest, purpose, method, and knowledge. Legal education, as promoted by this imagined community focuses on law, judicial decisions, judges and courts, and client legal problems. They focus primarily on texts in which law can be found (judicial opinions, statutes, and other decisions of legal agencies). My problem, as I contemplate the intricacies of legal doctrine, puzzling over yet another judicial pronouncement in which a legal doctrine has been expanded or contracted, and the persistent search for legal rules, is that it all gets overdone. Legal "practices" and "education" get pursued in such a relentless, driven fashion that reflection and introspection and questions about what we do as lawyers are considered peripheral, a luxury to be taken up when the basics have been mastered. While every discipline and profession are organized around constitutive practices, methods, language, and knowledge, it is the assumptive trailing notions that accompany these constitutive activities that have become bothersome. By "trailing notion," I mean that unspoken assumption that our activities and practices are beyond question, need no further justification, and should not be subject to close scrutiny. Trailing notions are used to establish demarcations between central and peripheral, essential and marginal, established and faddish, unquestioned and questioned. Trailing notions become established by making (assuming) that an activity (and its associated support) is "first" and "foundational."

Many of the "trailing notions" that accompany traditional legal education have been subject to serious and sustained critique for over fifty years, while classical legal thinking has now been thoroughly scrutinized by scholars associated with Critical Legal Studies, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theorists, and legal narrativists. Contemporary legal scholarship is awash with critique of legal education. Literature and narrative, in particular, have emerged as a significant force in the critique genre. Rudy Baylor, the law student/lawyer protagonist in John Grisham's recent best-selling novel, The Rainmaker [New York: Doubleday, 1995], reminds us that popular culture and its "fictions" also offer a critical stance in their portrayal of legal actors who find the legal world, and legal education, problematic, if not pathological. Here, I want to take a closer look at Grisham's Rudy Baylor and the dim view he takes of legal education.

The Rainmaker begins with Rudy explaining why he became a lawyer:

My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession. I was a young teenager, clumsy, embarrassed by my awkwardness, frustrated with life, horrified of puberty, about to be shipped off to a military school by my father for insubordination. He was an ex-Marine who believed boys should live by the crack of the whip. I'd developed a quick tongue and an aversion to discipline, and his solution was simply to send me away. It was years before I forgave him. [1]

Rudy Baylor has found his way to the legal profession by way of what Freudians might refer to as psychic compensation. Baylor may be taking up law to register protest against his father. Unconsciously, he seems to be setting about to replace an absent, unloving father. Baylor observes that his father's work (as an industrial engineer) led him to hate lawyers and for unexplained reasons bring his anger home.

He'd spend eight hours haggling with them [lawyers], then hit the martinis as soon as he walked in the door. No hellos. No hugs. No dinner. Just an hour or so of continuous bitching while he slugged down four martinis then passed out in his battered recliner. [1]

Given this family dynamic, Rudy Baylor may, as the country song goes, "be looking for love in all the wrong places."

We might note here that Grisham has played with this theme of rebellion in an earlier work, A Time to Kill [Tarrytown, New York: Wynwood Press, 1989]. There, Grisham presents a lawyer who rebels against a family heritage and the Father.

For decades the Wilbanks family ruled Ford County. They were proud, wealthy people, prominent in farming, banking, politics, and especially law. All the Wilbanks men were lawyers, and were educated at Ivy League schools. They founded banks, churches, schools, and several served in public office. The firm of Wilbanks & Wilbanks had been the most powerful and prestigious in north Mississippi for many years.

Then came Lucien . . . . [B]y the third grade it was evident he would be a different Wilbanks . . . .

He never intended to practice law like his ancestors. He wanted to be a criminal lawyer, and the old firm's clientele had become strictly child abuses, the ugly cases no one else wanted. He wanted to be a civil rights lawyer and litigate civil liberties. But most of all, Lucien wanted to be a radical, a flaming radical of a lawyer with unpopular cases and causes, and lots of attention.

Rudy Baylor is not alone in turning to law for absent fathers. Charles Reich, in The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, expresses fondness, admiration, and awe of Justice Hugo Black, for whom he served as clerk. [Charles Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef 23-25 (New York: Random House, 1976)]. Black treated Reich like a son and became a surrogate father. More significantly, Justice Black is portrayed by Reich as not only a father figure, but a symbolic, mythically alluring Great Father who has the capacity, stature, and intellectual power to passionately embrace not just law, but justice and the panoply of ideals represented by the Constitution.

Justice William Douglas also befriended Charles Reich during his years in Washington, but unlike the benevolent Justice Black, Douglas was a wild, untamed Father, Father in a Dionysian mode. "He stood out among the bland figures of Washington like a sun among plastic reflectors. He seemed like a person from the wilds while others came from a habitat of cocktail lounges." [59]. In Douglas, Reich found, an "electrifying" person, a "figure of towering greatness." [60]. He found that "[h]e cared not a bit for manners, convention, amenities." [61]

Douglas, like Black, was a mythic figure: "Justice Douglas was the Sun God himself, radiating energy in all directions. He was the traveler, the ultimate explorer; he would go farther to the edges of the universe than all but a few individuals could go." [61]

Reckoning with an idealized Father image in the real world lives we live as lawyers weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of young men like Reich (and in a somewhat different way on young women) who are "looking for a father, looking for people as teachers and models, trying out the role of manhood." [22]

Reich, in search of "the highest standards," found in the lives of Justices Black and Douglas legal figures who become larger than life; they are for Reich both real and fictional, ordinary and mythic. Black and Douglas are characters fit for a novel.

Reich, like Rudy Baylor, and any of one us, sometimes finds it necessary to explain how he found his way into law. For Reich, law offered an opportunity to be at the center of the action, at the focal point of modern public life. There is much in the way of commerce, market, politics, religion, and even personal life that evolves around law, that makes it an offering so rich that law creates an illusion of centrality, as the center of public life in America. Rudy Baylor and Charles Reich, searching for love, look to a profession that promises a meaningful, exciting life, a life with glow (and glory), a life that will satisfy our needs for action and significance. Whether the expected rewards and promised sense of relevance and significance, power and glory, will be forthcoming is another matter. In all that is promised (or surmised), Law may promise more than it delivers, as Rudy Baylor will learn first hand.

One gets the sense that Grisham knows something about this misplaced search for love, or perhaps is drawn to the theme unaware. Rudy Baylor has had a "glorious affair" with Sara, who ditched him for an Ivy Leaguer, "a local blueblood." [The Rainmaker, at 24]. Filled with "heartache," Rudy Baylor is learning to go on. Mitch McDeere, another lawyer protagonist, in an earlier Grisham novel, The Firm, is a small-town, western Kentucky boy, who managed to succeed at Harvard Law School and is ready to capitalize on his hard work and educational success. Mitch McDeere has driven himself hard, hard enough that one suspects a strong psychological need to prove something to somebody (perhaps to his "missing" father). [Mitch McDeere's prospective employer has conducted an investigation into his personal life. They found that he "had been neglected, raised in poverty by his brother Ray...and some sympathetic relatives." The Firm, at 10]. Evidently, an unresponsive, unloving, missing father leaves a vacant hole in a son's psychic life that leave them hungry, a hunger translated, perhaps, into a strong desire for "success" that will proves something to the world and the absent, unloving father. Translations of loss and longing have been known to set one upon a search: father, Father, Great Father, Law, Sun God, Law Fathers. Rudy Baylor's crude musings on legal education are the fumblings of the nascent hero, in quest of the lost Father.

Law sets one upon a heroic journey, a mythic quest underwritten and plotted by psychological need. The legal world beckons those who would move from:

— periphery to center;
— devalued, discounted work to socially significant work;
— inaction to action;
— silence to speech;
— ineptness to competence;
— dependence to independence;
— vulnerable to empowered;
— unarmed to lethal;
— slave to master.

We seek out Law to get close to the center of action, to do socially significant work, to advocate (stand-forth, profess) and bask in the glow of the Sun gods, Fathers unloving or missing in action are recreated from fathers/gods we meet along the way. Law beckons those with an active zeal to succeed, those who fantasy an escape of the fates of fathers and mothers, even the fates of fathers and mothers who succeeded but paid too high a price. (Those who seek out law demand skills by which one can bargain with the Devil — and win). We come to Law to prove to ourselves and the world we are competent, strong, and virile, that success is possible where others have failed. Law is attractive to those with high-minded ideals, a sense of entitlement, and a touch of narcissism. Law is escape and haven, promise and possibility, security and order. Law, to those who arrive at its gates from the countryside, seems to offer a life lived in a field of dreams.

We get to be lawyers only by making our way through the eye of the needle — legal education. Rudy Baylor's disenchanted musings about legal education in The Rainmaker are a reminder that some students don't find legal education all that wonderful. We don't know what Rudy Baylor's teachers may have seen in him as a student, but we know what Baylor thought of legal education.

I will finish law school in May, a month from now, then I'll sit for the bar exam in July. I will not graduate with honors, though I'm somewhere in the top half of my class. The only smart thing I've done in three years of law school was to schedule the required and difficult courses early, so I could goof off in this, my last semester. My courses this spring are a joke — Sports Law, Art Law, Selected Readings from the Napoleonic Code and my favorite, Legal Problems of the Elderly. [The Rainmaker, at 2]

Rudy Baylor may be saying as much about himself in this passage as he is attempting to say about legal education. When Baylor describes the teacher of his "Geezer Law" course (a derogatory name bestowed upon Legal Problems of the Elderly by students), we begin to get a better idea of what has gone wrong for Baylor if not for legal education.

Professor Smoot, an oafish egghead complete with crooked bow tie, bushy hair and red suspenders, sat [at a meeting of his class with elder citizens they will represent] with the stuffed satisfaction of a man who'd just finished a fine meal, and lovingly admired the scene before us. He's a kindly soul, in his early fifties, but with mannerisms [akin to a senior citizen].... [F]or twenty years he's taught the kindly courses no one else wants to teach and few students want to take. Children's Rights, Law of the Disabled, Seminar on Domestic Violence, Problems of the Mentally Ill and, of course, Geezer Law, as this one is called outside his presence. He once scheduled a course to be called Rights of the Unborn Fetus, but it attracted a storm of controversy, so Professor Smoot took a quick sabbatical. [3-4]

Rudy Baylor sees Professor Smoot as a walking stereotype, a bleeding-heart liberal, a man who has made himself irrelevant to students. Its hard to say whether Professor Smoot deserves the disdain of his students. There are certainly law teachers who stake-out, in the autonomous world of a tenured law professors, idiosyncratic if not bizarre stances. Smoot may be as irrelevant as Baylor is alienated and cynical.

But Baylor makes a point about the man he is ridiculing which suggests that the basis for the ridicule of Smoot is not easily diagnosed. There is a moment of recognition and acceptance, when Baylor says of Smoot:

He explained to us on the first day of class that the purpose of the course was to expose us to real people with real legal problems. It's his opinion that all students enter law school with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after three years of brutal competition we care for nothing but the right job with the right firm where we can make partner in several years and earn big bucks. He's right about this. [4]

Rudy Baylor recognizes the truth of Professor Smoot's concern about what lies ahead for the young lawyers he teaches. Baylor and his law school colleagues may dismiss Professor Smoot as irrelevant because he bears a message that reminds them of compromised ideals. Smoot's students may simply not have the will or courage to do the psychological and political accounting that he demands of them. (Self-deception and denial are rampant in public life and in legal education. Introspection is easily postponed.) Smoot, one assumes, believes the costs of legal education should be acknowledged now rather than later, in law school rather than after one has staked a claim on the kind of success that big-time law firm practice promises.

Professor Smoot may have in mind heading off the kind of betrayal that lawyers experience when they follow well-trod, enticing paths that views idealism as unrealistic and dysfunctional. Charles Reich outlines the "bargain" lawyers are asked (and seem all too willing) to make:

At the time it did not seem strange to me that the path led away from happiness — toward hard, intense, unrewarding work or toward spending my life in situations that did not feel good. I accepted the doctrine that happiness was a reward for doing one's duty. I believed that if I did well at what society wanted me to do, I would receive happiness because society made good on its promises. I thought that A's in school and weekend work at the office would place me in a position to have the things I really wanted in life, a belief held by many of my generation. I worked at earning happiness, but it did not come. My plan was logical, but every year that I followed it, I found that the things I really wanted were yet further away. [Reich, supra, 21-22]

Barry Schwartz, in The Costs of Living (1994) describes a former student, Allen, who he meets when he returns for his tenth college reunion.

He came to my office looking healthy and prosperous. He was doing well at his (large, New York) law firm, and expected to make partner in another year or two. While he worked very hard, and didn't like all the clients he had to work for, his work was often interesting, and he knew that he was good at it. His wife, Nancy, enjoyed the same things, like the same people, had fun together, and rarely argued.... They owned a nice, though small condo on Third Avenue in Manhattan, and a spot for their car in a garage just two blocks away. In the summer, they had a share in a rental in Southhampton, a quarter mile from one of Long Island's more beautiful beaches. [Barry Schwartz, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life 17 (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1994)]

It sounds like a good enough life, a man enjoying a success he deserves. But, it turns out, all is not well. Schwartz says, "there was a dullness in his eyes and a weariness in his voice...." [Id]. When Schwartz suggests that he must love his work, Allen makes clear that "love" is not the word he would use. Schwartz reports that Allen

wasn't sure that he was really doing anything especially worthwhile. Mostly he just helped rich people get richer or larger corporations get larger. He rarely felt, at the end of a day, that he had spent his time making the world a better place, and he had thought, when he started to law school, that he would sometimes get to do that. [18]

Julia Keifer, the fictional protagonist in Lowell Komie's wonderful short story, "The Cornucopia of Julia K.," is thirty-two, and senior enough in her firm to serve as lead counsel in major securities litigation. On her way to a conference on one of her cases, she sees her face reflected in the doors of an elevator:

The fragile, white, enamel face, a perfectly made-up geisha, gray eyes, lavender lipstick. She was very, very tired. Little drops of perspiration were coming to her forehead and her legs were weak underneath the leather boots. She didn't want to go to another boring conference on another meaningless securities case. She wanted to be on a hidden beach somewhere with a straw hat over her face and the sun burning down on her breasts. ["The Cornucopia of Julia K." in Lowell B. Komie, The Judge's Chambers 43-52, at 47 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987)]["The Cornucopia of Julia K.," is also collected in The Legal Fiction of Lowell B. Komie (Chicago: Swordfish/Chicago, 2005) [on-line text]

After the conference, Julia returns to her office, where she has an interview with a young woman who wants to join the firm. When asked why she wants to be a lawyer, Ms. Bascomb, the young applicant says, "I think I really want to help people." [51]. Julia tells her that Connaught, Marquis, and Schlaes "is a bad place to help people . . . . We don't help people here." When the young woman doesn't respond, Julia goes on to tell her: "This firm of eighty-five men and three women is not exactly the cutting edge of the legal profession, Ms. Bascomb . . . . We help hamburger corporations and toilet paper manufacturers, but we don't help people." [52]. When Ms. Bascomb observes that she thinks Ms. Kiefer's partnership in the firm is an accomplishment, Julia tells her "Don't be beguiled." [Id].

Charles Reich, in The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, takes the beguiling edge off the Law Firm World. "We sat at desks piled high with work, confident enough that we are going to bring home a great heap of happiness one day. What we did not tell one another was the fact that we had not found what we wanted." [Reich, supra, at 22]. Reich's description of Law Firm life as pathological was an early warning of what has turned out to be an era of disaffected lawyers.

Mitch McDeere, the lawyer protagonist in Grisham's earlier novel, The Firm rushes toward the big money thrown at him by a Memphis firm, seeking the biggest financial package his elite law school success makes possible. Mitch McDeere's financial windfall turns out to be costly in a way that only an inventive novelist could imagine. Rudy Baylor will, by a stroke of good fortune (unrecognized at the time), be spared the opportunity to experience the glories and pathologies of the Law Firm World painted so vividly by Charles Reich and with fictional extravagance by Grisham in The Firm.

The sincerity of Professor Smoot's concern and the truth of his observations do not spare him the contempt of students. The life Professor Smoot fears for his students is the life Baylor and his colleagues assume will not befall them; they will succeed notwithstanding the failure of those who have gone before them. (They are, after all, on a heroic quest disguised as it is in alienation.) Being told what we don't want to hear and don't have a willingness to confront is not a situation likely to result in deep affection;. There is in Smoot and his students the making of a tragic mismatch, youth and elder, folly and wisdom. Indeed, for those on the fast-track, seeking to take up life in the Law Firm World of imagined privileges, honors, and rewards, Professor Smoot must seem an obstacle (and an unnecessary one). He stands, rhetorically, against the power and glory and self-satisfaction that his students seek and assume they will secure by way of merit. Professor Smoot stands an "oafish" gatekeeper in the way of what his students thank they want and foolishly assume they deserve.

Look at the way students respond to Professor Smoot's concerns:

The class [in elderly law] is not a required one, and we started with eleven students. After a month of Smoot's boring lectures and constant exhortations to forsake money and work for free, we'd been whittled down to four. It's a worthless course, counts for only two hours, requires almost no work, and this is what attracted me to it. But, if there were more than a month left, I seriously doubt I could tough it out. At this point, I hate law school. And I have grave concerns about the practice of law. [The Rainmaker, at 4]

Rudy Baylor's law study at the fictional Memphis State is getting ready to end with something far more serious than a disregard for liberal politics and a professor who attempts, in his courses and lectures, to remind students of the idealism they bring with them to the study of law. Baylor has learned to "hate" law school and one suspects, notwithstanding the negative psychological projection that ensnarls Professor Smoot, it is not liberal law teaching that drives young men and women like Rudy Baylor to despair, but an inability and unwillingness to boldly confront the map of the world sketched out by Smoot and offered to his students.

One wonders whether Rudy Baylor's cynical views of legal education are not linked more to his self-contempt and the "grave concerns" he harbors about his future than to the quality of legal education at Grisham's fictional Memphis State, or for that matter, the legal education one might get at the real Memphis State. For Rudy Baylor, as so many students, there is a threatening disparity and incongruity between the tough, hard, practical, straight (black-letter) law he and his anxious fellow students crave and the growing realization that what they want to do with "straight" law may not be possible, will not get them where they want to go, what they want to do, who they want to be. Indeed, there are signs to suggest that becoming a lawyer is not a straight, well-lighted, pathway to success, but a loopy, precipitous path that poses obstacles and real dangers. The journey is beset by incivility among fellow travelers, disdain by the locals one meets along the way, and serious debilitating bouts of anxiety, depression, and burn-out. Most people slow a car down in foggy, inclement weather. Law students, in defiance of common-sense, and in disregard of professors like Smoot, charge ahead into the Law Firm World as if they an answer to silent prayers.

Rudy Baylor's ridicule of Smoot cannot erase the contrast between Smoot's sincerity and his own sense of falseness. When Professor Smoot addresses the elderly citizens he has brought his class of four to represent:

His voice is sincere, and there's no doubt in my mind that Professor Howard L. Smoot indeed feels privileged to be here at this moment, in the center of this depressing building [of the Cypress Gardens Senior Citizens Building], before this sad little group of old folks, with the only four students who happen to remain in his class. Smoot lives for this. [The Rainmaker, at 6]

In contrast to Smoot's sense of belonging, Rudy Baylor's first efforts at lawyering, made possible, paradoxically, by Professor Smoot, reflects the opposite of sincerity, conviction, and being where one belongs:

This is my first confrontation with actual clients, and I'm terrified. Though the prospects sitting out there are aged and infirm, they are staring at me as if I possess great wisdom. I am, after all, almost a lawyer, and I wear a dark suit, and I have this legal pad in front of me on which I'm drawing squares and circles, and my face is fixed in an intelligent frown, so I must be capable of helping them. [4]

Baylor observes that his friend Booker, working with one of the senior citizens, "takes notes like a real lawyer and listens intently as if he knows exactly what to do." [6]

In working with first-year law students in an interviewing and counseling course, I have noticed how much the students, in the role-play exercises, seek to talk, act and conduct themselves like lawyers. There was a seriousness of purpose in their voice when they addressed clients and an effort to sound like lawyers as they elicited the facts they would need to decide the nature of the client's problem and an appropriate response. I watched as they labored, at times with difficulty, to play the lawyer role. And there were times when the students' mimicry of this imagined role created a ring of pronounced falsity to their efforts. It was the kind of falsity that comes from putting on the "intelligent frown" Rudy Baylor employs when he knows he does not have the wisdom he is assumed by clients to possess. [4]

The falsity Rudy Baylor observes in himself is the kind of falsity we perpetrate in legal education when we create a world in which students "dress-up" for law firm interviews, return to their apartments after an interview and "dress-down" for class. One of the interview rooms at the law school where I teach is located on a hallway I walk. I marvel at the fact that the interview "dress" routine takes place in our midst as if it were the most natural of activities, an activity beyond question.

Students, of course, don't see it as an occasion for fancy dress when they participate in the most serious intellectual discourse of their new professional lives, when they engage in dialogues that will literally "make" them lawyers. Students don't wear "regimental" dress for the classroom or visits to teachers. They dress in interviewee uniforms to please and placate visitors from the Law Firm World, the world in which they seek to gain a toehold and live a life.

For education and the life of the mind T-shirts and jeans, baseball caps (worn backwards in the classroom) are sufficient; the gates of the Law Firm World open to those who wear the uniform. Only those in appropriate attire will be allowed to enter and take up the privileges of the Law Firm World.

Rudy Baylor ultimately gets around to making a claim about legal education that looks more systemic than personal.

Law school is nothing but three years of wasted stress. We spend countless hours digging for information we'll never need. We are bombarded with lectures that are instantly forgotten. We memorize cases and statutes which will be reversed and amended tomorrow. [20]

An earlier Grisham creation, lawyer Jake Brigance, the central character in A Time to Kill, also had things to say about legal education. Brigance, at thirty-two, is a model of the successful, small-town lawyer. He is married, has a young daughter, a dog, and lives in a mortgaged 19th century Victorian on the National Register of Historic Places. Jake Brigance's success has not diluted bad memories of law school. During the long, bone-weary days of defending Carl Lee Hailey (in a trial that provides the center-piece of the novel), Jake remembers law school as a time when:

he and his friends would either group in their favorite bar in Oxford and guzzle happy-hour beer and debate their new-found theories of law or curse the insolent, arrogant, terroristic law professors, or, if the weather was warm and sunny, pile the beer in Jake's well-used convertible Beetle and head for the beach at Sardis lake, where the women from sorority row plastered their beautiful, bronze bodies with oil and sweated in the sun and coolly ignored the catcalls from the drunken law students and fraternity rats. He missed those innocent days. He hated law school — every law student with any sense hated law school — but he missed the friends and good times, especially the Fridays. He missed the pressureless lifestyle, although at times the pressure had seemed unbearable, especially during the first year when the professors were more abusive than normal. [A Time to Kill, at 234-235]

Jake Brigance thinks that any right-thinking student hates law school. When Rudy Baylor tells his friend Booker that he hates law school, Booker tells him, "You're normal." [The Rainmaker, at 21]

Baylor's proposed alternative to the legal education he hates is training with a good lawyer. Baylor sees in the quiet confidence of his friend, Booker, who is able to present himself convincingly as a lawyer, a model of what happens when legal education takes place in law offices rather than the classroom. "Booker [working with one of the elder citizens that Professor Smoot's students will represent] takes notes like a real lawyer and listens intently as if he knows exactly what to do." [6]. Booker is able to do what Rudy cannot, according to Rudy, because he has worked throughout law school with lawyers rather than law professors.

Rudy Baylor, in his disparagement of legal education, speaks for a significant number of students, who would find law more congruent with their intellectual tastes if it were taught like a construction trade. We should, Rudy Baylor, would have us believe, learn to be lawyers the way one would become a carpenter, plumber, or electrician. The proposal seems constantly to haunt us in legal education.

Rudy Baylor's anxiety about his abilities to act as a lawyer are linked to a perceived failure of educational method and content. Here, Rudy Baylor speaks for those who believe that lawyers are ill-equipped during law school to take up the practical work that lawyers do. Rudy Baylor's views of legal education are not all that uncommon. Many law students, practical in their intellectual orientation, view "theory" (public policy, jurisprudence, history, political theory, literary criticism, political analysis) as a waste of time. Students share Baylor's distinction between courses that teach "practical information" and help them get ready to do what real lawyers do and courses which provide insight into policy, the legal system and the legal profession.

Baylor's views represent one of the polar positions in a long-standing struggle in legal education between the practical and the theoretical, professional training and liberal education. Both Rudy Baylor and Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill traffic in stock, conventional responses to the fault-line they experience first-hand but do not understand or make an effort to explore. Grisham leaves Baylor and Brigance in the dark about their feelings about law school. Rudy Baylor attributes his anxiety to an impractical legal education rather than the seismic shifts along a fault-line he does not see.

Legal education may be seriously flawed — as I suspect it is — but the practicalist suggestion that legal education can best be done in law offices is seriously misguided. For the flawed, troubled world of legal education, an education guided by those who have given us the Law Firm World is no answer. Indeed, to have legal education conducted in law offices would turn a blind eye to the values and cultures represented in the contemporary Law Firm World. We would have simply traded one problematic form of education for another.

There is, according to some observers, a growing disjuncture between the traditionalists and contemporary law teachers, a disjuncture that neither Rudy Baylor or Jake Brigance (in A time to Kill) explore. The "new" law teacher finds legal education troubling and sees law as an "integrative" discipline. Even conservative scholars like Richard Posner contend that law is no longer (if it was ever) an autonomous discipline. When those who teach a discipline have no faith in its autonomy, they have no choice but to re-imagine law. For some, law gains integrity by acknowledgment of its position at the cross-roads of history and philosophy, liberal arts and social sciences. Such relocations, common to the post-modern era, are accompanied by uncertainties and anxieties. When the center is invaded, successfully, legal education takes place in a world where all but the most devoted traditionalists are practitioners of doubt. Rudy Baylor, in his cynical disdain for Professor Smoot, reflects the anxiety of a student who cannot understand a world in which marginal and peripheral affairs compete for loyalties now divided.

Traditionalists come in a variety of forms. Some traditionalists in legal education devote themselves to prescribed activities (reading judicial opinions, surveying legal doctrine, arguing for broad and narrow readings of legal rules/ precedents/ decisions/ statutes) and assume that the reason to become a lawyer is to devote a life to knowing rules, statutes, legal decisions, and the means of deploying them on behalf of paying clients. Other traditionalists see law as the center piece of an ideal, civil, egalitarian society. The lawyer in this vision of lawyering is a local statesman. Anthony Kronman, dean of the Yale Law School, and others argue that we have entered a perilous time with the passing of those lawyers who loved law deeply and acted as statesmen within the legal arena.

But those who carry on today, in the name of tradition, do not impress me as doing so out of devotion to a conception of lawyers as statesmen, with law serving the greater public interest. Contemporary traditionalists are little more than instrumentalists, prepared to place their services at the behest of anyone who can pay the fee, for whatever purposes a client may seek, regardless of harm to others and community.

If the Law Firm World comes to be dominated by instrumentalists, then law cannot be a way to rise above the din of market-place rhetorics and realities, a social world of consumptive insignificance. When students of law are driven by practical concerns and have no affinity for the statesman ideal, they will find professors like Smoot not only irrelevant but will brand them as incompetent and make them targets for ridicule. Even, the post-modernists in legal education might have something to puzzle over in all this.

I assume there are lines of inquiry and exploration that might bridge the disjuncture between traditionalists (with their lawyer as statesman ideal and their personal love of law) and contemporary legal scholars driven by multiple visions of reality and doubt about a legalistic-oriented social order. Rudy Baylor (as a student) and Jake Brigance (as a practicing lawyer) offer no help in locating this bridge or promoting two-way traffic across it.

<1> For an interesting biographical account of a young woman's psychological journey into law, see Polly Nelson, Defending the Devil: My Story and Ted Bundy's Last Lawyer 12-17 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994)

<2> In most law schools we have a fair number of students who find their way to law school because their fathers were lawyers. (In another decade or so we will begin seeing law students whose mothers were lawyers and judges.) I don't know that anyone has paid much attention to these students raised by fathers and mothers who were lawyers. Do we know what kind of carriers of tradition they might be? If the statesman ideal (or some living equivalent of it) was manifest in an earlier generation of lawyers, how will the daughters and sons of this older generation of lawyers (who practiced when lawyers were more civil, less driven by the billable hour, more accepting of their role as counselor) respond to the modern pressures and anxieties of lawyer? Will they accommodate themselves to the new world of legal practice or remember and reconstruct a future for human scale practices of their parents?

<3> Law, an expression of hope, ideal, and dream, creates an order at once worldly (profane) and mythic (sacred).

<4> Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the lawyer monologist in Albert Camus's novel, The Fall 44, 45 (New York: Vintage Books, 1956) (1956) has some interesting things to say about the continuing need for slaves:

I am well aware that one can't get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing — you agree with me? .... The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he's unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back . . . . Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything.

Clamence suggests we have all become slaves of Law, that Law has become designated Master of us all. ("We shall be a nation of laws not of men.") ("No man is above the law.") My colleague, Charles DiSalvo, has for many years taught a seminar on Civil Disobedience. I don't know much about what he seeks to do or teach in that seminar, but I imagine the course has something to say about Law being our Master. I assume that Civil Disobedience points to a different conception of the world, a world in which conscience, moral principle, religious belief, and commitments are held forth as ways to disorder Law as Master, to which we must bow like Slaves.

There is still another possibility in Clamence's commentary on slavery — that Law draws those into its fold who would be spokespersons for Law our Master. Speaking for the Master one might assume to have avoided the degradations of slavery. To be in the Master's house, we can assume (momentarily) that we are not Slaves.

<5> One might say that Rudy Baylor (The Rainmaker), Mitch McDeere (A Time to Kill), and Charles Reich (The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef) are each in their own way visitors from the countryside, seeking admission to the heavenly city (Law). The imagery evoked here is suggested by Franz Kafka's powerful and perplexing parable of the countryman who arrives to seek admission to Law and is kept, quite mysteriously, from entering, by an ominous gatekeeper. [Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces 148-150 (New York: Schocken Paperback ed., 1976) (1948)]. The countryman awaits entry until his death and is told, "this gate was made only for you. I am now [with your death and failure to gain entry] going to shut it." [Id. at 150]. The psychological, heartfelt entry to law may be far more difficult to make than we are willing to admit. Legal narrativists (and those to whom this sticky label might be attached), make the difficulty of entry to the great city of professional life central to their concern about modern professional life. [For a version of the difficulty, see Louise Harmon and Deborah Post, Cultivating Intelligence: Power, Law, and the Politics of Teaching (1996)]. For narrativists and other post-modernists, we are all countrysiders standing at the gate of Law which is being closed as we speak.

<6> Charting the underlying rationale for students collective response to teachers is difficult. In contrast to the ridiculed Professor Smoot, Rudy Baylor reports that students "love" Professor Max Leuberg, who Rudy describes as "the visiting Communist professor" who had a "passionate hatred of insurance companies." [The Rainmaker, at 24]. "Leuberg would get so angry [at insurance companies and trial lawyers and ignorant juries] he'd throw books at the wall. We loved him." [Id. at 25]

If we interpret Rudy Baylor and his colleagues' disdain of Professor Smoot as a clash between conservative and liberal politics, the interpretation gets up-ended in the students' admiration of Professor Leuberg. Leuberg's politics is far to the left of Smoot's but he seems to have a style that students find attractive. Leuberg "hates formalities" and insists on being called Max. [Id. at 26]. In contrast to "stuffy academics who wear ties to class and lecture with their coats buttoned," "Max hasn't worn a tie in decades. And he doesn't lecture. He performs." [Id. at 27]. "He wears faded jeans, environmentally provocative sweatshirts and old sneakers. If it's cold, he'll sometimes wear socks." [Id. at 25]. Leuberg has explained to his class

That he at one time wore Converse, but is now boycotting the company because of a recycling policy. He wages his own personal little war against corporate America, and buys nothing if the manufacturer has in the slightest way miffed him. He refuses to insure his life, health or assets, but rumor has it his family is wealthy and thus he can afford to venture about uninsured. [Id. at 26-27]

One begins to wonder, given this description, how it is that Leuberg comes to be so "adored" while Smoot is collectively held in disdain. It must not, as one might have thought, be simply a matter of politics. Student affections must not turn on whether the teacher has in mind preparing them for the Real World, a world in which, Rudy Baylor says, professors couldn't function and they end up teaching. [Id. at 43]. Rudy Baylor does seek out Professor Leuberg when he thinks one of his elder law course clients has a case against an insurance company. But it was Professor Smoot who introduced Rudy Baylor and his practicalist colleagues to real clients in his Legal Problems of the Elderly course. The only reason Baylor gives for students' adoration of Leuberg is that he "always takes time to listen." [Id. at 25]

<7> Scott Turow, another lawyer turned novelist, observes that "to a surprising extent, lawyers often do not like themselves." Scott Turow, "Law School v. Reality," New York Times Magazine, September 18, 1988, p. 52. Rudy Baylor's disdain for legal education may be a prelude to what lies ahead. Turow, writing in the late 1980's found that "[m]any lawyers do not like to practice; they regard themselves as imprisoned in gilded cages; highly paid, well regarded, and unhappy." Id. at 52, 68. The situation, from what one reads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and bar publications, has grown even more problematic since Turow offered his observations.

<8> "In a given setting, to put on a costume [as law students do] composed of the conventional elements of dress is to produce a sign, in the same way that to speak a word is to produce a sign." [Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity 164 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)]. In popular fiction, a lawyer's dress is, as Kennedy observes, a sign. D.T. Jones, the lawyer protagonist in Stephen Greenleaf's, The Ditto List 11 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), comments on a colleague's dress: "Jerome's clothes betrayed his mind. His shirt was white and his shoes were shined, and his suit lay on him like a tan. A pristine inch of handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket, a campaign ribbon from a bloodless war." Greenleaf portrays a different mind-set, and a different sign in the description of D.T. Jones' "dress" on the day he meets his colleague, Jerome:

The clock read 8:45. D.T. swallowed a dwindling chip of a Cloret, unbuckled his thirty-two-inch belt, unzipped his thirty-four- inch slacks, stuffed the ends of his crew-neck T-shirt and the tails of his oxfordcloth button-down back below his waist, then redid his slacks and donned his size thirty-eight long side-vented blazer with the missing sleeve button and the cigarette burn above the left side pocket, snugged his challis necktie more firmly around his fifteen- inch neck, and forced the slightly frayed cuffs of his thirty-six-inch sleeves out of sight . . . . [Id. at 4]

D.T. Jones, was "[d]ressed the way he had dressed for twenty years . . . ." [Id.].

Chuckie Bishop, the lawyer in Walter Walker's novel, A Dime to Dance By 10-11 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) (1983) is given a lecture on dress "signs" by a colleague Sid Silverman:

Shoes can tell a lot about a guy, and people recognize that, even if they don't put it in so many words. Like, a guy can dress up or dress down to meet whatever occasion he's going to and you can tell what his taste is and maybe you can even guess how much money he's got, but what you don't know is maybe somebody gave him those clothes for a present, or bought them for him. Or maybe he's just been to the place before and he knows what kind of clothes they wear and went out and got some just so he'd fit in — you know, like those shirts with the alligator on them. If you don't go to that place again you can always wear the shirt with the alligator someplace else, right. But shoes aren't like that. First of all, nobody ever gives anybody else a pair of shoes. Even a wife doesn't go out and buy a pair of shoes for her husband. Secondly, shoes can be real expensive, so most people aren't gonna buy a pair just for one type of occasion unless they're athletic shoes or something. It's not like a shirt, where you don't have to worry too much about getting your money's worth, and it's not like a suit, which you don't mind leaving it in your closet forever because you know that sooner or later you're gonnna need it again. Shoes you gotta be comfortable with. They gotta be comfortable on your feet and they gotta be useful to have around. What I'm trying to say is, they gotta be appropriate for the things you do. At least that's what everybody thinks. So the best way I know of to make a silent statement is with your shoes.