A student asks me to review a short writing for Lawyers and Literature. I ask him what he would like me to do as a reader. He says: "I don't know whether I have found a good theme or not. Perhaps, you can read it and let me know what you think."

I tell the student that he has in fact identified a theme from the stories we have been reading and that there is no reason the theme he has identified can't be woven into a thoughtful, instructive, reflective essay. Moreover, it appears that the theme has special resonance for him and one hopes this will make the writing easier (although there are no guarantees).

While the student has identified a powerful and writeable theme, I have some concern about the writing he has submitted to me. The statements made about the stories are simply too pro forma and reductive to be of much help. They establish only that the student has read the story, but not how or why these stories are being read, or what value they might have to the student or to any other reader. The problem is that they don't reflect much engagement with the stories.

From what I can see in the writing, the student talks in a most cursory way about the stories and then begins writing about his own situation, at which point the stories completely disappear. It is unclear how the stories have informed the student's reflections. At one point there is a discussion about lawyers as insiders and outsiders, and the student concludes: "Some people are natural insiders whatever their profession, while others must be content to be outsiders." The conclusion doesn't follow from the stories we have been writing, indeed the stories seem to suggest otherwise, but there is no reference to any conflict between the stories and the conclusion. How, one wonders, can the insider/outsider theme in stories/literature have any bearing on lawyers as insiders and outsiders if we are simply living out our genetic inheritance? How can literature matter if we are by force of nature relegated to outsider status? And isn't it an odd use of the word natural to suggest that some of us have been relegated to alienation and suffering as outsiders? Some of us may find our place--inside and outside—as natural, but for others it will be experienced as forced, as quite unnatural. Some relegated to a life as outsiders will be forever discontent. While some will only fume and fuss and complain as outsiders, others will angrily rage against this fate. (Is there anything natural about fate?) Some outsiders become rebels and revolutionaries.

The student mentions some "internal baggage" that follows his desire to be an insider, of having gotten to places where he thought he would be an insider and then found that he was not. But again, this claim is not given any substance. When you say you have "all this internal baggage" the reader must feel the weight of it, must be given some sense of how it pulls you down, slows you down, how it bothers and annoys you. Otherwise, "all this internal baggage" exists just as words on the page.

The basic point is that this student's conclusions don't fit either the stories (Kafka's "Before the Law, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," The Fall, The Second Coming). Indeed, the arguments in the paper don't seem to fit the student's own diagnosis of the situation. For example, he begins the essay by noting that "Those on the inside have achieved a certain level of success, yet they remain encumbered by the same fears, insecurities, and other human frailties that are common to us all." I don't understand how this squares with the conclusion that some folks are just "natural insiders." If they are natural insiders one might assume they would have less insecurity and fear, but then, it's not clear what distinguishes insiders and outsiders. I would think that fear and insecurity might be different for insiders and outsiders--present perhaps for each, but experienced differently.

I would assume that we don't all suffer the same kind of fear and insecurity. Atticus Finch doesn't seem to be in the same condition as Ivan Ilych, indeed, they seem to exist in rather different universes. Or compare Atticus Finch and Jean Baptiste-Clamence. Indeed, I think Will Barrett, for all his musing about his life, and his peculiar symptoms, is in a rather different situation than Ivan Ilych. Will Barrett is full of existential questions and reconfigures his life to take account of his reflections. Ilych, on the other hand, experiences fear which is ultimately uncontainable. While Will Barrett enters a period of confusion and uncertainty, we watch (and learn) from his emergence from the fog that has enveloped his life. Is it possible that Ivan Ilych and Will Barrett suffer from the same fear and insecurity? Doubtful. The fear that Ilych's suffers carries him virtually to death--there is, we surmise a moment of recognition before death that some answer or relief has been found. Barrett goes down into his depression and survives by charting a "third way"; he accepts neither the mindless insanity of his culture or the path of suicide which his father has taken. We don't know whether Will Barrett will ever be free of his bouts of despair, but we know that he will prevail in a way that Ivan Ilych cannot. We may not know what lies ahead for Will Barrett, but a case can be made for the proposition that Barrett is heading for a life far different than Clamence's stunted performances for patrons in an Amsterdam bar.

And where, one wonders, is the student going with the following statement? "Those on the inside have achieved a certain level of success, yet they remain encumbered by the same fears, insecurities, and other human frailties that are common to us all." I don't see where you can go by lumping insiders with the mass of humanity. The statement is just true enough to disguise the fact that it doesn't work. This lumping/sameness/"we're all alike move" has a certain rhetorical power when used in the right situation--e.g, when Scout reminds Walter Cunningham who has joined the lynch mob at the jail who has set out to abduct and kill Tom Robinson, that he has been to their house and that she knows his son. There is, of course, more benign uses of the move. For example, Atticus tells Scout when she asks him whether they are poor, that indeed they are, he but goes on to explain what he means. Sometimes, the we-are-all-in-the-same-boat move is just a way of saying I really haven't thought this matter through and can't explain it and yet I must write something and here it is. For example, law students, during their first semester of law school will sometimes write about the comforting feeling that they are all in the same boat together. They take comfort in solidarity. The comfort and the sense of solidarity (when it exists) comes to a thudding end when grades are published and the happy family becomes tribes of have's and have not's.)

When the student goes on to write about his need to be an insider, he makes it sound like going to the laundry to pick up clothes. I didn't get a sense from the writing there was any feeling or any weight attached to the words. The student writes: "[B]eing in law school while having grave doubts about practicing law is a miserable experience." Maybe it is. I assume it is for the writer of these works. But as a writer, if you want a reader to follow your claim, you must make the claim real and words something more than assertion. I don't doubt the truth of what is being said, but then, as I read on, I begin to actually question the claim. When the language that follows presents a contrary feeling tone and impression, then the claim about law school being a "miserable experience" loses its presumed legitimacy. The words of the claim must be argued, or demonstrated, or evidenced. Assertions don't carry as much weight as demonstrations. As a reader I want to believe in what a writer writes, but writers, like characters in fiction are sometimes unreliable narrators of their own lives. But how can I know what the writer is doing (or trying to be), if his language fails him? As the reader, I want to be sufficiently convinced of this student's misery that I could defend it, and my conviction that it portrays a kind of narrative truth.

A similar concern is raised by the student's statement that he finds reading the stories assigned in the course "utterly enjoyable." I like the term "utterly enjoyable." He doesn't say "very" enjoyable. We tend to overuse the word very and in trying to make our language more emphatic, we weaken and dilute it. The word "utterly" provides a surprising and energetic lift to an essay that has been on the short side of flat. While I am enthusiastic about the use of the word "utter," I begin, along the way, to wonder whether it was not just a fortunate phrase. And why did I lose faith in the expressed enjoyment? There was much but the phrase to pin my hopes on. The writer didn't actually say much at all about his actual reading of particular stories, and didn't point to particular passages in any of the stories that made the reading enjoyable. The reader is asked to assume on assertion standing alone that there was some enjoyment to be had. But how can the claim be credited by the reader when the writer hasn't spoken more fully about his reading and what happened during the engagement with the stories? Doesn't the assertion that the stories were "utterly enjoyable" need to be presented in a way so that the reader can experience along with the writer some of this enjoyment?

A student from the "Lawyers and Literature" course has scheduled an appointment to meet with me to talk about the draft of her course paper. She has presented me with a nine page paper draft which reads like a high school book report (and a boring one at that). I don't know how our conversational meeting will go, but from experience, I know they often go badly. I am determined, as always, to make the discussion as productive and positive as possible but there are some students who are so anxious about doing well in the course and making good grades that it is difficult to talk to them in a meaningful way.

In rereading Rebecca's draft paper, I find that the paper is nine pages long. A paper of this length (and quality) could be written by most students in the course of a few hours. I am puzzled at how any student, could assume that a paper of such brevity would suffice for 3 hours credit in a professional school. I don't know enough about Rebecca's educational history and will not have an opportunity to learn enough in our meeting to determine what kind of education might have prompted this situation.

I am afraid that Rebecca, like some of her colleagues, has simply assumed that in a course like "Lawyers and Literature" any writing they do will be sufficient to receive a respectable grade. I have actually had students say, in one way or another, "I mean, really, how can anyone evaluate what I write, when I am talking about stories and about life." They assume that by reading the stories and reducing them to simplistic plots with "this is what I think" tag lines, they have done all they can rightfully be expected to do.

This notion that in literary matters there are no standards for evaluative judgment would be a surprise to students in a graduate program in English literature. (Indeed, isn't the very idea of "literature" or indeed , any student's reading based on evaluative judgment?) While the standards for evaluating a literary work (or any work of art) may be more complex than that of a law professor evaluating an essay examination in Constitutional Law, one must assume that there are, indeed standards and that the determination is not pure subjectivity. The idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder is as true as any truism, but like most truisms it distorts a complex phenomenon. We evaluate and make judgments about art and literary works in much the same fashion as we do arguments in Constitutional Law. We judge some literary works to have the mark of greatness (and make them "classics") and some we know (or believe we know) to have little or no lasting value. (We assume, do we not, that many works of popular fiction will be read when first published and then disappear?) We can and do, evaluate, judge, and offer honorary prizes for excellence in literary writing, just as we reward some legal writing in law school. Is there an element of subjectivity in the evaluations and decisions regarding literary work? Yes. But then, most students realize, and sometimes register complaints about, the subjectivity of teacher evaluations based on essay examinations and even objective tests. There is, as you may know, a substantial subjective factor, in even the most objective test. (There is much writing and debate about the subjective element of tests like the SAT, LSAT, and medical school entrance test).

Many of the students who talk with me about the evaluations of their writing assume that reading the assigned stories and presenting some version of the plot, along with a statement as to whether they "liked" or "disliked" the stories, will suffice. I haven't learned how to sufficiently impress upon students that reading is more than the physical act of getting from one end of the story to the other, more than the physical act of following words on a printed page, naming the characters in the story, and outlining the plot, and how the story ends. Reading involves interpretation and understanding, juxtaposition and synthesis, questions and puzzlement.

I have tried, in the course, the selection of readings, and the commentary presented in the syllabus, to alert students to the idea that: Writing about lawyer stories must reach beyond an extended book report. I assume that in literary writing extreme brevity is not a virtue. Students tempted to present papers of less than 20 pages should reevaluate their work or present it to the instructor for review prior to submission. Be aware that neither expository or introspective/reflective writing lend themselves to summary statement. (Some students write course papers the way they write final examinations.) If your writing reads like syllabus points for a judicial opinion, it is probably not the best style of writing for this course. Legal writing encourages (and appropriately so), brevity and directness. Some law teachers demand brevity in writing final examinations. Your writing for this course, in contrast to the stark, mechanical, reductive legal writing (often enough, writing which still lacks clarity), you may have mastered, may require a different writing style. In this course, you are encouraged to write to find out what you know, in contrast to legal writing where you write to prove you have a definitive answer. Most exercises in legal writing demand that the writing focus on a goal and an audience. In expository, literary, reflective, introspective writing, the idea is to discover a purpose for your writing in the writing.

To my surprise, the discussion with Rebecca about her paper begins on a positive note. She seems genuinely interested in trying to understand my view that the paper is problematic. She seems willing to entertain, if not accept, the idea that her paper is not very good.

I ask Rebecca whether she had had difficulty in writing the paper and she indicated that she did. She explained, without much prompting, that she didn't see herself as a "deep" person and that she sometimes felt that the class discussion was overly complex and that much of the classroom discussion was just intellectual posturing. The paper is a mirror reflection of Rebecca's self-described view of herself as a reader. She has, as readers often do, diagnosed her situation quite accurately. In the paper she has asked me to read, she has indeed avoided any matter of gravity or depth, an avoidance that does not come easily when reading Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Camus's The Fall, and Walker Percy's The Second Coming, stories in which lawyers find themselves digging to the depths of their own lives and struggling to understand the meaning of life.

The stories we read were troubling and I understand that no one of us as readers could possibly comprehend the full human drama presented in these complex works. I have great respect for the student who recognizes her limits and seeks to walk carefully along the shore line of her own experience. In Rebecca's case, it is clear that she has fears, vaguely expressed, about what she might find in the depths, and that her caution has reduced her writing to a kind of vapor, absent any expression of depth. She makes clear that even her nine page draft is symptomatic of her situation: she didn't think she had anything to say and didn't want to put anything of herself in the paper. (She notes, in passing, that she has never been asked by another teacher to put anything of herself into her writing.) I point out that it was not necessary for her to write about herself directly, that there are all sorts of ways to write about lawyers and literature without writing about yourself admitting that the relationship of reader and story can be manifested in various ways. I tried to suggest some questions that she might have posed that would have allowed her to respond to the readings without being overly autobiographical, but the suggestions didn't seem to be of much interest.

Rebecca then makes a rather startling suggestion--perhaps she should write something about herself and her relation to these books we had been reading. She wondered how she might do that. "How can I get started? Where do I begin? I don't think," she says, "I can do it." I offer some suggestions. She had been talking about trying to stay on the surface, and away from the depths. "I've never like deep stuff." I guess I'm just a superficial person." Wonderful, I tell her. Write "The Autobiography of a Superficial Woman." Or "The Autobiography of a Superficial Law Student." We both laugh, and I see a liveliness in her response to what might have been taken as a serious affront, if not simply absurd. (We laugh, I assume, because we both know she is not nearly so superficial as she holds herself out to be in this conversation.) If she could let herself be as superficial as she claims to be, with some degree of awareness, the writing might begin to look more interesting. (Could she do a parody of the superficial law student? Perhaps she might have something to say, something worth hearing, about our agonizing reach for the depths.) If she could write in a serious way about the joys and difficulties of superficiality, it would, I feel assured, be interesting and entertaining (in the positive sense of inviting, encouraging playful thought). She could, I explained, do some good work if she took her claims of superficiality seriously, writing about a guide to superficial reading, how to deal with pseudo-intellectuals and their bogus world, how legal education provides a safe haven for superficials (and their pseudo-intellectual professors). She suggests that it isn't easy to be superficial, that she is constantly in doubt about whether she is or not, and that she frequently feels bad that she has ended up with this perception of herself. Her remarks suggest that she is mulling over the idea, tracing the outlines of a possible writing in her head even as we speak. I tell her go exactly where she wants to go with the writing, but that it should do somewhere. She really doesn't, I tell her, have to reveal secrets, or try to be philosophical. She could treat the superficial person she is writing about as a fictional character, as the pure or ideal superficial person which she knows she can never be.

There is a danger in this kind of writing and I point it out to Rebecca. She could learn and become still further convinced by this writing experiment that she is truly the person she fears. There is no guarantee that in trying to be real (and get some life into our writing) we want become more vulnerable. The other possibility is that she will find new ways of understanding her old assumptions and that she has depths that conflict with her perceived superficiality. In either case, the writing might result in a higher level of self-awareness. It may actually be better to know the reality of who we are than to live with limiting illusions. Imagined fear are as powerful as the reality they mask.

Rebecca says, "I guess I just don't know what you want in a paper." She says with the tone of voice that hints that I have in some way failed to tell her something she needed to know and that was in my power to tell her. She seems, if I read her correctly, to be saying, "I got into trouble, but it's your fault as well as mine." Some students talk this way because they can't accept responsibility for their own failure, but I don't see Rebecca doing this. She isn't the kind of student who makes clear early on that the conversation is really about grades and the obsessive concern for grades that creates so much anxiety for some students. (No amount of conversation about a problematic paper seems to satisfy the grade obsessive student.)

While Rebecca isn't overly grade conscious, she does express concern about what her father will say when he sees her grade. She notes that while her parents are both tolerant, they are strict. She says, quite unrelated to anything we have been talking about, that tolerance is the most important thing in her life. She feels uncomfortable, she says, when anyone makes demands on her and she doesn't like the idea of anyone judging her or trying to judge anyone. (What kind of life does it take to avoid judging others and ourselves? What kind of distancing is required? What kind of deadening does it demand? How can such a notion be lived? What set her upon such a course?) But then she laughs and says, "that's hard to do in this place." I asked what she meant and she said, "well, there are a bunch of Little Hitlers running around here." We both laughed. Her point is, of course, exaggerated, but no more than my suggestion about the autobiography of a superficial law student.

Hearing a lively laugh, much more lively than her ordinary speech, I ask her if she has a sense of humor (hoping to find another opening into the somber world of this self-proclaimed superficial, tolerant, judgment fearing woman who lapses into banality at the blink of an eye). I point out that I find her laughter and humorous observations, quite lively and interesting, and ask her whether I have made a judgment about her and one that she would approve of me making. "Yea, your right. And that's what gets me into trouble." A quizzical look, prompts the comment, "Should I have written about things that look like they are going to get me into trouble? If I do that, I will just feel bad." (Some openings suggestive of possible writing strategies are cordoned off before the possibility can be articulated and explored.) We have been talking almost an hour and I can tell from her shifting in the chair that there will be no opportunity during this discussion to pursue them.

Rebecca says, in preparing to leave, "Well, I need to think, I guess, about what I am going to write about." "Well," I tell her, "maybe so, but then maybe what you need to do is just write. Is there any reason to assume that you are going to think your way into doing a worthwhile paper?" She admits that she might do better to just sit down and do it. Rebecca has another class and we are forced to end the discussion. I have some hope that the next draft will reflect some of the ideas we have discussed and that Rebecca will get past her concerns about the course.