A Beginner's Guide to Legal Education

Professor James R. Elkins
College of Law, West Virginia University

Looking Ahead

Getting More or Less Than What We Bargain For

Socrates pointed out to his young friend, Hippocrates, that the various courses of instruction offered up to the young are like the wares of merchants: "they give equal promotion to everything they have for sale" and often "do not know which of their wares are good for the mind and which bad . . . ." [B.A.F. Hubbard and E. S. Karnofsky, Plato's Protagoras 8 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)]

Sidney Burrill

Louis Auchincloss's short story, "Equitable Awards" is about a young divorce lawyer and her client, Gwendolen Burrill. Ms. Burrill, the client, is married to a lawyer. As it happens, her parents had opposed her marriage to Sidney Burrill, in part because he was a lawyer. Now, years later, the marriage has fallen on hard times due in part to her husband's slavish devotion to his work, and Gwendolen Burrill is seeking a divorce. As the story unfolds, Ms. Burrill talks with her lawyer and with herself, about the divorce, her husband and his work as a lawyer. Her observations about her lawyer husband might give those who seek to be lawyers cause for caution:

Sidney had "compulsive habits of work" and "labored hard," as did the other young lawyers in his firm.

He had a "way of losing himself and the world in work . . . ." Gwendolen learned during her marriage that for her husband work was "sacred."

Away from the firm and his lawyer work, Sidney could be "a free spirit." "He was gay and easy with people at parties; he liked to drink and . . . to make love."

"When he wasn't working, he could be charming: affable, amiable, open-minded, funny and interested in all the little things that were going on around him. In the country he loved to identify birds and flowers and to take the boys on long walks. The intensity that he brought to his law practice was also available for the mixing of a cocktail, the solution of a crossword puzzle, or the fixing of defective plumbing."

Given his attractive side, Gwendolen entertained a phantasy that someday she and Sidney would be able to get on with their lives together. She hoped, she says,

that things would be different when Sidney attained his ambition and became a partner in his firm. Then he would take more time off, and they would do things together. But her father had warned her against this illusion.

"Lawyers and businessmen in Sidney's league can't afford to slacken the pace," he had told her, rather complacently, as it now struck her. "They might make the unpleasant discovery that they had prepared themselves for nothing else in life."

Many men and women work hard, some are wed to their work, but the problem for lawyers like Sidney Burrill lie deeper than simple busyness. It is not just Sidney's long hours but who he associates with during these long hours of work — the focus of his devotion — that leads Gwendolen Burrill's father to call Sidney's clients, "pirates." Sidney could never, Gwendolen Burrill says,

break away, or perhaps even want to break away, from those cool, aggrandizing clients who were shrewd enough to know, without ever being big enough to tell him, how indispensable a tool he was to their daily machinations.

* * * *

Sidney seemed to have inherited a brain from nowhere and to be quite willing to place it a hundred percent at the service of his employers. He never looked beyond his firm; he never questioned its right to use every bit of Sidney Burrill for its general purposes. He was like a faithful hound that needed but a single master . . . .

Louis Auchincloss, who drew this portrait of Sidney Burrill, has written of his love for law and has himself engaged in the practice of law for many years. His novels and short stories provide "fictional sightings" of those who have acquired and in turn been overtaken by their clever work as lawyers. Lawyer stories like "Equitable Awards" and provide pedagogically instructive education on the dangers of leaping, like Hippocrates, into a profession and course of instruction without a thought as to where it might land you.

Charles Reich

Charles Reich, in his autobiography, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, provides a chilling description of the work of Washington, D.C. lawyers. "Our work," says Reich, "was detrimental to us in the most profound way."

Much of my work consisted of talking to people — colleagues, people from outside [the firm], public officials. It was much easier than writing [always subject to close scrutiny by other lawyers in the firm and their mindless second-guessing about how an argument should be stated], but was not completely satisfying either. All of these people had a professional, or public, self. They all represented a particular interest or point of view, and they took this position with what seemed to be their heart and soul. If positions had been taken in a purely detached manner, there might have been some zone for genuine human contact between the participants, but detachment did not win ball games; everyone must ring with seemingly true belief. After such a performance, there was little room left for a "real" person to show himself. One put one's entire self — writing, voice, manner, personality, personal appeal, even physical stance — at the service of the matter at hand. One coated over one's real self with a public self — every pore covered, if one were really professional, until the public self became first the only visible self, then the only real self.

Whatever they really felt, the other lawyers liked to adopt the appearance of being cynical about the law and its processes, the causes and clients for which they worked, and the firm itself. Deprecation of everything was almost a way of life with them. Winning and losing cases was a game. Questions of justice, wisdom or good policy were irrelevant for lawyers. They were, in one partner's memorable phrase, hired knife-throwers.

But they did not play it as if it were a game. At the heart of their conversations were tension, anxiety, and a total absorption in their work. . . .

For Reich, the defense he evolved to live in this world required a retreat of the "real self." He found that being a lawyer, doing what lawyers do in Washington, D.C. firms, did not allow him to "regain any sense of self when the working day was over."

Reich finds that "parts" of himself have been "left behind somewhere." The result: an "intense depression that always hovered over my life, that could be held at bay by activity and outwardness" but overtook him, often, with an "overwhelming rush."

Allen

Barry Schwartz, in The Costs of Living, describes a former student, Allen, who has returned to campus for his tenth college reunion. Allen is a lawyer. Schwartz says,

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, liked 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 Southampton, a quarter mile from one of Long Island's more beautiful beaches.

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...." 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.

[Law School: What Kind of Story Is It?]

Notes

<1> The story of Sidney Burrill can be found in Louis Auchincloss's "Equitable Awards" in Louis Auchincloss, Narcissa and Other Tales 52-70 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983). Auchincloss provides a fuller portrait of a lawyer enamored with Legal Mind in Diary of a Yuppie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).

<2> Legal Mind and Legal Thinking are awfully nebulous and it is best to observe them in operation, in practice, at work. Lawyer stories are a wonderful, entertaining, and frightening source of information about Legal Thinking and Legal Mind. I recommend lawyer stories for still another reason: they move us away from disciplinary abstractions like legal thinking, legal reasoning, legal theory, and legal argument and engage us in the particulars and contexts in which our lives that give our professional lives meaning.

<3> Charles Reich's account of his early years as a lawyer and the world he never quite shared with his colleagues is set forth in The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (New York: Random House, 1976)

<4> Allen's story is presented in Barry Schwartz, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life 17, 18 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)