Reading: "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs," in Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs 123-135 (1981); Committee on Legal Ethics of the West Virginia State Bar v. Mark Hobbs (Sup.Ct. App. W.V., 1993) [on-line text]

(1) Assume that Mary and Louise have applied to law school. They have roughly equal LSAT test scores and equivalent teaching and publication experience (although Louise's book received more attention and acclaim). Neither Mary nor Louise scored well on the LSAT test and have been placed in a pool of candidates who are given additional consideration because of their professional experience as college teachers.

(i) Considering only their professional qualifications, each has particular strong points. Use the biographical data contained in Tobias Wolff's story and determine which of the two women you would vote to admit to law school.

(ii) What kind of arguments would you make to your colleagues on the admissions committee?

(2) Until her presentation to the faculty and students at the "famous college in upstate New York" (125) it seems fair to say that Mary was a cautious person. How did her caution, her unwillingness to take risk, affect her character?

(i) How has caution shaped your character?

(ii) What kind of impression does Wolff seek to give of Mary when he says: "In fact no one at the college was safer than Mary, for she was making herself into something institutional, like a custom, or a mascot--part of the college's idea of itself." (124)

(iii) Given the central role that caution and being risk-adverse has played in her life, how are we to understand what happens at the end of the story?

(iv) Contrast what happens at the end of the story and the beginning of the story: "When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught. She shared his views, but did not sign the protest petition. She was, after all, on trial herself--as a teacher, as a woman, as an interpreter of history." (123)

(3) Mary wants the job, thinks the interview will go well, and has hopes she will be selected for the position.

(i) Does wanting the job and having as her primary purpose getting the job provide an adequate moral justification for reading Louise's material for the class she has been asked to teach?

(ii) Does Louise's failure to give Mary notice she will teach a class sufficient justification for Mary to use Louise's lecture?

(iii) Does the fact that Mary so carefully prepares each of her own classes by writing out her lectures justify using Louise's material?

(iv) Would Mary's fear of not being able to speak well without prepared notes, exacerbated by her lack of experience in doing so, be justification for doing what Louise has suggested she do?

(v) Can Mary justify using Louise's lecture on the grounds that the faculty had no real intention of offering her a job when she was invited for the interview?

(vi) Would all of these "factors" added together justify Mary's presenting Louise's Marshall Plan material?

(vii) Does it matter, in the moral sense, that Mary's use of Louise's material would result in misleading the students? What difference would it make to the students? (Remember the "cynical upperclassmen [at Brandon, the first college where Mary taught] who claimed to despise the education they had received" and did not shed a tear when Brandon went bankrupt and closed its doors.) (124).

(viii) Of what significance is Mary's initial reaction to Louise's suggestion: "Parroting what Louise had written seemed wrong to Mary, at first; then it occurred to her that she had been doing the same kind of thing for many years, and that this was not the time to get scruples." (128). Mary thanks Louise for the suggested use of her materials and says, "I appreciate it." (128). What does Mary mean when she says, "this was not the time to get scruples"? (My dictionary says of scruples used in this context: hesitation as to action or decision from the difficulty of determining what is right or fitting; qualms.)

(ix) When it occurs to Mary "that she had been doing the same kind of thing for many years" what is happening? What does the statement tell you about Mary's teaching? About her character as a teacher? About the ending of the story?

(4) Later, we are told that Mary "still felt uneasy about reading Louise's work as her own. It would be her first complete act of plagiarism. It would change her. It would make her less -- how much less, she did not know. But what else could she do? She certainly couldn't ‘wing it.' Words might fail her, and then what? Mary had a dread of silence. When she thought of silence she thought of drowning, as if it were a kind of water she could not swim in." (129).

(i) Is Mary being overly sensitive when she thinks that reading Louise's lecture will "change her" and "make her less"?

(ii) Can Mary, like Bowen McCoy, claim that she was in a situation that made it necessary to ignore her initial reaction and her more considered hesitation to do what she thinks is wrong? Is getting the job sufficient reason to do what Louise would have her do?

(5) Based on everything you know about Mary and Louise does either have the kind of moral character one needs as a lawyer?

(6) How would you describe the self-deception of the various characters in this story?

(i) Is self-deception a particular problem for lawyers?

(ii) What, if anything, can be done to confront self-deception? What do Mary and Louise do? Seymour Wishman? Robert Service? Bowen McCoy? You?

(7) Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, observed that "[o]ne must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time. One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge." [Beyond Good and Evil (quoted in William R. Bishin and Christopher D. Stone, Law, Language, and Ethics: An Introduction to Law and Legal Method (Mineola, New York: Foundation Press, 1972)]. How is Nietzsche's idea of the tests we must face borne out by Mary's story?

1. Interview With Tobias Wolff (talking about his latest collection of short stories): An Eye for What Is Human

2. "The seductive feature of immoral behavior is that it always seems plausible. Although warped and distorted, the world so perceived makes its demands upon men and women. An older tradition called this plausibility the temptation of evil. Immoral behavior usually presents itself as world-compliant rather than defiant. No one is so much the scoundrel as not to think of his or her behavior as justified, as conforming to the world as it is. The man who hates believes that there are enemies out there to be hated. The greedy man thinks that his avarice is necessary because he has bills to pay, and a future to make secure. The ruthless believe that, except for their aggressiveness, the world would engulf them; it defeats the weak. Immoral behavior is tempting because it seems the most reasonable response to the vision of the world which vice itself presents." [William F. May, "Professional Ethics: Setting, Terrain & Teacher," in Daniel Callahan & Sissela Bok (eds.), Teaching Ethics in Higher Education 205, 240 (1980)]

3. On Courage:

"To face our lives truthfully requires trust and courage, for if we are to be free we must learn to see what we have done without illusion and deception. So the formation of courage is even greater than the power of choice, as we must be trained to face our destiny of death, not with denial, but with hope." [Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics 43 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)]

"Since men [and women] in general find it hard to face great dangers or evils, and even small ones, we may count as courageous those few who without blindness or indifference are nevertheless fearless even in terrible circumstances." [Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices 10 (1978)]

"[I]f the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name." [Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979)]

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