Still leaning back, he shrugs, barely meeting my gaze. He tells me that my question is beside the point. It is not the legal rules that matter, he explains to the ceiling, but the fact that workers cannot expect justice from the capitalist courts. It is the structure of the society, not the content of the rules, that leads to oppression. He may even be half right, but none of it is remotely relevant, and his terminology seems as outdated as a powdered wig. I pull an old pedagogical trick, inching closer to crowd his field of vision, forcing him to remember which of us is in a position of authority. I ask him whether he recalls that the case at hand involves not an employee suing an employer but one motorist suing another. Mr. Knowland, twisted around in his chair, answers calmly that such details are distractions, a waste of our time. He remains unwilling to look at me. His posture screams disrespect, and everybody knows it. The classroom falls silent; even the usual sounds of pages turning and fingers clacking on laptop keyboards and chairs scraping disappear. The red deepens. I recall that I had to upbraid him three weeks ago for fooling around with his Palm Pilot during class. I was circumspect then, taking care to call him over after the hour ended. Still, he was angry, for he is of the generation that assumes that there are no rules but those each individual wills. Now, through the crimson haze, my student begins to resemble Agent McDermott as he sat, lying through his teeth, in the living room at Shepard Street… and, very suddenly, it is too late to stop. Smiling as insolently as Mr. Knowland, I ask him whether he has undertaken a study of the tort cases, sorting them by the relative wealth of the parties, to learn the truth or falsity of his theory. Glaring, he admits that he has not. I ask him whether he is aware of any such study performed by anybody else. He shrugs. “I will take that as a no,” I say, boring into him now. Standing right in front of his table, I tell him that there is, in fact, a substantial literature on the effect of wealth on the outcome of cases. I ask him if he has read any of it. The antiquated fluorescent lights buzz and hiss uncertainly as we wait for Mr. Knowland’s reply. He looks around the classroom at the pitying faces of his classmates, he looks up at the portraits of prominent white male graduates that line the walls, and at last he looks back at me.
“No,” he says, his voice much smaller.
I nod as though to say I knew it all along. Then I cross the line. As every mildly competent law professor knows, this is the point at which I should segue smoothly back into the discussion of the case, perhaps teasing Mr. Knowland a little by asking another student to act as his co-counsel, in order to help him out of the jam into which he has so foolishly talked himself. Instead, I give him my back and move two paces away from his seat, then whirl and point and ask him whether he often offers opinions that have no basis in fact. His eyes widen, in frustration and childlike hurt. He says nothing, opens his mouth, then shuts it again, because he is trapped: no answer that he can give will help him. He looks away again as his classmates try to decide whether they should laugh. (Some do, some do not.) My head pounds redly and I ask: “Is that what they taught you at-Princeton, wasn’t it?” This time, the students are too shocked to laugh. They do not really like the arrogant Mr. Avery Knowland, but now they like the arrogant Professor Talcott Garland even less. In the abrupt, nervous silence of the high-ceilinged classroom, it strikes me, far too late, that I, a tenured professor at one of the best law schools in the land, am in the process of humiliating a twenty-two-year-old who was, all of five years ago, in high school-the campus equivalent of a sixth- grade bully beating up a kindergartner. It does not matter if Avery Knowland is arrogant or ignorant or even if he is racist. My job is to teach him, not to embarrass him. I am not doing my job.
My rampant demons have chased me even into my classroom.
I soften once more. And try to clean up the mess. Of course, I continue, tweedily pacing the front of the room, lawyers are occasionally called upon to argue what they cannot prove. But-and here I spin and stiletto my finger again toward Mr. Knowland- but, when they offer these unsupported and unsupportable arguments, they must do so with verve. And they must have the confidence, when asked about the factual basis of their claims, to do the courtroom polka, which I demonstrate as I repeat the simple instructions: sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, stay on your toes, and never, ever face the music.
Relieved, jittery laughter from the students.
Except a glaring Avery Knowland.
I am able to finish the class, even to summon a bit of dignity, but I flee to my office the instant noon arrives, furious at myself for allowing my demons to drive me to embarrass a student in class. The incident will reinforce my reputation around the law school- not a nice person, the students tell each other, and Dana Worth, the faculty’s foremost connoisseur of student gossip, cheerfully repeats it to me-and maybe the reputation is the reality.
My office is on the second floor of the main law school building, called Oldie by most of the faculty and all of the students, not because it is old, although it is, but because it was built with an endowment from and is named for the Oldham family. Merritt Oldham, who grew up with money-his grandfather invented some sort of firing pin during the Civil War and, according to legend, died when the faulty prototype of an improved version caused a gun to explode in his face-was graduated from the law school around the dawn of the twentieth century and went on to Wall Street glory as a founder of the law firm of Grace, Grand, Oldham amp; Fair. When I was a law student, Grace, Grand sat at the top of the New York heap, but it came down hard in the Drexel Burnham scandal in the eighties. Two of its hottest partners went to the penitentiary, three more were forced to resign, and the rest fell to squabbling over the corpse. The firm finally split in two. One half went under within a few years; the other, retaining the Oldham name, is still afloat, but barely, and our students, who memorize the relative rankings in prestige of every Manhattan law firm long before they master even the rudiments of tort law, would sooner go hungry than work there.
The firm may have collapsed, but our building is still Oldie-formally, the Veronica Oldham Law Center. Merritt adored his sainted mother, never married, never had children, and is claimed by our gay students as one of their own, probably with reason, if a fraction of the stories Theo Mountain tells are true. The Law Center sits on a grassy hill at the end of Town Street, looking down over the city. It comprises two square blocks, north and south of Eastern Avenue, joined by a pedestrian bridge. The southern block, with a view toward the main campus, is Oldie, a vaguely Gothic structure with three floors of offices on its east side and six floors of library on the west, joined by a row of classrooms to the south and a high stone wall to the north, all surrounding the lovely flagstone courtyard that is probably the school’s greatest aesthetic attraction. The northern block of the Center, added twenty years ago on the site of an old Roman Catholic church that was devastated by fire and purchased by a clever dean, includes a large, rather spartan dormitory housing nearly half our students, and a low, ugly brick building (formerly the parish school) crammed with offices for all our student organizations except the most prestigious, the law review. This arrangement causes a bit of jealousy, but we have no choice: our alumni, like alumni everywhere, regard change as the enemy of memory, and would never allow us to evict the law review from its traditional warren of rooms on the first floor of the faculty wing.
To reach my office, one climbs the central marble staircase and, at the second floor, turns left, trudges to the end of the dreary corridor with its peeling linoleum floor, turns left again, and counts four doors down on the left. Immediately before my office is a large room housing four faculty secretaries, not including my own, who sits, thanks to some fascinating bit of administrative reasoning, on the third floor in another corner of the building. Beyond my office is the den of Amy Hefferman, the ageless Princess of Procedure, much beloved of the students, who talks every year or so of retirement, then relents when the graduating class votes her commencement speaker; directly across the hall is young Ethan Brinkley, who has the habit, without warning, of dropping by to share implausible stories of his three years as deputy counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; next to him, in a room little larger than Kimmer’s walk-in closet, sits the even younger Matthew Goffe, who teaches a course on corporations, a course on secured transactions, and a course on radical alternatives to the rule of law. Matt is one of our few untenured faculty members and, unless he discontinues his disconcerting habit of signing every student petition and joining every student boycott, is likely to remain in that category. Next along, in the northwest corner of the building, is the vast chamber occupied by Stuart Land, the former dean and, probably, the most widely respected intellect on the faculty, who teaches a little bit of everything, commands the services of two secretaries, and makes the reputation of the law school his special concern. Stuart, say the corridor gossips, has never quite recovered from the palace coup that led to his ouster and Dean Lynda’s elevation, a revolution more about politics than about policies-for Stuart’s unapologetic conservatism left him constantly at war with Theo Mountain and Marc Hadley and Tish Kirschbaum and many other powers on the faculty.
Or so it is rumored.
But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some
