Law School Djinn

Ah, the beginning of a class at St. John's Law School requiring, as they all did, the sustenance of a nice cup of coffee.  This photo, circa somewhere in the late 1970s, never made it into the Yearbook, but someone kindly (I think) gave me the proof.

Those were the days, when I was in my mid-twenties, that I could drink several cups a day and sleep wonderfully well at night. Those days are long gone some close to forty years later! And I can tell from my face just how much I am enjoying that sip before a tenured Professor of Law obscures the material to be presented that day.

The wisdom of the ages says, "Know Thyself". I have found that particularly difficult, especially in the area of why I ever became a lawyer. I decided on the profession when I was was too young in the first instance, age fourteen, if memory serves, and had not the faintest idea of what it really meant to be one, in the second instance.

Those of you who have read my ramblings before know that I was nearly side-tracked into radio and television writing. It is, I think, what I would have preferred, emotionally, but it wasn't what common sense dictated. And after a dabble in the creative arts, I took the road most traveled by (to vary Mr. Frost) and opted for further education and a more linear, and financially stable, career.  It's a paradox that as I sit here writing, I know that it was the best thing not to go "rogue". I am secure as a result, which was otherwise unlikely. But why a lawyer? You got me. I was a bit, no a lot, naive and ridiculously idealistic. I knew being a lawyer wasn't like "Perry Mason", the long running television show of the dramatic credits featuring a compendium I would come to know, the Corpus Juris Secundum.  But I had been schooled in objective truth and Natural Law, both of which I continue to hold dear, but not countered in my training by exposure to deceit, and manipulation.

When I got there, one of the white haired professors of stern look and liberal leanings did that army thing as we sat at those long tables at which lines of us would be seated. "Look to the left and to the right of you, because many of you will not be here at the end of the semester."  One woman, who did think it was all supposed to be "Perry Mason" was gone by the end of the first week. I was in a two and a half year program by virtue of my detour into radio and script writing, but I had done very well in college and saw no likely problem.

While I have great respect for the Socratic method, whereby the student reads the text and then is guided to brilliance by pointed questions of the learned teacher, my sense was that most of the professors, few of whom practiced in real life, had misread the instructions. I went through most of "Torts", the law of wrongs, or Negligence, or Intentional Harm, in a fog. I went out and bought the Bar Exam preparation books and used that to help me, and what had been made Greek became English again.

St. John's was one of the few schools that primarily used True-False Exams. I never did well on those types of exams as I would debate endlessly on the facts on both sides and find neither was correct, and be forced to choose uncomfortably, rather than to be provided an opportunity to explain the pros and cons of each side as one would expect, well, a lawyer to do.

I want to say that this picture was taken in Constitutional Law, and if memory serves, I almost failed the exam because I somehow made a mistake in which question I was circling, or filling in the space, or whatever, so I missed answers that I otherwise knew.

I got the measles during final exams my last year, yes, at age 25, and the powers that be said well, if you can't take it, you'll have to wait a year. My doctor said that if I took the exam in a room alone, that would be sufficient, and so I did. And happily they let me.

I found it hard to find work after I graduated, and passed the New York Bar, and as you know, blog readers, I was still entranced, if no longer by radio, by script writing, and warmer climes, so I moved to Los Angeles. I found a niche as an attorney, and wrote, in my way, in between verbal jousts over what was and was not ethical, as prosecutor for the State Bar's Office of Chief Trial Counsel until I finally got shipwrecked by the storms of human politics and hied myself to a safe distance from the practice of law.

I do wonder sometimes if that young woman blissfully sipping her before class coffee might have gone a different direction had she had an inkling of the denouement of her educational efforts? The answer, actually, and surprisingly, is probably a "no!"  I am a great believer in synchronicity and where I am today, and how I got there, seems to be a most exquisite combination of destiny and free will.

The only thing I might say to that kid in the picture is "lighten up!".  But I don't think she would have listened.