One L by Scott Turow

beginning in all our courses now. The first three weeks, the professors sort of showed us the blueprint in each subject, the basic principles and terms we had to master before we could understand anything else. Now we seem to be down to actual lessons in how you put the house together. We’ve moved into the more detailed study of rules in defined legal subjects in each course. In Procedure, we’re reading cases on jurisdiction, the very complicated matter of when and how and over whom a court can exert its power. In Torts, we continue with intentional wrongs—assault, battery, false imprisonment—and excuses like consent and self-defense.
    As we proceed with that close work, we seem to have started on the traditional classroom routine described by the catalogs and guidebooks. HLS, like many others, is what’s called a “national law school.” That means that the laws of no one state are emphasized. Instead, by comparing cases from all over the country we are supposed to get a sense for the general thrust of American common law and the typical methods and strategies of legal thinking. It all sounded like a pretty mysterious process to me when I read about it, but day by day the workings of the basic law school program and the case method are starting to seem familiar.
    In Contracts, for example, we are now studying Interpretation, the ways a judge decides what the words in a contract mean. Does he listen to A, who said those words? Or B, who heard them? Does he try to figure out what a reasonable person standing in one of their shoes might think? Or does the judge just take the words for their plain meaning?
    The pattern of each class all week was more or less the same. First Perini would call on a student who would state the facts of the case; then Perini would ask the person under fire to identify the kernel issue in the decision. In one case, the plaintiff was suing for ground rent, so the narrower “issue” was whether the word “house” in the contract of sale meant the house alone, or also the land that sat beneath it. With that established, Perini would have the student consider the case’s result, asking from whose point of view the judge seemed to have looked at things and what kind of interpretative standard that suggested. Then Perini would ask whomever he was questioning to compare that standard with what we’d seen in other cases. He’d ask the student to reconcile the decisions, to explain the ways they seemed to establish consistent principles of interpretation, and to account for differences through the varying circumstances and facts of each case. For instance, we saw much different interpretative standards employed in cases where the contract was written down, as compared to those in which the agreement had only been by word of mouth. Finally, Perini would touch on what he sometimes refers to as “the deep-thought issues,” and what students usually call “policy questions.” How much discretion do we want judges to have in interpreting contracts? Too much, and the judge, in essence, can compose the agreement himself, rather than the parties. Too little, and judge may have to accept without question all kinds of perjury and injustice.
    The other professors do not go at things in exactly the same way as Perini. He usually covers only one case a day, practicing on it that kind of step-by-step analysis. Morris goes over a number of cases, setting them out against each other in a far more straightforward manner, doing much of the work Perini demands from students. Zechman usually transforms a case into another of his peculiar “hypotheticals,” which he alters bit by bit, question by question, so we can see the way each fact relates to the controlling principle. Mann tends to lecture. But in each course, that process of comparing and distinguishing in order to flesh out the law is usually somehow repeated. In Criminal, for example,