One L by Scott Turow Page A

we’re now deep in the mire of the Model Penal Code and the deadly work of learning to read a statute. Each day, Mann has us contrast the code with cases on the same subject; we compare and distinguish common law and statute, the provisions of state law and the code.
    That jigsaw puzzling, case after case, piece after piece is a far easier process to describe than it is to practice. The common law is crazy and cases go off in all directions. You can never quite jimmy all of them into place. Today Zechman tied the section in knots by asking us to distinguish between two cases with identical facts and contrary results. Two men had a fistfight. In one case they were allowed to sue each other for battery; in the other they were not because the court considered both to be “wrongdoers.” People suggested every trivial distinction to explain the different holdings: One fight had been with bottles, the other with knives; one fight had been during the day, the other at night. Nobody ever hit on the most obvious distinction: The cases were from two separate states, where the courts simply decided the same question in opposite ways. (I got that from Prosser, not Zechman, who left it all in the air—another example of why that class is like a trip on a runaway carousel.) Usually though, the contradictions are subtler and the patterns are present if you press hard enough. Up and down, back and forth. Hopping from minutiae to the big picture. That process is now fully in gear which is supposed to teach us to think like lawyers.
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    When we started jurisdiction in Procedure, Nicky Morris made what seemed an important comment.
    â€œAbout now,” he said, “law school begins to become more than just learning a language. You also have to start learning rules and you’ll find pretty quickly that there’s quite a premium placed on mastering the rules and knowing how to apply them.
    â€œBut in learning rules, don’t feel as if you’ve got to forsake a sense of moral scrutiny. The law in almost all its phases is a reflection of competing value systems. Don’t get your heads turned around to the point that you feel because you’re learning a rule, you’ve necessarily taken on the values that produced the rule in the first place.”
    The remark struck a number of people, and as we left class for lunch, I talked about what Nicky had said with Gina Spitz. Gina came on as the last of the tough cookies. She’d just graduated from Barnard and she was full of the bristle of New York City. She was big, feisty, outspoken, and glitteringly bright. But what Nicky had said had touched her in a way that left her sounding plaintive.
    â€œThey’re turning me into someone else,” she said, referring to our professors. “They’re making me different.”
    I told her that was called education and she told me, quite rightly, that I was being flip.
    â€œIt’s someone I don’t want to be,” she said. “Don’t you get the feeling all the time that you’re being indoctrinated?”
    I was not sure that I did, but as Gina and I sat at lunch, I began to realize that for her and many of the other people in the section, there was a crisis going on, one which had not yet affected me as acutely.
    On one hand the problem was as simple as the way Nicky had put it. Students felt they were being forced to identify with rules and social notions that they didn’t really agree with. In Contracts, for instance, it had already become clear that Perini was an ardent free-market exponent, someone who believed that the national economy should function without any government regulation. Perini quickly succeeded in showing us that many of the common-law contract rules reflected free-market assumptions. When he threw the floor open for comment about whether those free-market rules were desirable or not, Perini’s fearsomeness made it hard to contest him.
    But there was a