One L by Scott Turow Page B

subtler difficulty in our education, one which went to the basis of legal thinking itself and which became especially apparent in class. We were learning more than a process of analysis or a set of rules. In our discussions with the professors, as they questioned us and picked at what we said, we were also being tacitly instructed in the strategies of legal argument, in putting what had been analyzed back together in a way that would make our contentions persuasive to a court. We all quickly saw that that kind of argument was supposed to be reasoned, consistent, progressive in its logic. Nothing was taken for granted; nothing was proven just because it was strongly felt. All of our teachers tried to impress upon us that you do not sway a judge with emotional declarations of faith. Nicky Morris often derided responses as “sentimental goo,” and Perini on more than one occasion quickly dispatched students who tried to argue by asserting supposedly irreducible principles.
    Why, Perini asked one day, is the right to bargain and form contracts granted to all adults, rather than a select group within the society?
    Because that was fundamental, one student suggested, basic: All persons are created equal.
    â€œOh, are they?” Perini asked. “Did you create them, Mr. Vivian? Have you taken a survey?”
    â€œI believe it,” Vivian answered.
    â€œWell, hooray,” said Perini, “that proves a great deal. How do you justify that, Mr. Vivian?”
    The demand that we examine and justify our opinions was not always easily fulfilled. Many of the deepest beliefs often seemed inarticulable in their foundations, or sometimes contradictory of other strongly felt principles. I found that frequently. I thought, for example, that wealth should be widely distributed, but there were many instances presented in class which involved taking from the poor, for whom I felt that property rights should be regarded as absolute.
    Yet, with relative speed, we all seemed to gain skill in reconciling and justifying our positions. In the fourth week of school, Professor Mann promoted a class debate on various schemes for regulating prostitution, and I noticed the differences in style of argument from similar sessions we’d had earlier in the year. Students now spoke about crime statistics and patterns of violence in areas where prostitution occurred. They pointed to evidence, and avoided emotional appeals and arguments based on the depth and duration of their feelings.
    But to Gina, the process which had brought that kind of change about was frightening and objectionable.
    â€œI don’t care if Bertram Mann doesn’t want to know how I feel about prostitution,” she said that day at lunch. “I feel a lot of things about prostitution and they have everything to do with the way I think about prostitution. I don’t want to become the kind of person who tries to pretend that my feelings have nothing to do with my opinions. It’s not bad to feel things.”
    Gina was not the only classmate making remarks like that. About the same time, from three or four others, people I respected, I heard similar comments, all to the effect that they were being limited, harmed, by the education, forced to substitute dry reason for emotion, to cultivate opinions which were “rational” but which had no roots in the experience, the life they’d had before. They were being cut away from themselves.
    Many of the people with these complaints were straight out of college. In thinking about it, I concluded that having survived the ’60s, held a job, gotten married—having already lived on a number of principles—made me less vulnerable to a sense that what we learned in class would somehow corrupt some safer, central self. But there was no question that my friends’ concern was genuine, and listening to them made me more self-conscious about the possible effects our education in the law was having