Law school daze.(Brush With the Law)(Book Review)

Brush With the Law By Robert Ebert Byrnes & Jaime Marquart Renaissance Books, 336 pages, $24.95

Brush With the Law is actually two books. One by Harvard Law School graduate Jaime Marquart, and one by Stanford Law School alumnus Robert Byrnes. Both wound up at the same Los Angeles law firm and compared notes about their graduate school days. The myth that slavish, ascetic devotion is required to make it through a top law school should be thoroughly dispelled by their tales.

I graduated from the University of Memphis law school in 1993. Although that institution is an earthbound counterpart to heavenly entities such as Harvard and Stanford, the process is about the same: pompous, tweedy professors attempting to intimidate students and trip them up using the Socratic Method. The environment at a place like Memphis may even be tougher than at Harvard and Stanford in some ways. Unlike Byrnes and Marquart, I was almost always required to attend class. Yet I know from personal experience that successfully graduating from law school is perfectly compatible with plenty of goofing off. After the initial terror wears off--it takes about a month--law school is at worst manageable, and often easy.

Compared to the experiences of Byrnes and Marquart, my lazy law school days were a tour in the salt mines. Marquart devised an elaborate system to minimize the amount of work he did after his first year. It called for taking classes with large enrollments and boring professors who had a preference for take-home exams. Courses with gaseous titles like "Law and Society" and "Gender and the Law" are invariably fluff classes, Marquart advises. He even went so far as to calculate a "ditch ratio" based on the number of people who evaluate a class (generally on the last day before the next semester) compared to the number who ...