Free One L by Scott Turow

Community Association—the married students’ group—and the topic of conversation all evening was how hard people work as 1Ls, especially in the beginning. The dean talked about it in the speech he gave, and so did the association secretary. It was the subject of dinner conversation as we ate our meal.
    â€œThat first week or so,” one man, a 2L, said, “those were the longest days of my life.”
    A woman sitting at the table said, “Amen.”
    Amen.

    On Monday, Aubrey Drake stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I wanted to join a study group. I had met Aubrey during registration week. He was older, near thirty, and he had introduced himself to me because he had been at Amherst. He’d graduated four years before I had, but we had friends in common and we seemed to take to each other quickly. He was an urbane man, tall, dark-haired, good looking, with a kind of cultivated charm which had been lost on my generation of students in the political chaos of the ’60s.
    â€œIt’s nothing formal yet,” Aubrey told me about the study group. “Just some people getting together at lunch to talk it over.”
    Study groups are another of the basics of the first-year life. A small number of students, usually between four and eight, meet regularly to discuss common difficulties which have arisen with course work. There is no set regime for study group operation. Some groups merely hash over random questions; others use their time together to work out formal exercises; some spend the year developing long course outlines which are exchanged among group members before exams. Most of the faculty encourage the formation of study groups. They afford each student an opportunity for extensive talk about legal problems, something rarely possible in class. And aside from their educational value, study groups have a kind of therapeutic function, offering a much valued element of stability amid the uncertainties of first-year life. The other members of your study group are the people to whom you can always go with questions, the only students in the school whom you know have committed themselves to your support.
    As with the prepared study aids which I had been sure I would be too proud to use, I had also figured before starting school that I would not join a study group. I was too mature, I thought, to need that sort of T-group; and besides, I preferred to do things on my own. By the start of the second week, with groups forming throughout the section and upper-year students like Mike Wald and Peter Geocaris advising me to join, I greeted Aubrey’s offer eagerly. My only reservations were that I wanted to be sure there would be room for Terry—we’d discussed a group already—and I was unwilling to saddle myself with the responsibility of a course outline, a project which I knew a couple of the groups in the section had already begun, each member taking on a subject for the term.
    Aubrey agreed to both propositions and at lunch, Terry and I met with him and the other people he’d contacted: six or seven men and women, none of whom I yet knew well. The conversation was tentative. In the second week of school, everyone was naturally leery of a long-run commitment. Whatever the group would do, however, everyone present seemed anxious that it include a regular meeting in the hour before Perini’s class to talk over the cases for the day. Perini was still following that routine of heavygoing inquisitions, and we all remained powerfully intimidated.
    When we met upstairs in the Pound Building the next day for the first pre-Perini go-round, the group had mushroomed. It seemed as if each of us had asked along a friend or two and there were fifteen or sixteen people sitting around a large oval table. Aubrey found the numbers unwieldy and I preferred to be in a group that would consider more than Contracts and erecting defenses against Perini.
    By the end of the week, a smaller