Free One L by Scott Turow Page A

group had broken away. On Thursday afternoon, the six of us met in the slate-walled lounge in Harkness to work through a statutory problem Mann had assigned in Criminal Law. Aside from Aubrey, Terry, and me, there were three other men. Kyle Schick had just graduated from Harvard the spring before. He was tall and narrow, with a huge corolla of springy blond hair. I didn’t know him well—he was someone Aubrey had met. He struck me as a little self-serious and overly ingratiating, but he was also good-humored, quick, and admirably well versed in Civil Procedure, a knowledge gathered in the summers spent working in his father’s law offices in Iowa. Sandy Stern had recently finished an engineering degree at MIT. He wore a big walrus moustache and personally had something of the manner of a slow-turning drill. Sandy went straight ahead without self-consciousness or faltering. In class, he had already become quite outspoken. No point was too small for Sandy to give it scrutiny or comment, and always in the same dry, almost toneless, voice. I had no idea how he had arrived in the study group, but once we’d had the aid of his precise analytic skills in working over problems, he became a valuable and accepted member.
    Finally, only that afternoon, I had invited Stephen Litowitz into the group. A small, stocky man, Stephen sat behind me in Contracts and I had wanted to get to know him better. We seemed to have an extraordinary amount in common. He’d been raised in the same neighborhood in Chicago as Annette and I had been. He was a Ph.D. in sociology. Like me, he had taught in a university for a couple of years before law school.
    The problem Mann had posed for us concerned a complicated hypo in which an accused rapist claimed drunkenness as an excuse for the crime. We were to figure out if such a defense were feasible under the Model Penal Code. The provisions of the code interlocked and cross-referenced so intricately that the job took hours of excruciatingly careful reading, paging back and forth between various sections to reconcile apparent contradictions. It was a wonderful session, though. If I was excited by the process of probing at a legal problem on my own, then I was positively intoxicated by the kind of speed and depth of insight that could be achieved by a group of bright, willing people working together. It was a sort of good-spirited intellectual melee. Except for Aubrey, who was too polite to shout or interrupt, we spent the time half out of our chairs, storming at one another, arguing points—each trying to explain before someone else cut him off.
    When the session was over, we were all pleased. We agreed that we were a group, and set up a schedule of further meetings. Sandy and Kyle, who lived in the dorms, went upstairs, and Stephen, Terry, Aubrey, and I sat around for another few minutes. All older, the four of us seemed to feel particularly comfortable together. We talked about what had brought us to law school, each in the midst of another career.
    â€œMan,” Terry said, “sometimes I just tell myself, Hey, you didn’t wanna be a grown-up. You’re not ready yet. You wanna stay loose.”
    I admitted that I’d had the same thoughts myself.
    Aubrey and Stephen, though, disagreed. Each had more tangible reasons for being here. For Stephen, the law degree was a way to find a secure job teaching. Even though he had his doctorate, the academic job market in his field was so clogged that only that kind of acute specialization would guarantee that he could find a teaching position which would lead to tenure.
    Aubrey’s story was the most interesting, since he had already been through business school and one professional education. In ’68 he’d finished at Harvard B School and gone into importing for a while, then opened an art gallery in Los Angeles which specialized in East Asian works. The gallery had folded four years later, but not before consuming every