Free One L by Scott Turow Page B

dime he had. So now he was in law school. Aubrey told the story cheerfully. Things, he said, were lower-keyed than the mid-’60s, when many of his law school friends regularly wore coats and ties to class. At any rate, he felt he could take whatever law school required. He was tired of the boom/bust risks of business. He wanted to work for somebody else with the guarantee of a good living.
    When I went home that evening I felt specially satisfied. Not living in the dorms, I had felt, in the first couple of weeks, a little isolated from my classmates. Now, with the group, I knew I’d be having regular contact with some of the people around me. The group met nearly every day. Three mornings a week we gathered to drill each other on the Contracts cases before facing Perini, then on Thursday or Friday afternoon we’d get together for a longer session on Civ Pro or Torts or Criminal.
    More important, I became close almost at once with Aubrey and Terry and Stephen. Most often I’d eat lunch with one of them each day. We’d talk on the phone, play squash, often spend time on the weekends. We were frank with each other, personal. The three of them were good friends to me and in many ways they became my year.

    Finally during that second week, I began to volunteer in class.
    My motives for speaking were complicated. One was a promise I’d made myself. While I was deciding whether to apply to law school, I had made it a point to sit in on a few law classes. When I did, I was bothered by the reticence of the students. One class had disturbed me especially. It was an upper-year Evidence course, and the day I saw it the professor was talking about lawyer-client privilege. The questions he was asking were ones to which even I, as a layman, could have tried an answer. Yet no more than two or three of the students in that room had responded, and by the end of the period I saw that class, stoical, frozen, as emblematic of the state—halfway between being alienated and being cowed—which seemed to have gripped so many of my friends while they were law students. I couldn’t understand it and I’d sworn that I wouldn’t let that happen to me.
    For the most part, though, raising my hand was not the result of any well-thought-out scheme. I am something of a babbler, especially when I’m tense. Outside of class, I was on a kind of oral jet stream, cruising along on my own talk, assailing anyone who would listen, like a drunk on a bus. In class, it was getting increasingly hard to keep my mouth shut. I was so engrossed in each session that I stifled myself only out of fear that I would not perform well.
    On the Tuesday of the second week, I finally gave in. It was in Perini’s class. We were studying Hadley v. Baxendale , a famous case which established a limit on the kinds of damages a winning plaintiff in a contract suit could collect. Perini asked us what the rule of Hadley was not designed to do. He said there was a one-word answer. People raised their hands offering responses ranging from “work” to “make sense,” and Perini toured the room, quickly shooting them down: “No,” “Never,” “Silly,” “You think that makes sense?”
    When he saw my hand, he whirled and pointed.
    â€œTo punish,” I said. I was shocked I was speaking. My heart was slamming in my chest.
    Perini came closer, tilting his head. “How so?”
    â€œThe way the rule works, it doesn’t act to punish somebody who breaches a contract.”
    â€œWhat difference does that make?”
    â€œIt means that damages aren’t awarded to deter breach.”
    â€œWhat are they intended to do, then?” Perini asked.
    â€œJust compensate the loss.”
    â€œRight!” said Perini. “Contract damages are merely intended to compensate plaintiff for his loss. You leave all that soul-splitting over punishment behind in Torts and Criminal