Page 303 - WhyAsInY
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soMe Case stuDies
The point remains, however, that virtually all that I learned that was of real value was learned after graduation. Further, the fact that I hardly remember my third-year courses supports the now-emergent view that perhaps law school should be a two-year enterprise.
Another point that remains to be made is that law students were simply not the same people as those with whom I went to college. A high percentage wore suits to class. They talked about business. They talked about law firms. They talked about money. When, in 1968, Cra- vath, Swaine & Moore, a very prestigious law firm, announced that it would raise its starting annual salary to $15,000, the news spread like wildfire, even within the dungareed part of the population. Whether or not the Columbia administration would like to admit it, it sure seemed to me that they were running a trade school, albeit a fairly toney one. This point would be reinforced when students couldn’t help but notice that three mornings each week a chauffeur-driven limousine would be parked at a hydrant on the south side of the school. The chauffeur stood guard as he awaited Professor Milton Handler, a senior partner in the Kaye Scholer law firm, who taught a course in his field, anti-trust (a subject matter to which little attention is paid by the legal world as of this writing). I would pass the limo as I walked to school to take my fixed place in the back row of the Cardozo Lecture Room, my seat being the very same one in the same room for every first-year course, not by choice but by the tyranny of the alphabet. I don’t think that I saw the limo as a possibility for me, much less a goal, but I can’t say that for many of my classmates. (In fairness, I should add that when I went to law school, the world had started to change. Not everyone was inter- ested in making money. Some affirmatively disdained it; some, yours truly included, were merely unknowing.)
Bust in Time
In any event, to go through a long exercise putting down law schools or my contemporary law students is not to excuse my (to my mind) less-
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