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Why (as in yaverbaum)
than-stellar performance at Columbia. I followed Cousin Peter’s advice for at least two months and briefed all of the cases (although, not with a typewriter and certainly not in DLI). I soon found that method to be less than efficient, and I essentially abandoned it. I studied pretty diligently during the first semester, but I started to slacken off during the second. My first-year grades, which, in the habit of law schools, were based on the final examination in each course, were actually reasonably good, but they were not terrific, and not the type that the top firms required if you wanted an interview for a summer job.
By the second year, I was out of the dorms and was living in an apartment on West 138th Street with my friend Charlie from Amherst, one other law student whom I liked but who had the habit of downing enormous amounts of beer each night, and a friend of Charlie’s who was a Jew for Jesus who had done prison time because he refused to be drafted. It was during that period in which my study habits substantially eroded. I was cutting a lot of classes and spending far too much time watching Graham Kerr’s witty TV cooking show, The Galloping Gourmet. I think that I studied for some of the finals during the first semester pri- marily by reading through the casebooks during all-nighters that were facilitated by the lessons that I had learned from Geoff Kurland.
The next semester was worse, but the state of unrest in the country handed me a life preserver. I was taking a full course load and a number of very difficult subjects (Federal Income Tax and Conflicts of Laws among them), and my cutting of classes had increased, which would have probably made examinations even more difficult for me. In late April, however, a few weeks after the King assassination, Columbia was thrown into turmoil as African American students took over Hamilton Hall (originally doing so with white protesters, whom they later evicted) to protest the construction of a new Columbia gym on the southern edge of Harlem. The white protesters, principally affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society, known as “SDS,” which was under Mark Rudd’s leadership, took over Lowe Library (where the university’s administration had its offices) and three of the classroom buildings. They were principally protesting not just the gym but also, among other things,
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