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BaCK to sCHool
leverage (the ratio of debt to investment), the greater the percentage return—but the higher the risk. Unfortunately, in order to do this, I was forced to cover the whiteboard with a series of examples to make the points, and that involved using numbers, something that many people thought that they could avoid by going to law school. To my chagrin, that exercise led a student in the first row (one learns to be wary of the first row) to raise her hand to ask the first question that I had to field in my new career, one that turned out to be the most commonly asked and irritating question of them all: “Professor, will this be on the final!!??”
I loved having to respond to that question, but I’m not sure that the hapless student loved my response: “In this class, everything that you are assigned to read, everything that I say, and everything that I think— or even might think—could be on the final.” Thankfully, my response got a laugh, as it did every time that I was compelled to use it during the next fourteen years.
I loved that question so much that one of my favorite bits was in a direct response to it: When I cut a class at Columbia and wanted to catch up, I’d have to borrow a friend’s notes. At BLS, things were different. When a student knew that he or she was going to miss a class, he or she (it actually was always a he) had the right to have the entire two-hour class taped. And taping was the professor’s obligation. I’d be provided with the equipment, but it was my job to turn the machine on and off and deliver the tapes to “security” on the way out. Two-hour classes had a ten-minute break built in, devised, I came to believe, so that male stu- dents could chase me into the men’s room with questions that they should have asked in class. (The men’s room was an important place to me; I quickly learned that men’s rooms were only on even-numbered floors at Brooklyn Law School, so, going forward, I made sure that my classes would meet on the fourth floor.) That general occurrence was enough to distract me from immediately setting the tape whirling when I returned to start the second hour. But it provided an opportunity for me to delight the class by starting the tape machine and saying, loudly, “. . . so that concludes my summary of what you should be looking for on
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