Page 115 - A Little Life: A Novel

Harold on that first day of the semester, pacing and pacing, and lecturing
them in his low, quick voice.
“You’re One Ls,” Harold had said. “And congratulations, all of you. As

One Ls, you’ll be taking a pretty typical course load: contracts; torts;
property; civil procedure; and, next year, constitutional and criminal law.
But you know all this.
“What you may not know is that this course load reflects—beautifully,
simply—the very structure of our society, the very mechanics of what a
society, our particular society, needs to make it work. To have a society, you
first need an institutional framework: that’s constitutional law. You need a

system of punishment: that’s criminal. You need to know that you have a
system in place that will make those other systems work: that’s civil
procedure. You need a way to govern matters of domain and ownership:
that’s property. You need to know that someone will be financially
accountable for injuries caused you by others: that’s torts. And finally, you
need to know that people will keep their agreements, that they will honor

their promises: and that is contracts.”
He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are
here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people,
there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here
because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because
you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real
challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the

Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most
intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts
are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an
inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every
realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a
contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the

Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question
of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—
and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we
promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case,
we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this
country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow
its terms, and we do so daily.