Richard D. Kahlenberg

2807 Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School, by Richard D. Kahlenberg (read 7 Dec 1995) This is a memoir of a guy who went to Harvard Law. He is very critical of the school, but I did not read him very sympathetically. He seemed to be a whiner, and kind of reminded me of one easily displeased when things weren't just his way. He is a devoted liberal, and I suppose in early 1955 I'd have read such an account more receptively, but my liberalism is now quite alienated from the current version spouted by the young. I was amazed at the intensity of his job search, compared to mine in 1955. I cannot say I am sorry not to have done things differently in 1955. I was surely more easily satisfied than are law students now. I just accepted that "that is the way it was."… (altro)

An immensely irritating book, largely because I kept wanting to slap the author.

The subject matter is the supposed evil of Harvard Law School, this evil supposedly manifest in the fact that the vast bulk of the class entering HLS claim to want to be lawyers for public interest purposes, but the vast bulk who leave go on to work in private firms for large corporations.
The book is frustrating because the author is such a naive twit.

Let's start with self-knowledge. The author constantly complains about how boring the details of law are, how what he really wants to be involved with is shaping public policy. Basically his complaint is that law school is not the Kennedy School of Public Policy. But no-one forced him to go to HLS rather than the Kennedy school. And it's not like he wasn't warned; he read the standard description of HLS, like The Paper Chase and One L, before starting.

We see more of this when he mocks his friends for wanting high salaries --- but insists that his desire to buy a house with an ocean view and "in the right neighborhood" is of course a quite reasonable desire.
Yet another version of this lack of self-knowledge appears when, in the very same chapter he first mocks Dickens' Mrs Jelleby for being more concerned with the starving of Africa than with her own community, then goes on about how he wants to help "the poor" of America through public policy, but isn't much interested in the details necessary to act as a lawyer helping individual poor clients.

Then, of course, there's the blindess to selection effects. HLS is known for being brutal and for being expensive. The US is full of top-notch law schools. Doesn't it stand to reason that the only sort of person who's going to apply to HLS is the sort of person obsessed with status and ranking, the sort of person who needs to be able to say "I went to HLS" and who, therefore, is the sort of person whose goal in life is to make pots of money as soon as possible?
And, my god, who takes seriously what 22yr olds say about politics?
Whether it's the Hitler Youth, the Red Guards or the Young Republicans, if there's a popular grandiose cause, you can expect students to be there. Sometimes it's a good cause, sometimes it's evil or insane, but in all cases you can be pretty sure that the bulk of the students are there based on fashion rather than facts and reasoned thought.

We also get the incessant whining about the teachers. The author seems to suffer from the same disease as the rest of America in that he wants the professionals with whom he interacts to be his friends. It's not enough that they do a good, sometimes excellent, job of lecturing, they also are supposed to know and care about him personally and invite to lunch and into their homes.
Dude, grow the fsck up.
And, for christ's sake, someone who explicitly admits that he frequently did not read the material and that he was more interested in family life than in his courses has no right to criticize his teachers as being too demanding. If you want a law school experience that requires fewer hours work per week, go to a different law school, don't complain that HLS should change from what it has been for hundreds of years to suit your lifestyle.

There are, to be fair, a few incidental items of interest along the way. Particularly of interest was the sheer ceaseless stupidity of the leftists at HLS, both faculty and students. The orthodox claim is that it is this sort of navel-gazing onanism that is responsible for the decline of the relevance of the left to US politics, and this certainly seems plausible after we read about there inane antics.… (altro)