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Brush with the Law
The True Story of Law School Today at Harvard and Stanford
By Jaime Marquart, Robert Ebert Byrnes Renaissance Books
Copyright © 2001 Robert Ebert Byrnes and Jaime Marquart
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8285-0
CHAPTER 1
MY OWN PRISON
Dumb people do go to Harvard Law School.
Not just cheaters, crybabies, or hypercompetitive assholes, all of which are also in abundance at Harvard Law School. I mean dumb. Dense. Dinks. By the time I had the sense to understand that, and the courage to accept everything that went along with it, it was basically too late for me. I was already in the summer between my second and third year of law school, and getting ready to do a lot of dumb things myself. I was about to fall behind. Up to that point, I had always been ahead. Technically, you could say I started out behind — poor, undereducated, naive. But by the time it mattered, somewhere around first grade, I was leagues ahead. And stayed ahead. I got nary a B all the way through grade school and junior high. Then came high school and more of the same. When I was fifteen, I took the SAT, mainly to see what all the fuss was about. My score was 1110. Not great, but good enough for college. So a year later, when I was sixteen, I started college. I got all A's in college and started law school when I was twenty-one. A couple years after that, I looked up and there I was: twenty-three; in the summer before my final year at Harvard Law School; a $100,000-a-year job offer in hand; and a world-class fuck-up, two years in the making. Just as all the former fuck-ups were getting it together and starting their careers, I was treading air. Fittingly, it was then that I met Robert Byrnes, himself a former fuck-up on the rise and one of only two people I can honestly say understands my current situation, which is this:
Deep in my third and final year of law school, I am at a Foxwoods $100 blackjack table. It is 2:00 A.M. on a Friday. Anyone who was capable of leaving got out of here by 11:00. I didn't sit down until midnight. A Maker's Mark rests in my right hand. A stack of black and purple chips, which only hours before was a financial aid check, is in my left hand. Over either shoulder stands an extraordinarily plain woman who passes for gorgeous at family gatherings and at Harvard. Each watches and shares in the tension. The stack is now composed of twenty black chips and one purple chip, or $2,500. Not bad. Not bad, were it not for the fact that the financial aid check I cashed three hours earlier was written for $5,000. Twenty-five hundred bean — a full year's tuition my last year of college, my T-Bird's Blue Book in 1995, just before I shipped off to law school — all blown in two hours' time.
I've seen this situation enough times to know what will happen next. I'm not leaving the table until I've recouped my losses or lost it all. Or, I could win. It happens 48.5 percent of the time if you're on the up and up, or about 50.5 percent of the time if you are not. I am not.
Counting cards in blackjack is a lot like being a lawyer. You make money by exploiting the rules of a system. Technically, it's not cheating. That said, the whole system would crumble if everybody played it that way. But they don't and you do, so they lose and you win, and the flaws in the system persist. In theory.
In reality, it hardly matters. When you're only talking about a few hundred hands of blackjack, you just have to be lucky. And lately, I've been playing with scared money. Still, I approach my situation as any compulsive gambler would, hopefully. I'm just one good hand away from breaking even. Even so, there's nothing like gambling away the next couple months' worth of rent and food to make you wonder what the hell you're doing. As I push the rest of my stack into the circle in front of me and the pit boss phones upstairs for approval, I wonder aloud to myself and those around me, How did I get here?
Well, first things first. Where the hell am I? That I can answer. I am a third-year student in my last semester at Harvard Law School. I am losing large at Foxwoods' high-stakes blackjack table. Most of my classmates are getting ready for exams, which start in two weeks. I don't remember, off the top of my head, what classes I'm taking; I couldn't pick half of my professors out of a police lineup.
My situation is as dreary as it seems, but this blackjack hand has little to do with it. There's that law firm job waiting for me after I graduate. The financial aid check I'm about to blow can be replaced by another five grand, from my law firm, meant to help me study for the bar exam. I'll probably gamble that away, too, but I'll just cash advance more. Win or lose, I'll be OK. But one thing is certain, and pardon the tired old phrase: it is a long way from Eagle Lake, Texas, to where I sit now. I reflect on the distance I've traveled, remembering the essay that got me into Harvard Law School in the first place.
HARVARD LAW SCHOOL PERSONAL STATEMENT
Eagle Lake is a small Texas town with hardly a lake or an eagle. Surrounded by rice fields and old oil patches, its people work and live hard. My own beginnings are not unique in that world. I'd like, however, to share with you a bit of my experience there (far beyond all the objective measurements of entry, you ask to glimpse the man). My journey and becoming were rich in turmoil, chance, and unsolicited kindness, elements that can go a long way in creating good stories and personal strength.
I grew up in a single-parent household with one older brother. Possessing little education, my mother worked two, sometimes three jobs. Her efforts yielded never enough. I learned early not to ask for things I could do without (or could provide myself). Throughout a series of unsuccessful romances, my mother could not keep her emotional tides at bay and shared her pain with my brother and me. Lord knows I do not blame her, but worrying about the bills and our personal safety was a little more than most thirteen-year-olds could take. More than anything I hated the lack of control and daily unpredictability.
Today I marvel at the fine line that separates perseverance from surrender and wonder how close I was to giving up. Instead, I grew strong and learned early the joy that external order can bring to an unsure existence. Public school, with its rules and regulated peace, offered that order. Academically I thrived, but economic necessity required my early contribution. After part-time jobs mowing lawns and flopping burgers, I landed a job with a local farmer who also happened to run the town pharmacy (I call him a "farmercist"). I worked in the pharmacy during the school year and on the farm during breaks. Working the rice field from sun up to sun down, close to the earth and alone, I grew more sure of my thoughts and dreams.
At the age of sixteen I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to move on. Encouraged by teachers to take my last two years of high school at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) and supported by a scholarship from the farmercist's friend, I enrolled at the University of North Texas. At TAMS, I gained college credits while I completed high school. Much of the friction in my environment was absent and I learned and grew as never before. I truly believe my success there was a gift of those early struggles. It just seemed so easy compared to what I had to worry about at home. I had the time of my life, graduating first in my class and being voted Most Likely to Succeed. The rest of my college career has been as smooth. Supported still by the scholarship of those in Eagle Lake and my own year-round employment, I will graduate from the University of Texas at Austin in May with highest honors.
Daily and deep down inside I revel in these small successive steps toward building a fulfilling life and look forward always to the continuing journey. I return often to Eagle Lake to see my mother, family, and friends. Their lives seem better, calmer, even happy; the town still quiet and unchanging. I've been luckier than most and appreciate what I learned there, the value of hard work, the wide variety of personal and emotional choices available to any one individual, and the inner effort and faith required to endure and succeed. All this I carry as I move on.
Jaime Marquart 1/2/95
As the pit boss gets the OK from upstairs, I am awakened by two excited feminine taps on my shoulder. The pit boss nods to the dealer. The game will continue. Having consoled myself with the promise of certain financial freedom and congratulated myself for my risk-perverse spontaneity, I take the hand with ease.
Reality intervenes again. I am holding a queen and a five. Fifteen. Blackjack's second-worst hand. The dealer is showing a ten.
I am reminded of why blackjack is a losing proposition. The essence of the House's edge can be summarized in one statement: When you both bust, they win, and you have to go first. Because the dealer has a ten showing, the chances are good that he will have a total of seventeen or higher, and he won't have to take another card. If that's the case, I lose with fifteen. So I have to hit. But, if I take another card, the chances are that I will bust. Then, only then, I might find out the dealer really had a five under his ten all along, that he would have busted, and that I could have won by standing on fifteen. But by then he will have already taken my money.
Either way, I'll probably lose — a fitting outcome given the events of the last three days. For all the drama around me, I don't particularly care if I win or lose. But it wasn't always like this.
* * *
The day I was accepted into Harvard Law School was the day I decided to go to Harvard Law School. By the time that big packet with return address Cambridge, Massachusetts, found its way to my door, I'd already arranged for housing and had a roommate at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. I was raised with my hands in the earth, not one hundred miles from the forty acres that make up UT. I'd never lived outside of Texas and saw no reason to leave. I only applied to Harvard on a whim, more or less out of curiosity. And I didn't even have enough money to visit Harvard before deciding whether to go. But a packet that big could only mean one thing. Only one thing to do, too. It was like my brother said, "You get into Harvard, you go."
I would go to Harvard, site unseen, almost by reflex, on faith. I would be leaving behind Elise, the only girl I'd ever loved, a decision that would have been impossible had it not already been made for me. A few days after I'd said good-bye to Elise and headed to Harvard, she was on a plane to Spain for a year abroad. Spain and Harvard or Spain and Texas. It made little difference.
Elise and I knew distance might take some toll, but who could blame either of us for being confident about our prospects. From the time I was seventeen, I had been in love with Elise. She was there from the beginning, at the creation of me. Elise taught me not to scoff as I had at those who speak of "becoming one." We had. And as I watched her drift into the distance, I finally understood everything that meant. I could never separate my feelings from hers, my self-image from her image of me. The only way to understand that sort of simultaneous fear and hope is to experience it. I hope you have.
Back then, I ignored fear and focused on hope. Harvard Law School lasts three years — three long, solitary, rigorous years, from everything I'd heard. But that wasn't how I looked at it, as I leapt blindly into a foreign world with Elise jetting thousands of miles toward another continent. Fortunately, law school broke down neatly into smaller chunks.
Most of the action is in the first year of law school, especially the first semester. The goal during the first semester of law school is the same as mine and Elise's had been all along: to last. For the first couple of months, lasting would mean fitting in socially, holding up under Harvard's humiliation-driven teaching methods, and keeping up with intense reading requirements. For me, it would also mean sparsely allocated phone calls and daily e-mails to Spain until the end of the semester, my first chance to see Elise. Ultimately, lasting would mean getting a passing grade on each of my final exams at the end of the semester. Those final exams would be my only measure of success or failure; at Harvard Law School, there are no midterms, no homework grades, and no extra credit.
After a brief respite with Elise in January would come one more semester of the same. For those in the top 5 to 10 percent of the class, the goal would then be a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship or teaching law further down the line. That would require getting onto Law Review (Harvard's highbrow legal periodical) at the end of the first year, getting good grades the rest of the way out, and making nice with an egomaniacal and well-connected professor or two. Like most of my classmates, I never entertained those notions. Instead, my focus after that first year would shift to working for the first time in a law firm, where Elise and I would be together again for an entire summer, probably somewhere in Texas. After that, I figured the worst would be behind me. Elise would be back in the States during my last two years. The only remaining challenges would be withstanding more of the same in class, writing a thesis, and getting a job, preferably one wherever Elise was. And then, the rest of our lives.
I knew that three years in law school would bring its challenges, but I had faith that the Bigger Things would always survive any man-made obstacles. From the beginning, I had been taught that strange mixture of reverence, fear, and comfort the Bigger Things offer. Religion continues to occupy a mighty role in the day-to-day lives of Eagle Lake's 3,551. If you're not from around those parts, you may not completely get what I'm saying. I'm not talking about just saying you believe, or going to church on Christmas Eve and Easter, or christening your babies. None of that Pascal's wager, what-could-it-hurt-to-believe bullshit, either. I grew up among high-octane, ten-gallon-hat believers. In my world, it was natural to hear voices and see spirits. Whether you were crazy or enlightened depended on who the voice was and what it was telling you. For 99 percent of us, the voice was Christ.
And the message: You are most likely going to Hell. I was one of the 99 percent, full of all the piousness and the pain. Like every other institution I've entered into, I took religion seriously. I mean, if you're faking it, the omniscient Creator is probably onto you. So, I figured, why fake it?
And it didn't hurt that Satan himself paid me a visit. Sometime in the summer, when I was three, I sat on the kitchen counter helping my mom wash the dishes. I was the dryer. The phone rang. I answered, my favorite thing to do back then:
"Hewo ..." I must have said.
"Jai-meeee!" growled the otherworldly voice on the other end of the line. "This is the Devil. I'm coming to get you tonight."
For a perpetual inferno, back in the days before cellular phones and fiber optics, Hell had pretty good reception. You might have thought the call had come from the other room. I dropped the phone and began to scream. Then I cried. Then I screamed some more. My mother took me into her arms and rocked me, asking what was the matter. My eight-year-old brother rushed in from the other room, panic-stricken himself. He didn't ask what was the matter.
I couldn't sleep in my own bed for months. Despite my family's attempts to convince me that it was actually my brother Jeff doing his best Satan impersonation on the other line, they couldn't fool me. I knew what he sounded like, and that was no Jeff. That was no human. They hadn't heard the voice. Eventually I was able to sleep in my own bed again, but for a year or so after that I prayed for forgiveness every time I colored outside the lines or left a skid mark in my Fruit of the Looms. I was a serious little boy.
As I grew older, fear and guilt gave way to calm and perspective. With education, my faith had undergone many evolutions. I was not the Bible-thumping, hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist my mother raised. But my spirituality remained one of the most quotable sources of my success. To borrow a phrase from my law school entrance essay, which I admittedly lifted from Tim O'Brien, all this I carried as I moved on.
And why law school to begin with? I can finally answer that honestly. I did well in college, didn't like the jobs (translated, the money) available to me at the time, and thought law school was a great chance to put off any important career decisions for three years. Best of all, I'd make a hell of a lot more money when I got out. All of this proved to be true. In an IPO-happy, dynamic dot-com world, law school and the law remain holdouts to the static and predictable. No Bill Gates wealth possible; but no Bill Gates risk either. Just guaranteed, $200-an-hour freedom. Modest comforts, maybe, but modest comforts had been elusive in my life. First, though, you have to get in.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brush with the Law by Jaime Marquart, Robert Ebert Byrnes. Copyright © 2001 Robert Ebert Byrnes and Jaime Marquart. Excerpted by permission of Renaissance Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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