QUEEN OF MEMBRANES
It was during moot court in my first and only year of law school that I discovered I was not meant to become an attorney. The judges were real, recruited from graduates who were “on the bench.” The opposing attorney was another student. Our case was about the exclusion of evidence allegedly obtained by illegal means, what was called “fruit of the poisoned tree.”
The main argument for pretending in court that the evidence didn’t exist was to stop the police and prosecutors from violating the rights of defendants. That was the side to which I was assigned. The opposing “attorney” made the argument that the evidence proved the defendant was guilty, so he ought to be punished, never mind exactly how the evidence was obtained. At that moment I could not help thinking, “he has a point.” Of course I had anticipated this argument, but it was so cogently argued, and so passionately, that it had to be taken into account.
From reading many cases, I was familiar with the idea of “balance,” that each side in a case had a certain “weight,” and that finally the judges had to chose the side of the scale of justice that weighed most heavily. I also understood the theory of the adversary system. However, I could not bring myself to act as if just one side had merit. This inability would be no virtue in an attorney.
I found the curriculum intellectually challenging, especially the first-year course in constitutional law and the teaching of Professor Ronald Dworkin, who became, along with H.L.A. Hart, the leading philosopher of law in the English-speaking world. I admired the academic level of the school.
I wanted the l.aw school opportunity to work. Having applied late during a disorienting year in the third world, I had sent a letter saying I wanted to attend that law school, and got a polite response that the next year’s class had already been chosen, but if my score on the last law school admission test of that cycle was “interesting,” I would be invited to New Haven for a set of interviews, not ordinarily a part of the process. I took the test in an Air Force hanger in pre-Gaddafi Libya, with heavy planes taking off outside. I think that, after a year of intellectual isolation in North Africa, I was so starved for conversational partners that the professors at the school may have found me at least eager.
That year at the law school, I haunted the lounge to watch the Fulbright hearings on the Vietnam war, and was appalled by the Federal administration witnesses with their confident-sounding talk about falling dominoes and the need to defend liberty in a former colony of our ally, France. This was before the era of “teach-ins” at leading universities, but anyone with access to basic histories of the area and true news about the nature of the war was not surprised by the defeat of the U.S. that happened nine years later, after a tremendous cost in lives and money.
National policy in Washington did not seem to be governed by the moral considerations about which Dworkin spoke so eloquently. A couple of slightly later students at the same law school went on to run for President of the U.S., one successfully.
Much as I admired the courage of those who sought to enter public service with good values, I decided to follow other interests, with gratitude for even brief exposure to legal thinking at its best.