Latest / The Kulturecast / The Paper Chase (1973) — "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind."

Transcript

The Paper Chase (1973) — "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind." · The Kulturecast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Weary Way.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since its founding in eighteen seventeen,
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: it has produced seventy five United States Senators, two hundred Congressmen,
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: eleven Supreme Court justices, and an undetermined number of dropouts
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: and breakdowns.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: That's just a screamer. Man screams every Friday and Sunday
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: night at exactly twelve.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: This is James T. Hart, class of seventy six. He
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: has a birth certificate, a driver's license, a high school diploma,
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: a draft card, a college degree, and he's about to
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: spend three more years of his life chasing another piece
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: of paper. Loudly, mister heart, fill this room with your intelligence.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: I haven't read the case in twentieth century Fox presents
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: the paper chase.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: All that stuff about grades is true. You got to
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: work like hell.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: We use the Socratic method here.
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: That just grades.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Kevin, who come in here with a skullful of mush.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: It's a number, it's a letter, but it determines salaries
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: in the futures.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Professor Kingsfield, Yes, you want to get drunk.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: That is the most intelligent thing you've said today.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: There's no guarantee that we're all going to be here
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: in the spring, some of us might have nervous breakdowns.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: One more word of it, you Anderson, and I'll lock
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: your head in your attash shade case.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: What did you say, the paper Chase. Every guy in
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: this house almost flunked out.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: The first year.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: It's not too hard to see why. They had broads
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: on the brain.
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: Oh do you mind that someone following me?
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Just to the corners?
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: All right, I'll walk your home, all right.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: The worst thing a lot of stop can do is.
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: Get involved the girl.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: I haven't been working hardness since I've been seeing so
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: much of.
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: You, and it's all my fault.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: Is that what you're saying?
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Why didn't you tell me you were Kingsfield's daughter.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: Our relationship has changed.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: It certainly has. I feel like an intruder.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Not a miss bad but a study.
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, he's back to some different change.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And so what do you say?
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: Really just said he hoped it wasn't a law student
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: the paper Chase. I found something. There's a room about
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: this where they keep all of the actual notes the
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: professors took when they were law students. Here. I want
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: to see the notes. I want to see Kingsfield's notes on.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Contract I shall be irrational.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: Panic has descended.
• 3:15
  Speaker 4: Oh my god, what have you been doing in this room?
• 3:18
  Speaker 4: He flup?
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: Me.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Huh, she's a diamond.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: Close your mother. To the serious doubt about your becoming
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: a lawyer, Okay, it's got you scared to death, and
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: you're gonna pass because you're the kind of law school
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: once you'll get your little diploma, your piece of paper
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: that's little different than this, and you can stick it
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: in your silver box with all the other paper.
• 3:38
  Speaker 4: In your life.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: You are a sign of a.
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, he's back, a different change.
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: So what do you say?
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: Really just said?
• 4:02
  Speaker 5: He hoped it wasn't a law student recording. Hello everyone,
• 4:04
  Speaker 5: and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Christashuo,
• 4:07
  Speaker 5: and I am joined by two people. One who's never
• 4:09
  Speaker 5: been on this show before but has been on a
• 4:11
  Speaker 5: podcast before, and the other has been on several podcasts
• 4:14
  Speaker 5: with me, especially recently. All the Way from Somewhere was
• 4:19
  Speaker 5: somewhere in Texas. For both of these people, First off.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: He is my dad.
• 4:24
  Speaker 5: He is a attorney and yeah, semi retired. My dad
• 4:28
  Speaker 5: Mark Stashie Audi and all the Way from Somewhere in Texas.
• 4:32
  Speaker 5: He picked this movie which is the ironic part because
• 4:34
  Speaker 5: he's not a lawyer. Your friend of mine all the
• 4:36
  Speaker 5: way from Texas Tech. He is a professor of Communications
• 4:40
  Speaker 5: and Media over there at Texas Tech, doctor David perlman.
• 4:44
  Speaker 4: Aldy from West tex So, if.
• 4:46
  Speaker 5: You are tuning into this episode, you know what we
• 4:48
  Speaker 5: were talking about. Maybe you don't because you're probably my age,
• 4:51
  Speaker 5: and I'm not sure that people my age have ever
• 4:53
  Speaker 5: heard of this movie, which is a shame. But I
• 4:55
  Speaker 5: feel like if you are a lawyer my age, you
• 4:59
  Speaker 5: may have still seen or heard of this movie. Maybe maybe,
• 5:02
  Speaker 5: depending on who your parents were, and depending on if
• 5:04
  Speaker 5: one of your parents was a lawyer on top of
• 5:07
  Speaker 5: you being a lawyer. On this episode of the Culture Cast,
• 5:09
  Speaker 5: we are going to be taking a look at nineteen
• 5:11
  Speaker 5: seventy three's The Paper Chase.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: So.
• 5:14
  Speaker 5: The film is directed by James Bridge, written by James Bridge,
• 5:18
  Speaker 5: based on a book by John j Osborne Junior of
• 5:22
  Speaker 5: the same name. The film stars Timothy Bottoms as James T. Hart,
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: a first year law student at of all places, Harvard
• 5:29
  Speaker 5: who runs into well a lot of the issues I'm
• 5:32
  Speaker 5: assuming first year law students run into at least in
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: nineteen seventies, where this film is set. It is very
• 5:38
  Speaker 5: much a film of a time and place, so we'll
• 5:40
  Speaker 5: be talking a little bit about the time and place
• 5:42
  Speaker 5: of it all. But it really is, in a lot
• 5:43
  Speaker 5: of ways a graduate style look at law school, in
• 5:49
  Speaker 5: that same kind of feeling out of place in the
• 5:51
  Speaker 5: seventies vein that the graduate definitely leans into. I want
• 5:55
  Speaker 5: to say, on the promotional poster for the film, they
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: even mentioned the graduate it by name at the top
• 6:01
  Speaker 5: of the post. So before I kick it to you,
• 6:04
  Speaker 5: doctor Pearl mutters, since Mark has never been on the
• 6:07
  Speaker 5: show before Mark, I'm going to kick it to you.
• 6:09
  Speaker 5: What did you think of film? When did you first
• 6:12
  Speaker 5: see it? And what did you think rewatching it for
• 6:15
  Speaker 5: the culture cast?
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: Well, first place, I mean, I think it's a fair
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: representation of the experience that people have in law school
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: in the seventies, eighties, maybe even the nineties. I can't
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: speak to today. I went to law school in eighty
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: two to eighty five, but I will say that it
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: was very much along the same lines of the Socratic
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: method lawyers and the law doesn't change that quickly, So
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: you know, this probably could have been shot in nineteen
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: thirties and probably been the same it's there's nothing in
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: here that's seventies related in the sense of what's going
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: on in the law school environment. I do think it
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: it accurately reence, at least in the classroom, what some
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: people's experiences may very well have been and are and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: going to law school in those decades. Today they may
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: they may take a softer touch. I don't know, but
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: back then, I mean, it is a it is a
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: it is a rough experience. As John Housman explains, part
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: of the the experience of going to law school is
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: to change people into people that largely think and analyze
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the same and he I think I think it accurately
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: underscores that in in the movie. Uh the rest of it, well,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: we can obviously talk more about whether that's something that's
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: actually going was actually going on in law school, but
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: I think the classroom experience, it largely may still go
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: on today because it's you know, again, the law doesn't
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: change that quickly.
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: All right, Doctor Perlmutter. I'm putting you on blast now
• 7:54
  Speaker 5: because you, of all people picked this movie. You are
• 7:57
  Speaker 5: not a lawyer, but you are in academia obviously, so
• 8:00
  Speaker 5: I am very curious of all the films that you
• 8:03
  Speaker 5: could have put on that long list of movies you
• 8:04
  Speaker 5: sent me to cover. Why the Paper Chase, because it
• 8:07
  Speaker 5: obviously jumped out of me given that I had obviously
• 8:10
  Speaker 5: my dad had mentioned to me to watch it long ago,
• 8:13
  Speaker 5: and I just had not, so obviously this was one
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: that had stuck out in my mind if it ever
• 8:17
  Speaker 5: came up again. So Why the Paper Chase?
• 8:19
  Speaker 4: Doctor Promutter, Well, I sent you a long list of movies,
• 8:22
  Speaker 4: and I think one element they all have in common
• 8:25
  Speaker 4: is they do a pretty good job of either opening
• 8:29
  Speaker 4: up a window to a world that most people haven't
• 8:33
  Speaker 4: had experience with, or building a world. So it might
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: be another world like Alpha Centuri, or it might be
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: Harvard Law School in nineteen seventies, which only a limited
• 8:43
  Speaker 4: number of people have ever experienced. And this film was
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: fascinating for me as well because my parents were both
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: professors at another rival Ivy League University, and my dad
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: physically looked a little bit like Professor Kingsfield and I
• 9:00
  Speaker 4: I did not see this movie until I think mid
• 9:04
  Speaker 4: early mid eighties, when I was an undergraduate, and I
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: had not heard much about it, but I did. I
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: watched it, and then I went to my dad and
• 9:12
  Speaker 4: I said, Dad, is that none of my professors are
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: like this. Do you act this way to your students?
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: Are Are they like trembling in their seats? And you
• 9:22
  Speaker 4: come off as this like authority from antiquity or something
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: like that. And he said, no, no, no, no, I'm
• 9:30
  Speaker 4: much kinder to the students. I feel sorry for him,
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: especially the ones, the young students there. But we are tough,
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: he said, I mean you have to be like, the
• 9:39
  Speaker 4: degree has to mean something. And I actually that was
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: a really good point he made and in some ways
• 9:46
  Speaker 4: led me to being a professor and having the values
• 9:48
  Speaker 4: that I do. Was that you can approach students in
• 9:52
  Speaker 4: many different ways. And I like to think that I
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: am relatively kindly compared to doctor Kingsfield. But Professor Kingspiel,
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: I should say, but the idea that the degree means
• 10:03
  Speaker 4: something is still something pretty sacred with universities, and Kingsfield
• 10:09
  Speaker 4: is as a type, he's an extreme type. I've met
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: Kingsfields in the course of my career. I did meet
• 10:15
  Speaker 4: Kingsfields as undergraduates. They were in different fields, they weren't
• 10:18
  Speaker 4: all in law. Most of them were not actually cruel people.
• 10:23
  Speaker 4: If you've watched the movie and We certainly hope people
• 10:26
  Speaker 4: watch the movie after this, or have in anticipation of listening,
• 10:30
  Speaker 4: have watched the movie. But they had these ideals, and
• 10:34
  Speaker 4: I think that that's brought out very well in the film.
• 10:36
  Speaker 4: And then the last part why I recommend it was that,
• 10:39
  Speaker 4: my gosh, Hollywood has not made a lot of movies
• 10:44
  Speaker 4: where there is a professor who isn't doing something terrible
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: and wrong. In the movie. The trope and type of
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: a professor is almost always somebody who's I wouldn't even
• 10:55
  Speaker 4: say that the hijinks that professors get up to in
• 10:59
  Speaker 4: movie these and television shows. But here's one who's like
• 11:03
  Speaker 4: ethically just pristine, like he's an ideal, high integrity human being.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but look, I think it is. You know, luckily
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: it's not misogenic. But there's no doubt that anybody that's
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: been through that crucible will not see it as cruel
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: and mean. Now, I will say this much. You know,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: everybody's law school experience is different. But I mean I
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: went to law school, like I said, in the early eighties,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: I was at the University of California. It wasn't Ivy League.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: But I don't think it matters whether you're an ivy
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: league or any of these other places. It's all the
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: same because again that this is the way the law
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: is thought it needs to teach you is by learning
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: and learning in this fashion. You know, some professors would
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: go you know, you would know when you would be
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: called because he'd go alphabetically, or they would go through,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: you know, through the seating chart from left to right,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: row after row. So what he did was was particularly
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: more cruel because he was trying to catch people. And
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: you know, at the end of the day, one of
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: the things that people don't realize, and I think this
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: film brings out, although it doesn't really highlight it, is
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: the fact that law school is one of those weird
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: places where there's only one exam per semester. Okay, most
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: other university courses you have multiple exams, you may have papers,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: you may have all kinds of things. The traditional law
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: school is you take an exam at the end of
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: the semester covering fifteen weeks, and if you're a one
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: L it's all. It's both semesters. The middle doesn't usually count.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: You usually have an exam after the first semester, and
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: it may count with respect to those classes that don't repeat.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: Some classes are only one semester long, but those that
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: are two semesters long, generally what they say is, at
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: least in my experience, the grade is only the one
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: at the end of the year. Okay, So just think
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: about that. It's a whole year worth of material that
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: you have to cram into an exam. So it is
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: you know, it has it, and they get it right here.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Although they don't really highlight it, it really does change
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: kind of the character what's going on versus other experiences.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: The other thing I'll say is, unlike almost any other
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: higher education except for maybe doctors and maybe accountants, this
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: is a professional So they're trying to make you into
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: a mold of a different kind of person. It's not
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: an educated person. It's a person who's going to look
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: at the at the case, look at the facts, look
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: at the law the same regardless whether you're a twenty
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: year practitioner or a one year practitioner. They want to
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: beat you into a mold, and that's part of what
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: the process is. It's that's what makes it ugly. That's
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: that's when you think, when you look at it, you
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: recoil a little bit about what he's doing. But at
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: the end of the day, that's what he's trying to do.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: He's trying to get people to think in a particular way.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: He in fact has a line, you know, he says
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: where he's taking mush in your mind and turning you
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: into a lawyer. That's what he's doing. He's trying to
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: get you to think like every other lawyer and approach
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: a problem in exactly the same way, which, by the way,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: limits in some respect new approach because everyone's thinking about
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the problem the same way.
• 14:18
  Speaker 5: What almost dissuades thinking about things in a new way.
• 14:21
  Speaker 5: And I don't think that's the intention either, obviously, because
• 14:24
  Speaker 5: I mean, like you mentioned, the law is the and
• 14:28
  Speaker 5: you used to say this all the time when I
• 14:30
  Speaker 5: was growing up, Like going to law school is not
• 14:33
  Speaker 5: about being taught how to be a lawyer. It's like
• 14:35
  Speaker 5: being taught how to think like a lawyer.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: And you would.
• 14:38
  Speaker 5: Always, like we would always you would always tell me
• 14:39
  Speaker 5: about that. And I mean the movie I think accurately
• 14:42
  Speaker 5: reflects that thesis, because like you said, I mean, the
• 14:45
  Speaker 5: entire point of the Kingsfield character is to take people
• 14:49
  Speaker 5: that are unprepared to go out into the world in
• 14:52
  Speaker 5: a professional field and turn them into someone that can
• 14:56
  Speaker 5: do that, hopefully successfully and efficiently in a way way
• 15:00
  Speaker 5: that won't. Because this is the other thing that you know.
• 15:03
  Speaker 5: I mean, they don't really touch on it a lot,
• 15:05
  Speaker 5: but it's something that you know, I'm sure doctor Peerlmutter
• 15:07
  Speaker 5: can speak to a little bit. All these people reflect
• 15:10
  Speaker 5: on their university. And it's so smart to have the
• 15:13
  Speaker 5: university be Harvard because if it were just you know,
• 15:16
  Speaker 5: asshole university in the middle of nowhere.
• 15:18
  Speaker 4: Who cares.
• 15:19
  Speaker 5: But because it's Harvard, because that alone on paper means
• 15:23
  Speaker 5: something and has so much tied to it, so much.
• 15:26
  Speaker 5: I mean again, like expectation, so manything that is part
• 15:30
  Speaker 5: of this, Like he is making sure that they're prepared
• 15:33
  Speaker 5: to be lawyers but also to be representatives of the
• 15:35
  Speaker 5: law community from Harvard, a place where people will continue
• 15:39
  Speaker 5: to want to go and be. Really I mean, they
• 15:43
  Speaker 5: don't talk about it in this but it is a
• 15:45
  Speaker 5: ruthless process to get into law school in and of itself.
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: I mean Timothy Botam's character touches on it a little bit.
• 15:51
  Speaker 5: He's like, you know, I knew these other two guys,
• 15:54
  Speaker 5: and one of them was a genius, and he didn't
• 15:55
  Speaker 5: even get a high enough score to come here. But
• 15:57
  Speaker 5: he never talks about himself in that regard, which is
• 15:59
  Speaker 5: the funny part. But he always he's talking about the
• 16:02
  Speaker 5: other people that he knew that couldn't get in. And
• 16:04
  Speaker 5: it's again like this is a place you want to be.
• 16:07
  Speaker 5: I applied to Harvard Law School, like I think pretty
• 16:10
  Speaker 5: much everybody does, just to throw your hat into that.
• 16:13
  Speaker 5: I mean, most people do, just to throw their hat
• 16:14
  Speaker 5: into the ring to see what happened. I mean I did.
• 16:16
  Speaker 5: I don't know if I had gotten in there, I
• 16:18
  Speaker 5: would have gone there anymore than I didn't go where
• 16:20
  Speaker 5: I got in anyway. And this is the point of
• 16:22
  Speaker 5: the podcast where I mentioned I was going to go
• 16:24
  Speaker 5: to law school and I didn't.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: So there's a There's a couple other things that, in
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: addition to the experience in the Kingsfield classroom, that I
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: think are very true. Although it may be changing grades
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: matter a lot, because it does. If you're a top
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: ten percent person or on law reviewer, both the opportunities
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: you get are much different than if you don't. I
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: as I understand it. And again it's been a while,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: but I've kind of heard that Harvard's gone away from grades.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: It's you know, basically become past fail because you're trying
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: to keep you know, trying to eliminate this. I mean
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: when I was going to school, you know, you always
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: hear the anecdotal things about you know, the competition is
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: so tight that you know, you have some sort of
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: research project. People go into library and cut the cases
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: out of the book with a razor blade so that
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: other people can't get them, so they can't get a
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: good grade. It is competitive, and it's one of the
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: things that they say but they don't really spend much
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: time talking about, is that there is a lot of
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: different experience between the one year, the one l experience,
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: and the three year experience. They talked in about it
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: when they're talking in the shower about whether you could
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: have a girlfriend or not, but they don't really highlight
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: much about it. What what happens to in a lot
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: of cases and they again they don't they kind of
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: touch on it, but don't really talk much about it.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Is the what your path to the future is largely
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: set by what happens in the first year and maybe
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: a little bit of the second year, and why is that?
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: And the film doesn't touch on any of this at all.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: But after the first year you want to try to
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: get And now I understand they law firms might hire
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: you after the first year, but when I was going,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: it was after the second year of school. And what
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: they were doing is that was the they were interviewing
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: you in the fall of the second year. They would
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: extend you an offer to go work as an intern
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: in the second year of summer and you would get
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: a job offer hopefully and which case, the job offer
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: basically says, as long as you graduate, you've got a
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: job with us. So it really puts an enormous amount
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: of pressure on what happens in that first year. So
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: you know, they do accurately portray that there's a lot
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: of pressure in the first year. They don't really explain why,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: but that's part of the kind of external pressure that
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: put this kind of thing on. I'll tell you know,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: I've watched this movie. This is the third time I
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: probably watched my life. There's a reason I don't watch
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: it is because it gives me a little bit of PTSD.
• 18:56
  Speaker 5: I was going to ask that I assume it has
• 18:58
  Speaker 5: to give you some level of flashbacks, because like, yeah,
• 19:01
  Speaker 5: it can't be all positive.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Like well, like I said, maybe it's a movie that
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: some people will find amusing, but I don't find it amusing.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: I find I find it too touch, too close to reality.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: It's like someone who's been in Vietnam watching a Vietnam
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: war movie that has, you know, realistic scenes. You you
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: you you recoil a bit because you remember what this
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: really was again, you know, it's the first year is
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: about learning how to think. That the quicker you learn
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: how to think like a lawyer that and and most
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: people have really good writing skills, the better your grades
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: are going to be, and the better that you're going
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: to end up in that second year, which really matters
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: because that really does set your career in many cases
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: for the rest of your life. Yeah.
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: Well, you offer also another lens on this that I
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: guess people in the seventies would have absorbed more without
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: it being spelled out in the film, is that Harvard
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: was Harvard. I mean today, Harvard is still Harvard, but
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: you know, there's a lot of other famous, great universities
• 20:07
  Speaker 4: in the world at Harvard's brand. It's not that it's diminished,
• 20:10
  Speaker 4: it's just it's more crowded. I mean, ut Austin has
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: a bigger endownment than Harvard, for example, like UT Austin.
• 20:17
  Speaker 5: I think when I was applying to law school was
• 20:19
  Speaker 5: free and Harvard may have been above or below it
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: by only one or two spots, like it's Harvard is
• 20:26
  Speaker 5: capital H in this movie.
• 20:28
  Speaker 4: If you go on the internet, you can find the
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: famous Harvard letter or essay of application written by one
• 20:36
  Speaker 4: John F. Kennedy, son of Patrick Kennedy, for Harvard, and
• 20:41
  Speaker 4: it often gets passed around as being well, honestly unintentionally
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: hilarious because basically he says, hey, I've heard a lot
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: of good things about Harvard. I'd love to be there,
• 20:52
  Speaker 4: right And today you have parents who are hiring like
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: private consultants and videographers and from Hollywood to help put
• 21:01
  Speaker 4: together their undergraduate Harvard as applications, let alone their Harvard
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: Law school applications. Harvard was for the elite of America,
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: and up until World War Two, college was for the elite.
• 21:15
  Speaker 4: You can still see in some of the older films
• 21:17
  Speaker 4: like fifties and sixties, somebody will say, hey, college boy,
• 21:21
  Speaker 4: most people did not go to college. What changed radically,
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: my father being a very good example, was World War
• 21:28
  Speaker 4: two and the GI bill that came after World War Two,
• 21:31
  Speaker 4: and suddenly hundreds of thousands, millions of people who may
• 21:36
  Speaker 4: have aspired to go to college and couldn't afford to
• 21:38
  Speaker 4: go to college or just didn't think about college, were
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: going to college. And that's where a lot of other
• 21:44
  Speaker 4: universities began to rise because people were going to Not
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: everybody could go even they wanted to. Not everybody could
• 21:51
  Speaker 4: go to the very small, relatively small classes of a
• 21:56
  Speaker 4: total number of students at the IV's or some of
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: the other top universities, and so there was a democratization
• 22:06
  Speaker 4: of universities. There's there's lots of elite universities now, but
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: Harvard still in the early seventies had that both like
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: shine and also stigma. Like you you may have gotten
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: like a big plus graduating from Harvard Law School in
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: the Boston area. I mean, yeah, I'm sure a lot
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: of Northeastern firms and Boston firms wanted to hire. I
• 22:29
  Speaker 4: don't think that was necessarily true of Arizona firms. You know,
• 22:32
  Speaker 4: they they may have seen a Harvard person in a
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: negative way. But the point was that these kids, who
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: these these young people that we see in the movie
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: A lot of people going to the film would have
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: seen them as they were, which is the sons and
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: daughters of the super elite, the privileged elite of America,
• 22:53
  Speaker 4: and so torturing them, you know, in the classroom, them
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: suffering a little bit in the classroom was not necessarily
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: like something that we would immediately have sympathy for. It'd
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: be like billionaires problems. So I understand what you're saying, sir,
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: and you know, everybody had to go through something, and
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: I'm sure you did, but the sympathy for Harvard students
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: having a tough time at Harvard was not super great
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: at the time that the film was made.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'll let me let me respond to a
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: couple of things that you said, because I think it's
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: it's important everyone kind of understand this. The law in
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: the past has been and it probably still is, very
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: much hinges around relationship. So the reason people want to
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: go to Harvard, there's a perception they give a better education.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: We can decide whether that's the case or not, whether
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: they have a better endowment or not, we can we
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: can debate that, but the fact is Harvard people are
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: more likely to hire Harvard people and ut people are
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: more likely to hire ut people. And I'll tell you
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: Texas Tech law law people they graduate from Texas Tech
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Law School are more likely to high Texas Technical lawyers.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: And it's because it's it's very club and the fact
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: that's what a lot of the fight to the glass
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: ceiling and a bunch of other things. What's interesting about
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: this movie is the number of females in the classroom.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: The seventies was kind of a breakout where you know,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: in the sixties there just weren't as many women going
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: to law school. It wasn't really thought of as a
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: women's profession. You know, the seventies kind of broke a
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: lot out with what was going on with that with
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: that generation. So you know, they would have the seventies.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: If you were someone who was older looking at this movie.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: In the seventies, what would have been remarkable to you
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: is a number of women going to law school because
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: you know, they don't really say much about it, but
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: there were a lot in that in that classroom, and
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: they were not wilting flowers that I think it was
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Miss Faraci. That was you know, responding and answering the questions,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: you know, straight up. But you know at the end
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: of the day, no matter where you are, a Harvard
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: having a Harvard label will get you further than having
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: a label of you know, the local law school. It
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: just will, just because people will assume certain things. The
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: other thing to understand is that depending upon where your
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: journey in the law is, you have more opportunities if
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: you go to certain schools than others. For example, my
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: guess is if you ran the the resumes of those
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: people who serve as clerks for United States Supreme Court justices,
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: you'll probably see more Harvard Yale in Princeton than you will.
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: Or be a Supreme Court justice, right, I mean, that's correct.
• 25:34
  Speaker 4: It think I think there was a study like Harvard
• 25:36
  Speaker 4: graduates have the highest per cap of that percentage of
• 25:39
  Speaker 4: being on the Supreme Court today.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: Yes as well, I mean yeah, that's years ago. Yeah, yeah,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I mean it's again, you know, there's
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: kind of a there's an assumption that this is kind
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: of gone. And I agree with you that you know there,
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I'm not sure people need to what's
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: interesting about it. I'm not sure that it was trying
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: to get you to sympathize with the characters because at
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: the end, and again it's really fleeting. You have to understand,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: I think the paper that Kingsfield is grading is Timothy
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: Bottom paper. They don't say it. You can't, I can't.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: I couldn't see the name on that blue book. But
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: that was my guess because you know, what's interesting is
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: the way that the movie ends with him not seeing
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: his grade. And I think it was, you know, I
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: think it was trying to, you know, show that he's
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: turning his back on the whole idea that you know,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: he spent all this time to try to get these
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: great grades and he's kind of turning his back on it.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: But it but if he's going to go back to
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: law school, it doesn't matter that he threw it in
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: the water. It's still going to be there, right.
• 26:41
  Speaker 5: Yeah, And I and and it does. I mean, it's
• 26:43
  Speaker 5: it is a little hard to see, but it is.
• 26:46
  Speaker 5: It is his book at the end of the movie
• 26:47
  Speaker 5: that it's grading. And that's where the difference from the
• 26:50
  Speaker 5: book is versus the movie, because in the book you
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: never find out what his gradeed. The book actually leaves
• 26:56
  Speaker 5: it a little bit more wide open than the movie does.
• 26:59
  Speaker 5: I mean, the movie, I think kind of I think
• 27:01
  Speaker 5: The part of the movie that really I think was
• 27:02
  Speaker 5: interesting to me is when he's in the elevator with
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: him and he's like, you know, I really enjoyed your class.
• 27:09
  Speaker 5: You know, it really meant a lot to me, and
• 27:10
  Speaker 5: he's like, who are you again?
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: And I don't I mean, that was a bit overdone.
• 27:16
  Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I was gonna say, like, that's the part
• 27:19
  Speaker 5: of the movie where like you were both kind of
• 27:20
  Speaker 5: commenting on, like, he doesn't seem like he's cruel, But
• 27:23
  Speaker 5: at the same time, how can that at the end
• 27:26
  Speaker 5: of the film be it perceived as anything other than cruel?
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Frankly, but I think it was a I think it
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: was done for cinematic effect. If you remember, he kept
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: telling his girlfriend that you know, he thought he had
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: a special relationship with Kingsfield, that you know he knew him,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: and you know you know that you know that Kingfield
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: kind of knew him, and then you know, at the end,
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: what that elevator scene shows is you don't know who
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: he is. And remember and remember Kingsfield had given him
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: the research project, right yeah before that, So here's a guy. Yeah,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: so it's basically, you know, here's a guy. You gotta
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: wonder whether he just was being you know, hardheaded or
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: what was going on. But I mean, I think it
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: was for effect to basically say, you know, he spent
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: all this time to trying to show, you know, tell
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: his girlfriend how how he was special to Kingsfield and
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: he knew him and all this other stuff, and Kingfield
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: just doesn't. You know. It's just it's it's almost like,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: you know, the the the trope in a in a
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: movie that has a lot of you know, assassins, where
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: you know, guy shooting somebody and said, hey, this is
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: just business, it's not personal. You know, you almost get
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: the feeling. It's kind of the lawyer equivalent of it.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I don't you know, I did all that. I don't
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: know who you are, and it wasn't it wasn't personal.
• 28:35
  Speaker 5: Well, it's what it reminded me of is and I
• 28:39
  Speaker 5: know you've watched it, doctor Pearletter. I don't know if
• 28:41
  Speaker 5: you've seen it all, but that this movie at times
• 28:44
  Speaker 5: reminds me of The Bear, where you have like the
• 28:48
  Speaker 5: younger seeking the approval of the older or the more
• 28:51
  Speaker 5: talented or more qualified. And in the third season of
• 28:55
  Speaker 5: The Bear, there is a scene between Jeremy Allen White
• 28:59
  Speaker 5: and Joel McHale. That is more or less ripped directly
• 29:03
  Speaker 5: from the end of this movie where you have him
• 29:06
  Speaker 5: confronting him and he goes who are you? And it's like,
• 29:09
  Speaker 5: oh my god, Like the what's the worst thing that
• 29:11
  Speaker 5: he could say to someone is not remembering who you are?
• 29:15
  Speaker 5: When that's all he does is sit every day and
• 29:17
  Speaker 5: run through his mind over and over again how much
• 29:19
  Speaker 5: this guy has like destroyed his life or what what
• 29:23
  Speaker 5: have you. And it's like, I I again, like I
• 29:25
  Speaker 5: don't I think Mark to your point, it's probably more that.
• 29:28
  Speaker 5: I think it's more just as like the continued tetatae
• 29:31
  Speaker 5: between the two of them of like, you know, the
• 29:34
  Speaker 5: back and forth, the war of words, I think is
• 29:36
  Speaker 5: kind of what that final scene is about. Because let's
• 29:40
  Speaker 5: not forget though we didn't watch it, there's three seasons
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: of a TV show called The Paper Chase, which is
• 29:46
  Speaker 5: a real thing that you can go watch somewhere.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: I'm assuming I don't know how many.
• 29:50
  Speaker 5: Waves it made when it came out, but there's a
• 29:53
  Speaker 5: whole TV show following this further, like you know, ah, yeah,
• 29:59
  Speaker 5: I mean again war seasons actually, so you know, having
• 30:01
  Speaker 5: him go through year two, year three of law school.
• 30:04
  Speaker 5: Like again, like you know, the thing is to your point, Mark, like,
• 30:08
  Speaker 5: there's still more story after this, and they even acknowledge
• 30:11
  Speaker 5: it and tell it, so you know, Yeah.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: The other thing I'll say about it, and I would
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: like to hear what doctor Permutter has say, is they
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: got some other things right that. Again, it's to your point,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: doctor Permonter. It's exposing things that people would not have
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: been in their ordinary experience. First place, you know, the
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Socratic method is not, to my knowledge, used in anything
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: but law school. Okay, I mean it's a it's almost
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: a unique kind of animal, at least in the modern era.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: The second is the whole use of these outlines. Outlines
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: are not something that I would say most college students
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: even even come close to touching. I mean, if you
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: think about it, right, if I've got a class and
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: political theory, I'm not writing an outline about you know,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: the books I read or necessarily what's going on. I
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: have notes from the class that I try to condense
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: into something that I try to you know, learn, in
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: which case that I'm going to kind of regurgitate on
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: an exam. The outlines, to my knowledge is is very
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: unique to law school and they really touch a lot
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: on it, but they don't really explain the fact is
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: the books that people use are a lot different than
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: books used in the In an ordinary college course. You know,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: if I go and take a chemistry class, you know,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: chapter one talks about, you know, I have a Godro's number,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: and it gives a whole bunch of you know, explanations
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: and how to calculate and what to do with it,
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: blah blah blah, and you know, goes on and on
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: chapter after chapter. In law school, what you get is
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: chapter one, here's case carbolic, you know, acid versus whatever.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: It doesn't explain why the case is there. It doesn't
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: explain what the case is, what's supposed to stand for.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have anything. It's it's like I just grab
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: a book off the shelf and you know, one of
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: the case reporters, I'm reading the case. Okay, So what
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: ends up happening in law school and this is part
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: of this kind of learning changing the mind is you
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: have to learn how to put all that stuff together.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: The professor is not helping you put it together. At
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: least he wasn't in the seventies. He wasn't in the eighties.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe they do today. I don't know. So in fact,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: it springs up a whole industry we can talk about
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: later about people. You know, you could buy outlines that
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: basically explain what the law is, as opposed to you
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: having to create them. Okay, but at the end of
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: the day, you as a student have to create these outlines,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: and they're unique to each person or group, and they're
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: unique to every class because you've got different cases, et cetera.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: And you know the study groups again, you know, if
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: you think about chemistry, I don't know that you have
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: study groups for chemistry, but here it is. You know,
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: typically I didn't participate in any of them, so I
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: really can't say the inner dynamics of those. But that's
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: a real thing. So there's, like I said, there's a
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: lot of things in this movie that are real people
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: busting down emotionally. I won't say make suicide is necessarily
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: you know, something that's a regular event. I don't know
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: one way or the other. But breaking down mentally, yeah,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: I mean there's you know, there's a pretty good wash
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: out rate, not because you flunk, but people just give up,
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: They just walk away from it because it is It
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: is a kind of one of those kind of experiences,
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: almost like boot camp, where they're trying to get you
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: to behave and act in a particular way. So you
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: have to create your own outlines that teach you the
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: law that you then have to You don't regurgitate the outline.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: What you have to do is you have to use
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: the outline that you've written to be able to answer
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the question because guess what your exam looks like a case.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: They give you a bunch of facts and then they say,
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: you know, what are the cause of action or what
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: should what should the plane if? Or what should the
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: defendant do? And you basically have to use the learning
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: to create basically your own kind of answer. So it's
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: a it's kind of a unique kind of thing. It's
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: not really you're not there to regurgitate car bill, you know,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: acid case. You're there to regurg it to you to
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: use what the what the holding in that case was,
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: to decide some other set of facts and try to
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: extend the answer in there, which makes it kind of unique.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: And I'll say this, you know the guy with the
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: eight hundred page outline, those exist. The ones with the
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: two page outline, those exist. I mean it's you know,
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: those are all part of those are real things.
• 34:25
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Whether whether it's all the time, I don't know, but
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: you know, everybody's got their own own style. When I
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: took exams, I had an outline I you know, created myself.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: And then I created another outline before I took the
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: exam that was shorter, that would allow me to actually
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: get to the answer quicker. And you know that I
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: could actually memorize. You can't memorize forty pages, but you
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: might be able to memorize five.
• 34:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah. And by the way, Chris, I hope you attached
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: the notes for this episode your dad's outlines. I think
• 34:52
  Speaker 4: we all want to read them.
• 34:53
  Speaker 5: Oh my god, I can't even I can't even imagine
• 34:56
  Speaker 5: what those were.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you that people use my outlines to
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: get good grades, so a lot.
• 35:00
  Speaker 5: Of other than they were really good. I can't imagine
• 35:05
  Speaker 5: what they look like, but I'm sure that they were,
• 35:08
  Speaker 5: you know exactly. I know how good of a lawyer
• 35:10
  Speaker 5: my dad is, so I know that didn't just know
• 35:12
  Speaker 5: what happened yesterday.
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: I definitely think your dad is an excellent advocate and
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: a counselor. Right now, so the Roman historian Livy made
• 35:23
  Speaker 4: a comment in one of his writings about the gods
• 35:26
  Speaker 4: do not give all their gifts to one man, and
• 35:29
  Speaker 4: I think this movie sort of pulls that out. There's
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: there's a character here. He's named Kevin Brooks. We have
• 35:36
  Speaker 4: to remember this is graduate school, right, so this is
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: not first year freshman college. This is like these people
• 35:44
  Speaker 4: have already graduated, probably with top yes, with top grades
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: and recommendations and everything, to get into Harvard Law School.
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: So there's a prefiltering, right. This isn't this isn't a
• 35:56
  Speaker 4: Bell curve of humanity here. This is like the last
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: three percent or two percent of a Bell curve. Now,
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: this is Harvard in nineteen seventy So some people got
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: into law school because, yeah, their father's brothers cousin is
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: a Supreme Court justice. There's somebody gave him a billion
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: dollars to Harvard too, So I mean there's other ways
• 36:17
  Speaker 4: to get in besides pure ability in nineteen seventy three.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: But there's a.
• 36:21
  Speaker 4: Character called Kevin Brooks, and he is sort of the
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: antithesis of what Kingsfield wants. He is portrayed as like
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: super smart in memorization, like he got through his undergraduates
• 36:34
  Speaker 4: because he memorized everything and was able to be able
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: to regurgitate everything in the final exam. But that's not
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: law school, as you are saying, sir. Law school is
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: about thinking. It's about reacting on your feet, certainly being
• 36:49
  Speaker 4: familiar with the law. If you're arguing the case before
• 36:51
  Speaker 4: his Supreme Court and you go like, oh, yeah, in
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: that case, I forgot what it's name. But you know,
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: the one with the thing, you know you're probably not
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: going to do well, but you do have to remember
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: an immense amount of stuff. But this Kevin Brooks, the
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: one who will just give it away at some point,
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: tries to commit suicide because he's never failed at anything
• 37:10
  Speaker 4: in his life, because he is a certain type of intelligent, right,
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: so the gods have given him a certain gift. But
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: it's not a gift that's going to help you pass
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: Kingsfield's class, or probably pass law school, or probably be
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: a good lawyer. Because he doesn't seem to be able
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: to take and synthesize and apply what he's learned. And
• 37:29
  Speaker 4: I want to give you one example of this, probably
• 37:32
  Speaker 4: of the one of the most famous lawyers in the
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: history of the world, who didn't go to Harvard a
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Just out of pure coincidence, I
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: was looking something up related to this. Lawyers spend a
• 37:45
  Speaker 4: lot of their time talking and advocating and counseling and speaking,
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: and so being able to get up and speak succinctly
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: to a jury or to you can fill us in
• 37:59
  Speaker 4: from getting this from my lawyer friends and from television
• 38:02
  Speaker 4: and movies. But so Lincoln famously had these debates with
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: Stephen Douglas in the eighteen sixty presidential race, the Lincoln
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: Douglas debates, and these were like they would get up
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: and debate for seven out, slavery, all the caraffs, all
• 38:18
  Speaker 4: the issues of the day. And somebody on the internet
• 38:22
  Speaker 4: asked the question about like, well, I read that they
• 38:25
  Speaker 4: were like twelve thousand people at some of these debates.
• 38:28
  Speaker 4: How did they hear what people were saying? This is
• 38:31
  Speaker 4: before podcasting, this is before like megaphones. And there were
• 38:34
  Speaker 4: some answers. But I had remembered something I read in college,
• 38:37
  Speaker 4: so I looked it up. A very obscure little article
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: said that Lincoln spoke from notes, right, He did not
• 38:44
  Speaker 4: have seven hours, He didn't have like fifty pages typed
• 38:48
  Speaker 4: single space that he just read. He was making up
• 38:52
  Speaker 4: as he said he had. He had certain key, key
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: ideas in his head and maybe some phrases from antiquity,
• 38:58
  Speaker 4: but he based spoke from his mind, creating argument. And
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: so afterwards when he wanted to quote himself or quote Douglas,
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: he bought copies of newspapers because journalists would sit in
• 39:13
  Speaker 4: the front row and they would try to write down
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: the entire speech and it would be reprinted in newspapers.
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: And by the way, the funny thing of that that
• 39:22
  Speaker 4: was is that he would get Republican newspapers. He was
• 39:24
  Speaker 4: a Republican and Democratic newspapers, and he would quote Douglas
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: from the Democratic newspapers because he assumed they would be
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: more complete, get it more accurately, and he quote himself
• 39:35
  Speaker 4: from the Republican newspaper. But the point was that very
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: early on in the law and that you can go
• 39:40
  Speaker 4: back two thousand years there's a famous book by Seneca.
• 39:44
  Speaker 4: The philosopher had a father who was a lawyer. This
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: is two thousand years ago, and he writes about, oh,
• 39:49
  Speaker 4: you know, to be a good advocate, you have to
• 39:51
  Speaker 4: not just know the cases of the law, but be
• 39:54
  Speaker 4: able to immediately martial arguments in your head. So this
• 39:58
  Speaker 4: emphasis on that is as as you're saying, sir, it's
• 40:02
  Speaker 4: not unique. I mean like engineers need to do this.
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: I can tell you in communications school we need people
• 40:10
  Speaker 4: to martial arguments. But the emphasis on oral synthesis is
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: one that I sort of simply I give Kingsfield a
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: pass here. I'll give a pass, not an a plus,
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: but a pass because it is so important to the
• 40:25
  Speaker 4: perception of success there. Would you agree with that?
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know the the The funny thing is, uh,
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure all lawyering is that. Okay, I'm not sure.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: If you're writing, you know, trust in wills, that that
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: that that that's going to be the top skill you
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: need if you're litigating a trust or will. Yeah, if
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: you're negotiating with somebody I trust. I use trust and
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: wills as an example, because you really are negotiating with anyone,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: it's your client who's writing the will. Okay. If you're
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: negotiating in a contract scenario, yeah, you need to be
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: able to martial arguments. You may have some advanced notice
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: because you've exchanged drafts. You might know kind of where
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: they're going, et cetera. But that is, you know, I
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: will say that modern law is a lot different than
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: probably what Abraham Lincoln went through in the sense of
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the amount of preparations that's done, especially in these larger
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: cases where there's a lot of money at stake. I mean,
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: they'll be mock trials, they'll be mock jury selection, they'll
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: be mock a lot of stuff. So by the time
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: you actually get to the trial, you've had a bunch
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: of practice around it. I'm not sure that Abraham Lincoln
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: had any of that. So, you know, he had his client,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: he stood up, and you know, he might have thought
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: in his mind what the other side might say. But
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure he, you know, went through his extensive
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: a preparation as I've seen a lot of major law
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: firms do. Now, the other thing I want to mention,
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: because you mentioned the Kevin character, there's one other aspect
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: to this that hides in in his character that is important,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: and that is I'm not sure he was there because
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: he wanted to be a lawyer. He was there because
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: his wife's father had a law firm and he had
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: a job after if he got good enough grade. Uh,
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: And law school is one of those weird places where
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: you know, if you go to college, go to undergrad
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and you go there to be an engineer and you
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: find out that that's really not your cup of tea.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: There's lots of other things you can go do. You
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: in law school and you find out that the legal
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: profession is not what you want to do. There's nowhere
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: to go, right. You either in or you're out right,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: and there's it's not like, oh, I'm going to go
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: do this.
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: No, there's a gentleman but on steroids, right yeah, and.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: You can't escape. So, you know, I saw in my experience,
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: you know, and I counseled you know, one LS when
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: I was a two L and a three L. You know,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: they were there and I ask him, why are you here?
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: And they said, well, you know, my mom and dad
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: thought would be great for me to do this. I said, look,
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: this is one of the toughest experiences you have. You
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: got to want to be there yourself. And I and
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: I think the Kevin character brings it out. I think
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: his his his failure was not only what you pointed out,
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: which is he's had the wrong skill set. He had
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: a phographic memory, but not the ability to apply it,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: which is you know those are two separate. You can
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: have a photographic memory and know how to apply it,
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: that'll make you an enormous success. Have a photographic memory
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: not knowing how to apply it, you're not gonna go anywhere.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: But I also got the feeling that he wasn't there
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: because he wanted it. He was there because his wife's
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: father had a job for him, and that's what it
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: was expected to he do in order to take care
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: of his wife. And that's why I think the pregnancy
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: adds fuel to the fire. He just sees the world
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: closing in on him. He's got all these kind of
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: obligations and he doesn't see how he's gonna make his
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: way through. He produces an outline of three pages that
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: is essentially useless.
• 43:48
  Speaker 5: I as as the one of the three of us
• 43:51
  Speaker 5: who was gonna go to law school and then didn't
• 43:54
  Speaker 5: go to law school for reasons that are again like
• 43:59
  Speaker 5: not to go into him. But I can understand where
• 44:02
  Speaker 5: that character is being written from in terms of, like
• 44:05
  Speaker 5: you said, Mark, the idea of you're there for the
• 44:07
  Speaker 5: wrong reasons and if you're if you're gonna put yourself
• 44:10
  Speaker 5: in this deep of a situation, you gotta really want
• 44:13
  Speaker 5: to be there, because the people that are gonna put
• 44:14
  Speaker 5: themselves this far into it aren't gonna complain about being there.
• 44:18
  Speaker 5: They're gonna rise to the at least the good ones
• 44:20
  Speaker 5: will rise to the occasion of being there because they
• 44:23
  Speaker 5: want it so badly they'll do whatever it takes to
• 44:25
  Speaker 5: go back to my comparison from before of the Bear.
• 44:28
  Speaker 5: In the Bear Jeremy Allen White's character, I mean essentially
• 44:31
  Speaker 5: is you know, waking up, eating, sleeping and living food
• 44:35
  Speaker 5: and then going to sleep for four hours and waking
• 44:37
  Speaker 5: up and doing it all over. And you get a
• 44:39
  Speaker 5: sense in this film and again just kind of of
• 44:43
  Speaker 5: and Mark, what you're you're talking about, you know, just
• 44:45
  Speaker 5: in general, in terms of the comparison to the real life,
• 44:47
  Speaker 5: you have to really commit yourself to law school, at
• 44:51
  Speaker 5: least in the first year, which is why this, I mean,
• 44:54
  Speaker 5: this movie is so hell bent on it being first
• 44:56
  Speaker 5: year law students, because, like you said, Mark, it is
• 44:58
  Speaker 5: a thing that if you're not there for if you're
• 45:01
  Speaker 5: there for the wrong reasons, it's going to become a
• 45:03
  Speaker 5: parent at least very quickly to you that you probably
• 45:05
  Speaker 5: shouldn't be there at all.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, this is it's self selection at its maximum, right,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, yeah, they're not going to tell I mean,
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: I agree with you, doctor, doctor promoter. These generally at
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: least again, you know, general is always you You always
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: get problems when you generalize and when try to get
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: into specifics. But a lot of these top schools, let's
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: call it the top one hundred, are going to have
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: the best of the best. They're going to be people
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: who were very successful in college. They were very successful
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: in taking standardized exams, the alsat and they're very you know,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: so that's who these people are. So you know, when
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: I said writing is basically you know, if you don't
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: If you can't write, law school is not a place
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: for you. So you know, everybody there can write well,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: everyone there generally can speak well, and they should be
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: able to read very well. I will say the one
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: thing that makes law school the one different here. They
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: don't really show it here, although they allude to it.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: You know, the the amount of workload he's talking about,
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: you know, five hours, six hours, seven hours of study. Yeah,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: but that's also a function largely of how quickly you
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: can read, the faster you can read. It's really a
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: reading exercise how quickly you can read and synthesize. If
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: you can read really quickly and synthesize fairly quickly, it's
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: not as big a load as if you don't aren't
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: able to do those two things very quickly. And I mean,
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: I do think they show the long hours I think
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: most lawyers, most law students experience is probably replicant of that.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: They probably do spend long, long hours.
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: And the exaggerations are have a point like the hotel
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: sequence there where they just are going all in and
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: you know, I guess regressing back to place this hearing
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: times or something threatening the hotel and the nale for
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: the rest of us at universities is a doctoral program
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: where you're spending this unbelievable amount of time to produce
• 47:09
  Speaker 4: one document. Now, of course, you are taking classes and
• 47:12
  Speaker 4: those classes have discussions, and there's papers, and nowadays you're
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: supposed to be publishing in academic journals during the law
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: during the doctor program as well, but they mainly you're
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: supposed to produce this far to five hundred pages of
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: original scholarship with a thousand footnotes to prove your worth
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: to enter the body of the Professoriat and there are
• 47:38
  Speaker 4: so many people who are very very smart in every dimension,
• 47:42
  Speaker 4: like they can synthesize. They can't, but they are just
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: not able physically or mentally. And that's not a denigration
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: of them, that's just a fact that they don't want
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: to spend that much time doing that one thing. And
• 47:58
  Speaker 4: I can tell you that I would never do it
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: all over it if I had a choice. And so
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: the movie, I thought, really does show something that I
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: find missing in a lot of more modern movies when
• 48:12
  Speaker 4: they're trying to show a profession, and that is work,
• 48:16
  Speaker 4: like actual work. It's sort of my old man mark.
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: I don't know if Chris has told you, but I
• 48:22
  Speaker 4: don't actually need to use a cane yet, but I
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: keep a cane here. I'm sure this is a podcast,
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: but I actually have a cane. It's my grandfather in
• 48:30
  Speaker 4: law's cane that I shake sometimes at Chris, but very rarely,
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: but just when I get mad about something. But it
• 48:38
  Speaker 4: is interesting to me how you'll see on television or
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: movies or law series, you'll see like the slightest suggestion
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: that maybe being an electrical engine nearing or an architecture,
• 48:53
  Speaker 4: or in law or in medicine, involves some work. But
• 48:57
  Speaker 4: I think a lot of Hollywood folks think it's boring
• 49:00
  Speaker 4: to show people working hour after hour after hour after hour,
• 49:05
  Speaker 4: you know, grinding themselves there. Now, maybe they try different
• 49:09
  Speaker 4: ways to give a hint of that.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: Well, they actually did a very good job in one thing,
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: and maybe you know, I resonate with it, and maybe
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: I know you saw it. Maybe you didn't resonate with
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: you the whole thing with the helping the professor with
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: his treatise. Okay, so the experience, I won't say that's
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: what happens in law school. That's let's leave that there.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: But you know your experience coming out of law school,
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: at least in the seventies and eighties and nineties, if
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: you go to a big law firm, you're a shock troop.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: So you know you they would be oh, the client,
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: you know, have an issue to come up on Friday afternoon,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: and you know you, as the first year lawyer or
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: second year lawyer, the partner would call you in and say, hey,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: we need this research. We need a memo online desk
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: by eight am Monday morning to give to the client
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: or for me to review that be it for you know,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: markup and give to the client on Monday, and so
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: you know, they really show that they do it in
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: a different context because it's it's law school. You can't
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: show it as a work context. But that's real. That
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: was a real experience in that timeframe and probably still is,
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: you know, with with the AI tools everything that's going
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: on now. I really can't speak to what the current experiences.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: But in this in the seventies and.
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: Eighties generational ship you said up through the nineties, right, Yeah,
• 50:35
  Speaker 4: And I do think that I wonder if the paper
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: chase were like redone today, what how they would play it.
• 50:43
  Speaker 4: But there is an issue and has been really since
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: millennials entered the workplace, and because I was an administrator
• 50:51
  Speaker 4: and I did a lot of alumni and industry outreach,
• 50:53
  Speaker 4: and because communications creds end up everywhere. They end up
• 50:57
  Speaker 4: at airlines, they end up at oil company, they end
• 51:00
  Speaker 4: up with the law firms. Have a communication end up
• 51:03
  Speaker 4: his lawyers too. Yeah, at least undergrad community gash.
• 51:06
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: Journalism has always been a very thought of, this very
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: strong track to go to law school afterwards there and
• 51:15
  Speaker 4: still is today writing and talking and researching. But I
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: think there's in the workplace now there's sort of this
• 51:24
  Speaker 4: is before Ai. But Ai has only been really with
• 51:28
  Speaker 4: us for a couple of years, so it's still playing
• 51:30
  Speaker 4: out what's going to happen with Ai. But I think
• 51:32
  Speaker 4: that there has been an adjustment. And I remember talking
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: to somebody who ran a consulting firm, and he ran
• 51:40
  Speaker 4: it the way I think his father ran it in
• 51:42
  Speaker 4: like the thirties or something, and this was a very
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: high end consulting firm. He would hire people, Yeah, he
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: would hire people from Texas Tech and the Harvard and
• 51:50
  Speaker 4: ut Austin, and they would be on a five year
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: track to become this is not law but another kind
• 51:57
  Speaker 4: of consulting. And he would work them really hard, like
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: super hard. And then you get to a certain level
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: and then you can pull back back a little and
• 52:05
  Speaker 4: you have other people who are working that hard for you. Right. So,
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: but then he suddenly encountered the millennials, and he suddenly
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: encountered somebody saying to him, Yeah, but my cat has
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: yoga at three o'clock. I can't cancel the appointment. What
• 52:21
  Speaker 4: do you mean I have to stay at the office
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: past three, you know. And interestingly I saw, because I
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: was talking to these alumni over time, there was a shift.
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: At first, they were extremely resistant, like in my day,
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: you know, we broke rocks and you know, we jumped
• 52:37
  Speaker 4: off cliffs whatever we had to do with things like that.
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: But then they realized that they wouldn't actually have anybody
• 52:43
  Speaker 4: working for them. Even the best students wanted to have
• 52:47
  Speaker 4: some aspect of a private life. They wanted to have
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They wanted to have, you know,
• 52:53
  Speaker 4: a cat, and not spend time with that cat. So
• 52:56
  Speaker 4: I think it's very interesting how the workplace now there's more,
• 53:00
  Speaker 4: or there was until two years ago, more of an accommodation.
• 53:04
  Speaker 4: And that's why this film seems like it was from
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: not just from like fifty years ago, but maybe from
• 53:11
  Speaker 4: five hundred years ago.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you know interestingly that you mention it and
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: I won't get into the millennials. But so the loanworks
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: very similar to what you did just just described. You know,
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: it used to be when I graduated, it was seven
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: year partner track, so you spent seven years toiling in
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the vineyards to then get to be the junior most partner.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: And by the way, when you got to be junior
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: Mark's partner, you had other people working for you, But
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: the work didn't stop. You know, you had billables. You
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: still had to kind of keep grinding away. So it
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: just changed what you were doing. It didn't you didn't
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: get easier. It just changed what happened. And maybe is
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: reflecting what happened in the millennials, is it started to
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: be eight and then nine, and then ten and then eleven,
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: and you know, at some point people, you know, how
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: far out does it need to be when you just say,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: I just that's that so far out I can't even
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: I don't even know what I'm gonna pay. Yeah, I
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: don't know where I'm going to be nine years from
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: our ten or eleven. So you know, it really speaks
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: against I mean, Chris hasn't really explained. My journey in
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: the law was much different, and in eighty five it
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: was incredibly different than anyone else. I didn't go to
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: a law firm. I went straight to a corporation and
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: always for the most part my entire career, at least
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: until recently, I was in law. I was in a
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: corporation as an executive, you know, giving legal advice and
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: in some cases being chief of legal of three different companies.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: But my journey was different. So I can only see
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: it from the side, but I actually signed out of
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: it because of what I saw, not because of pay
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: per chase, but because of the paperchase reality. You know,
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: if you're gonna you're gonna struggle and struggle. I mean,
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: I'd rather do it in a different way. Now they
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: get paid really well. But you know, the life work
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: balance is is real. What you're explaining is real, and
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: you're right, this does look like five hundred years ago,
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: because you know, everybody that's supposed to work works hard,
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: and you know, does whatever is it takes. I'm not
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: sure that people buy into that as much today as
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: they did in the seventies and eighties. And by the way,
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: some of those people rebelled from it. Obviously.
• 55:15
  Speaker 5: I would say, you know, I have friends that went
• 55:19
  Speaker 5: to law school that are lawyers. Mark, you know, two
• 55:22
  Speaker 5: of them rather well. I did not perceive that either
• 55:26
  Speaker 5: one of them had this experience in law school. I
• 55:29
  Speaker 5: heard them talk about law school, and I've heard them
• 55:32
  Speaker 5: tell me how hard it was. But one of them
• 55:34
  Speaker 5: had a girlfriend the whole time he was in law school,
• 55:37
  Speaker 5: from before when he was in law school all the
• 55:39
  Speaker 5: way through law school and married her and has kids
• 55:41
  Speaker 5: with her. Now, so you know that the the the idea.
• 55:45
  Speaker 4: Was she the professor's daughter, the most feared professor's daughter.
• 55:51
  Speaker 5: Right, which I mean look obviously for dramatic effect, that
• 55:54
  Speaker 5: was a choice that they made.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: But no, she was not.
• 55:57
  Speaker 5: So there was none of that from their stories that
• 56:00
  Speaker 5: they told me. The things that I heard were different
• 56:02
  Speaker 5: because you know, again I had enrolled to go to
• 56:05
  Speaker 5: law school in twenty fourteen in Nebraska, so they would
• 56:12
  Speaker 5: have been going to law school from fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,
• 56:16
  Speaker 5: possibly even into seventeen.
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: So what I'll say, and I mentioned this earlier, and
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: this may this contributed to so and I don't know
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: how far back it goes, maybe it goes into the seventies,
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: but definitely was a thing in the eighties. There are companies,
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: one of them I won't mention their names, but there
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: are companies that produce outline okay, so they're yeared towards
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: passage of the bar okay. And obviously none of this
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: in this movie talked about passages of the bar. But
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: these outlines you can basically you subscribe when you become
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: a one L and you pay you know, a fee,
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: and you get these outlines throughout all of law school.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: So you're in property, they delivered you a book that
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: basely tells you what the law is from A to
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: Z improper. Okay, and it may be your experience. What
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: you're speaking to, Chris, is that has crept so much
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: in that the Socratic method just doesn't have any appeal anymore,
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: because again, the whole purpose of Socratic method was to
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: make the student discover the law on their own.
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, you're given a case and it does. They don't
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: tell you they have a holding, they have facts, they
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: have the legal reasoning, and they have the holding. But
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: the holding doesn't it's not highlight it doesn't say this
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: is the important thing about this case. So you know,
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it may be that
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: it's changed dramatically from this. And this is now just
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: a historical artifact because in the seventies and eighties this
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: was the way you learned the law. Now, I will
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: say I knew people in law school that did subscribe
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: to that service and did use those outlines and probably
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: weren't producing their own.
• 57:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, that's a very interesting point because Mark, we
• 58:03
  Speaker 4: are now in a liminal threshold here in higher education.
• 58:08
  Speaker 4: We're Among the many crises we face is the crisis
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: of AI and what do you do when every student
• 58:18
  Speaker 4: has access to those outlines right for everything? Which AI?
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: AI had so many problems, and I actually it's been
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: my research area for the last three years and including
• 58:30
  Speaker 4: the hallucinations and the misrepresentation and a lot of the issues.
• 58:35
  Speaker 4: But I find it fascinating that one of the discussion
• 58:38
  Speaker 4: points we've been having is, well, maybe the only solution
• 58:42
  Speaker 4: is to return to the Socratic method, because the only
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: way that you're going to get the student unfiltered. And
• 58:49
  Speaker 4: I really don't want to either under emphasize or overemphasize
• 58:53
  Speaker 4: the problem. But if you want the pure reaction of
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: a student to knowledge without any chance, ants that they've
• 59:01
  Speaker 4: gone through AI, that's in the classroom, live with their
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: phones in a bucket at the front of the class,
• 59:10
  Speaker 4: ask them questions.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: So uh.
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: The famous line from the poet Milton about the ad
• 59:16
  Speaker 4: the attic the grove of academ where the attic bird
• 59:20
  Speaker 4: trill to war world no desocratic, that of course comes
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: from Socrates and played open ERSO sitting there under the
• 59:26
  Speaker 4: olive trees having discussions, and that all the all the
• 59:29
  Speaker 4: dialogues we have are essentially supposed to be versions of those.
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: Maybe we're going back.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's actually they actually kind of emphasize
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: it here, right, So when they when he asked Kevin
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: the hypothetical you can't find in the book, right, Kevin
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: is trying to find in the books. I mean, there's
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: there's various aspects that flow from that one you've already
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: talked on, which is you know, that shows that you know,
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: just knowing that the facts is not enough. You have
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: to know the analysis. If you don't, it falls apart.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: But it also points out the Socratic method is meant
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: to be an extension of things, not something that necessarily
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: you can just look up in a book and say
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: what the answer is? Right, and it does. They don't
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: do a very good job of it here in this movie.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: But the idea of the law is always about the
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: next set of facts, right.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: I was recently working on a on a case and
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: the facts came out that you know, you can't this
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: this particular uh set of facts ended up with an outcome.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: But what you have to understand is the case is
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: limited to those facts. The next question that the good
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: lawyer asks is based on the facts and the holding
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: does it extend to a new set of facts? And
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: that's what Kingsfinn does in those in those hypotheticals, he poses,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: what about this? Well? What about this? Well? What about this?
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: And I agree with you, there's no way that AI,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: if you've collected all the phone you know that that
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: don't we give them the answer? They have to come
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: up with by themselves. That but it's the key. You
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: have to take away the phone because otherwise they'll just
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: typing the phone. They're going an answer that they'll spout
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: off right.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 5: And that for me, you know, again, to speak to
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 5: something that I experienced when I was in high school.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 5: My favorite course I was in in high school was
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 5: ap World History, and that was because the professor who
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 5: taught that course every exam, yes, there was a multiple
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: choice section, but the multiple choice section was weighed less
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 5: than the writing section. And the writing section was here
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 5: are you know four first hand or secondhand documents, synthesize
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 5: the information within and tell me, you know, make a
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 5: statement or make an argument or you know and you know,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 5: and your argument could have even been wrong, but as
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 5: long as you used evidence to back up your argument,
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: that the professor would give you marks within a reasonable grade.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 5: And you know, I think that, yeah, that that is
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 5: gone in a lot of ways from teaching now, because
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 5: I think it's much easier to just teach to an
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 5: exam or teach to multiple choice, and when you just
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 5: are doing that, or when you're expecting the that is
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 5: all you're going to get. You can utilize other things
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 5: to get the answers or circumvent having to do the work.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 5: I mean, again, AI is useful, But the problem with
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 5: AI is, like any other tool, you can't control how
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 5: you know, It's like a car. Some people use cars
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 5: to run people over, some people use cars to get
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 5: to and from work. Some people use cars for a
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 5: job like an uber driver. Some people have cars as
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 5: part of their workforce in terms of you know, over
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 5: the road trucking or something like that. But you know, broadly,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 5: AI is not awful. It's just the way it's being used.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 5: I think sometimes you know, well, if you're using it
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 5: in an academic capacity to circumvent having to do work
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 5: of your own, not great.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: Really well, well, I think what doctor Prometer is getting
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: to and I think this is the key, and I
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: think this, you know, I think This is a good
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: place to kind of highlight it is what are we
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: trying to teach when you go to a university or
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: you go to law school, Are you trying to teach
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: a bunch of facts and figures? Or are you trying
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: to teach someone how to think and facts and figures?
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: Google is always faster than anybody else can ever be. Okay,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: you know, if I if I want to, if I want,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: you know, you know, give me the the population of Arizona.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: You know, at Google's probably better than me trying to
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: figure it out and remember it. Okay, uh but Google?
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: But but AI is not as good at reasoning. And
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: I'm not and I'm not degranating AI, but you can't
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: substitute for your reasoning. You know. I think what they're
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: trying to teach here and what they're trying to highlight
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: in the paper Chase and doctor Promote, I think you're
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: saying what you're trying to teach otherwise in the university
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: is how people think, not what they know, but what
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: how to think, how to think about a problem, how
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: to address an issue, because it's it's everywhere, I mean,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: everything that we face as as a humanity needs as
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: problems that you have to face and reason to conclusion,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: and if you just let AI do it, then it's
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: reasoning for you. It's just not the same.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah. The one thing I would add there, I have
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 4: a quote in my head from Stephen King, who honestly
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 4: I'm not a Stephen King fan in the sense of like,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: I just don't read a lot of this stuff and
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 4: maybe I should more. But he had some pull away
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 4: quote that I thought, gosh, that really sums up the
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 4: challenge of being a teacher anyway, K through twelve university,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 4: law school. Whatever. He said he met a lot of
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 4: people who wanted to be authors, but very few who
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 4: wanted to write. And boy, that sort of explains what
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: I think is the problems with a lot of Hollywood
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 4: movies and television shows and video games and books, is
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 4: that I think you need both. Like I see sometimes
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 4: in like Reddit, New Writer or something, somebody says like,
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 4: I have a great idea for a science fiction novel.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 4: Should I read any science fiction first? And I was thinking, yes,
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: I think you should, young woman or wherever you are,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: you really should read before you write. I mean, you
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 4: should have experiences. There's a lot of things you need
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: to do. But I think the accumulation of facts and
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 4: learning fact how to understand facts, because facts without a
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: context can often be meaningless.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: Right, that's right.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 4: People can throw out fact, but the questions, like larger
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: questions or questions about attribution or conclusions we can draw.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 4: Let's go back to that AP history class, you know,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 4: probably in nineteen seventy three for the AP history exam
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 4: what were the causes of the Civil War? Right now?
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: I literally had a high school teacher who taught a
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 4: semester for us on the Civil War, and he taught
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 4: what he thought were the causes of the Civil War.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 4: And I think we're still discussing the causes of the
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 4: US Civil War, and there's a current consensus, but I
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: can tell you it's actually different than the fifty year
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: ago consensus. And you know, if my mind is preserved
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: in ai aspect, maybe I'll find out what the consensus
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 4: that fifty years from now. The number, the amount of
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 4: fact has skyrocketed because more and more people are doing
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 4: dissertations on like you know, one tiny county in East
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: Texas and recruiting patterns of young men deciding to go
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 4: fight in the Confederate Army and why they did, and
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: letters and diaries home that hadn't been discovered. My point
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 4: is that ideally, university, law schools, whatever, should be places
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: where people learn how to process large amounts of information
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: and then synthesize and articulated for a point.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: Right, yeah, but I you don't want The problem is
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: I think and Ao you mentioned, I bet that if
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: your teacher fifteen years ago, whenever it was that you
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: were into ap history, had asked, had given an exam question,
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: that he expected you to give him the answer that
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: he gave you in class.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: Well, no, I well, I mean yes, there are teachers
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: like that.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: I think there's a lot. I think there's a lot
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: of it that.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 4: Try some population of teachers who get into teaching because
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 4: they like to hear themselves.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: Well, that sounds of cheering yourself. It's it's easy to grade.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: It's easy to grade when you have an answer. It's
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: harder to grade the getting to the answer, right, I
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: mean it's easy. That's part of the reason why people
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: do multiple choice exams. Right, So there's four answers, there's
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: one right one and there's three wrong one. How you
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: arrived at the right one could be that you you
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: know stole into the exam room the day before and
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: got the answer she'd memorized it. Okay, you could know
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: how to get to the right answer, you could have
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: guessed the right answer, et cetera. And what I think
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: this is trying what they're trying to show in the
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: paper chase, and it is hearkening to something else, which
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: is it's really if you put a set of facts
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: down and you say, what are the kind of of action?
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: The idea is is what you're supposed to be showing
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: is how you think, not what you I mean, you
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: got to know what the heck of torte is or
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: what the heck of contract is, and you may need
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: to know the four elements of contract formation, but you're
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: not expected to know all the body of law around
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: what is and isn't consideration. For example, they use that
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: in the movie. He says, you know, consideration could be
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: what you give someone or what you've ceased to do.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: You're not expected in law school, and I think they
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: do a good job of filing here. You're not expected
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: to know the fact. You're not expected to know every
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: case that's out there that contains the law. That's what
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: you're supposed to be trained to be able to go
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: fine right and find the cases and analyze the cases
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: to come up with the argument that says, these five
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: cases say consideration has to be given to the other side.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: These five cases can be interpreted to say that I
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: don't have to give it to the other side. So therefore,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: if my case is one that we're you know, that
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: doesn't have any consideration going to the other side, that's
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: the that's the cases I want to use. That's why
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: I'm going to argue to the court they should follow
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: because remember, judges are following the law creating the law.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: At the same time, we are in a common law institution,
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: not a civil law. And therefore it's a thinking exercise.
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: So you know, they don't really show when they grade
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: the paper because they don't show what the heck he's grading.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, it's really hard
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: to grade because which you really should be grading is
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: not the regurgitation of the facts or of carbolic you
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: know whatever. It's Hey, look, you know, here is the
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: way to think about this. You know, the structure, that's
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: what the outline is. The outline is a structure. What
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: are the four elements of contract? Formation. But you're not
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: expected to know every possible way that any one of
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: those elements could be met, because it's impossible. That's what
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: you should go to the library to figure out when
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: you have a problem.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and there are some differences in different fields, by
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: the way. I just I want to talk for just
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 4: one minute about something that I found funny at the
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 4: end of the film there where Kingsfield is grading what,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 4: as Chris pointed out, what I assumed to be Heart's
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: final exam paper. There is that he looks at it
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: so quickly he just like skims it and then quickly
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: writes it grade and then off to the next one.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 4: And I'm thinking of myself, like, boy, I would really
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: feel bad as a professor if I took that shorter
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 4: time the Greatest Students paper. First of all, as a
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 4: journalism professor, I'd be reading every sentence and like correcting
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 4: and read like you know, oh, misplaced comma. You know
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 4: what depends on what you're looking for, right, Yeah, exactly.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 4: I'm just saying that that again shows the differences.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: That you may may not need to be that. I'll
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: tell you the one thing I was curious about the
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: grading though, you noticed he added some scores at the bottom.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: He added an eleven and I sent something else. I
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: don't know where he got those from, whether those were
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: the fudge factors or something else, because in my experience
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: so and I'm sure it's still the same in college.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: Maybe not. The blue book doesn't have the name on
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: the front. It may have your student number, but it's
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: usually on the back, so they're not supposed to know
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: whose paper or blue book they're grading. In the blue
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: book that he had, I think the name was on the.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 5: Front of the plot, well, I no, it was written
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 5: right on the front.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know, I'm wondering if it wasn't a,
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: you know, it might have been the twist of yeah,
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: he didn't know who he was. You know, they was
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: pulling the you know, I don't know who you are thing.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: But he's given him eleven extra points to give him
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: the A because he knows who he is. Because when
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: you look at what he was grading, none of those
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: numbers that he used was eleven, you know, thirty. This
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: clearly looked like he was adding something there that I
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: couldn't figure it out.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's another huge difference today is that we
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 4: are expecting then I think it's reasonable to be asked
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 4: to justify a grade fully. So in other words, we
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 4: were okay, you know, I'm giving you ten points for
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 4: your you know, grammar, spelling and punctuation. I'm giving you
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 4: nine points for your argument.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: I mean that.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 4: Again, I don't know Harvard Law anybody there, but a
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 4: student who asked, like on what they you know, can
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 4: you explain to me how I got this grade. We're
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 4: supposed to actually show them how it added up, and
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: and and I think we would be in trouble if
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 4: it said there was a fudge there. You dated my daughter,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: but I'm not sure you might be my son in law.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 4: So there's eleven points for that. And like you gave
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 4: me a good ant. Now the prior record stuff right
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: like that? That would be unethical for me when I'm
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 4: grading a paper. I do not. I mean, I consider
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 4: it to be wrong to take in anything previous the
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: student has done. Maybe maybe in other systems as s acceptable.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's no different. It's supposed to be completely numbered.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: There weren't even a name.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: I've had students, you know, especially in graduate courses. I've
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 4: had students who are just super shy, and they really Now,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 4: if there's a class contribution part of your grade, they're
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 4: not going to do as well in that one, and
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 4: that's something to work on. But like if I'm reading
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 4: a paper, I'm not saying, Gosh, I really like this guy.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 4: He's so articulate. I think I'll, you know, give him
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 4: eleven points. So I got to go ask if somebody
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 4: from Harvard who's still alive from Harvard Law in nineteen
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 4: seventy three, has to explain the grading system.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: But there's actually one other thing that's interesting, and they don't.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: They don't really talk about it. But harken back to
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: what I said about how law school, how your grades
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: come out your participation in class. The most I ever
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: heard anyone professor say that you got for it was
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: five percent of your grade. So you could sit there
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: and do nothing. He could call on you and you
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: could say pass or my dog ate the paper. All
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: he can do is embarrass. You mean, it's all in
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: all centers on the final exam that's supposed to be anonymous,
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: So you know, you think about that for a second, right,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: I mean he's supposed to grade them with numbers, and
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: at least when I was a law school, they were
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: posted via your student number. What your name didn't say
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: mark stash, you got an A. It said number one, five, six, seven, eight,
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: got an A.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 4: Right, we did. We did post grades with names. I
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 4: mean that's we can't do that now. But but like
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 4: I remember, it was numbers.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: By the way.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I I swear to god, I had a professor.
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 4: I won't say where I had this professor, but like
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 4: he had our name, our social Security number in our
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 4: final grade posted outside his door.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: This is numbers and grade. So you knew your number
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: because there was a student number, because in the eighties
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: they started switching off of Social Security finally and started
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: using a unique number for you. But they're not even
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: supposed to know who the paper is supposed to be.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: A number that you know kind of ties into that.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: So you know, at the end of the day, the
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: whole exercise in the class is nothing other than just
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: what it is. It doesn't affect your grade. The people
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: have volunteered weren't more likely to get a's than the
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: people who sat in the back and gave.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: I'm slightly suspicious about that.
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: You know, showing the way he grade that paper, I'm
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: suspicious too, But that's I suspect kind of the the thing.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: But the other thing I'll say is I was one
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: of those guys that volunteered a lot, and it actually
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: has there's a reason for it, okay, and they don't
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: really explain he doesn't explain it fully. But if you
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: volunteer a lot, the professor's unlikely to call on you
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: when you're unprepared, okay, because they get tired of, you know,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: hearing you, or they're tired of you vol so they
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: they they are unlikely to call, you know, when there's
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: when they come and say, okay, we're gonna start you know,
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: we're gonna start calling. They're going to call on somebody
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: they haven't heard from, not from somebody they've heard twenty
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: times in the last week from. So there's actually a strategy.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: He doesn't mention it, but that is the strategy that
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: a lot of those people were employing. Is if I
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: volunteer that he probably unlikely to call on me when
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: I'm not prepared.
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 5: I mean, it's a good strategy.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: It's a heckermetry being proactive.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 5: I mean that's the way I work. Anything else want
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 5: to say about the paper.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: Chase, I think it's worth watching as a as as
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: an artifact of the way law school may it definitely was,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: you know, before the seventies, in the seventies and into
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: the eighties, probably less so if one's going to law
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: school today, I don't think one should be looking at
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: that and have an expectation that this is necessarily the
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: way it's going to be, because there's a lot of
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: other things that are happening there. And the other thing
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: I'll say is, you know, there's another movie that shows
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: a similar kind of thing. It has similar tone, but
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: it doesn't in a much more lighthearted fashion, which is
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: Legally Blonde. It's also Harvard Law, and you know, she
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: has the experience with the professor, with the professor gives
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: her a hard time. It ends up differently a lot
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: differently than this movie. But I think they're good bookends
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: to look at, if you if you know, if you
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: want to kind of look at, you know, the portrayals
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: of law school and and because those are the two
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: movies that I'm familiar with that that do a reasonable
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: job of at least trying to get at a lot
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: of this kind of pieces. Obviously, Legally Bond has a
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: lot of other stuff in it. It has stuff before
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: law school, and then it obviously has stuff with you know,
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: doing with the professor. But I think they're both good
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: bookends to look at.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: I agree. In fact, I always thought Legally Blonde was
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: directly referring to the paperchase. Of course, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: The whole thing's in the classroom. That's exactly you know,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: you know with the you know. I'll tell you the
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: line that if you asked anybody who saw the movie
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties, what they would remember is
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: here's a dime, go call your mother, tell you're not
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: going to be a lawyer.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 5: Well, I the one that resonated with me. It was
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 5: the one at the beginning where he's like, come fill
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 5: the space with your knowledge. Like it's just like such like,
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 5: oh my god, like geez, Louise, this guy. I really
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 5: enjoyed this movie. I'm so glad I finally watched it.
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 5: I Mark, I can understand why this movie would give
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 5: you PTSD. But I also think because of the way
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 5: things have changed. I think it is interesting to watch
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 5: this and go, oh wow, things were like this at
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 5: one point, but I think in a lot of ways
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 5: the system has softened to the expectations and differences of
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 5: the people that are coming into the system, and I
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 5: think that that's important obviously in the short term and
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 5: in the long term so well, given that neither one
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 5: of you have anywhere to plug, I guess I can
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 5: plug myself. So Weirdingwaymedia dot Com is where you can
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 5: go to find all the things that I work on,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 5: including plenty of things that I don't work on, like
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 5: eighties TV ladies and the Projection Booth and Midnight Viewing
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 5: and the Film Entaries podcast and the Feminine Critique, a
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 5: lot of things. You can find all of those Overwirdingwaymedia
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 5: dot com, like rate and review the show wherever you
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 5: get it. Hopefully it's on iTunes and Spotify, because that's
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 5: where it helps the most. Doctor pearl Mutter, thank you
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 5: so much for picking the film, and Mark, thank you
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 5: so much for joining us for the first time. I
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 5: think it went rather well. I didn't even say much,
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 5: which is a good episode for me. I just sit
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 5: here and listen. So yeah, and as allways, well that
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 5: we'll catch on the next episode.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: Boo