Brush With the Law

Rating:
Summary: Fear and Loathing in Law School
Review: "Brush with the Law" completely debunks the law school myth established by "The Paper Chase" and "One L," and reveals the grim reality behind top-tier law schools. In "One L," Turow supposedly studies 15 hours per day and "learns to love the law" (blech). In "Brush with the Law," Marquart and Byrnes ignore law school until the night before finals, and spend most of their time smoking crank and gambling away their student aid.

While most law students probably don't smoke crank (at least I didn't), a lot of things in this book are right-on. First, the fixation on the bell curve of grades. GPA, Law Review, and big firm jobs become determinants of social worth. The social scene is so small and insular that gossip and cliques become as big a deal as they were in high school. Marquart and Byrnes don't buy the B.S., and their outsider perspective on this soul-sucking gamesmanship made me empathize with them as kindred spirits.

That said, the ending left something to be desired. We're brought to the brink of existentialist nihilism, but then the authors have "epiphanies" at the end that seem unconvincing and slapped-on. Read this book for the take on law school, not for the ending.

Rating:
Summary: "Jerry Springer" Goes to Law School
Review: "Brush with the Law" is a double memoir written by two students who attended law school at the same time but at different schools: Jaime Marquart at Harvard Law and Robert Byrnes on the other side of the continent at Stanford Law.

Full disclosure: I was a classmate of both Marquart and Byrnes, as I completed my first year at Stanford and then transferred to Harvard for my second and third years. I was a casual acquaintance of Byrnes while I was at Stanford, but to the best of my recollection I have never met Marquart.

Years from now, readers may well see this book as a quintessential product of the 1990s. (Byrnes and Marquart entered law school in 1995 and graduated in 1998.) The '90s was a decade when the word "slacker" entered the popular lexicon and when revealing raunchy secrets on talk shows such as"The Jerry Springer Show" became a national fad. "Brush with the Law" manages to achieve the dubious feat of combining both the slacker genre and the Jerry Springer phenomenon in a book which purportedly is about elite law schools.

Both Marquart and Byrnes qualify as slackers - neither seems to have any interest in law, and neither spends much time in class. Marquart goes so far as to invent an elaborate course-selection procedure he dubs "The System," which enables him to pass his classes without actually attending them. (I give Marquart credit on this score - I attended almost all of my classes and kept up with the assigned readings reasonably well, yet my grades were about the same as Marquart's.)

The "Jerry Springer" aspect of the book makes the book an entertaining read, albeit a guilty pleasure. Marquart spends his time and his financial aid checks gambling at Foxwoods and Atlantic City. In a bizarre scene near the end of the book, Marquart is orally serviced by an Atlantic City prostitute who takes a break to pass gas, explaining, "I just had seafood with my boyfriend."

Not to be outdone, Byrnes spends much of the book smoking crack in the bathroom of a San Francisco bar. He also participates in a group sex experience. (I and everyone else at Stanford Law had heard rumors of this incident and Byrnes' participation in it, but I had never believed the rumors until I read the book.)

The unusual double-memoir format works reasonably well. Byrnes and Marquart brush by each other at several points in the narrative and end up working at the same law firm in Los Angeles - Young & Mathers in the book, Quinn, Emanuel in real life. Of the two authors, Byrnes is the better writer. Marquart's dialogue tends to sound stilted - even at Harvard, nobody really talks the way his characters do.

I wouldn't want either Byrnes or Marquart to represent me as my lawyer. And I question why either Byrnes or Marquart ever bothered to go to law school given their obvious lack of interest in law either as a profession or as an academic subject - a question which could equally well have been asked of many of my other law school classmates.

Nevertheless, the sheer depravity of Byrnes' and Marquart's tales makes "Brush with the Law" hard to put down - it's like a gruesome car wreck that you can't help but rubberneck at as you drive by.

Rating:
Summary: Fear and Loathing in Law School
Review: "Brush with the Law" completely debunks the law school myth established by "The Paper Chase" and "One L," and reveals the grim reality behind top-tier law schools. In "One L," Turow supposedly studies 15 hours per day and "learns to love the law" (blech). In "Brush with the Law," Marquart and Byrnes ignore law school until the night before finals, and spend most of their time smoking crank and gambling away their student aid.

While most law students probably don't smoke crank (at least I didn't), a lot of things in this book are right-on. First, the fixation on the bell curve of grades. GPA, Law Review, and big firm jobs become determinants of social worth. The social scene is so small and insular that gossip and cliques become as big a deal as they were in high school. Marquart and Byrnes don't buy the B.S., and their outsider perspective on this soul-sucking gamesmanship made me empathize with them as kindred spirits.

That said, the ending left something to be desired. We're brought to the brink of existentialist nihilism, but then the authors have "epiphanies" at the end that seem unconvincing and slapped-on. Read this book for the take on law school, not for the ending.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for readers at elite law schools; 2 for all others.
Review: As a classmate (and non-acquaintance) of Jaime Marquart at Harvard Law School, I found this book impossible to put down. It is essentially an unblinking confession of how Marquart at Harvard, and Robert Byrnes at Stanford, achieved slightly-above-average grades in law school while not attending class, not studying until a day or two before their exams, and spending most of their time (apparently) gambling, drinking, taking drugs, and/or bouncing from woman to woman. The disturbing but important lessons from this are (1) that it's not worth making an effort to pull ahead of the pack grade-wise at Harvard or Stanford law school; (2) that, if you go to Harvard or Stanford to learn law, rather than to prove something, you shouldn't be worried about being with the pack anyway; and (3) in all areas of life, you can't grind your way to stardom (assuming stardom is what you want). For law students who do *not* attend Harvard or Stanford (or, I guess, Yale), this book should be approached with extreme caution. Grades *are* important, and hard work *can* make a big difference, in your likelihood of success if you're getting a degree from any but the top handful of schools. For more on this, see *Letters from Law School,* by Lawrence Dieker. (One other point: the URL given in *Brush with the Law* for seeing copies of Byrnes's and Marquart's exams, outlines, etc., appears to be dead.)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: Brush With the Law is possibly the greatest summary of law school that I have ever encountered in book form. Although Marquart and Byrnes are obviously amateur writers, the story behind their writing is what really matters. I found myself connected to the characters, almost to the point of friendship, and I was disappointed when I finished the book: not because of a bad ending but because I knew that I had never read anything like Brush With the Law before and probably never would read anything so engaging about law school again.

Rating:
Summary: This book is to law school as teasers are to movies
Review: but I don't mean that as an insult! I just finished reading it in serialized form, published weekly in an online news service for lawyers in New York, and I admit I looked forward to each installment as a welcome distraction from the reality of the actual practice of big firm law. From the perspective of someone who graduated from an Ivy League college and law school more than twenty years ago and who has been working as a Wall Street lawyer ever since, though, I feel it's important to say that this book really, truly does not tell you very much about what it is like to be a lawyer or what parts of law school will end up making a difference later on in your career. How could it? The authors are still quite young and haven't seen their own stories play out. All we know is that they managed to graduate and get jobs as associates at a good, if rather idiosyncratic litigation boutique in LA. (Loved the bits about Urquhart's unique recruiting style! Kids, don't try this at home!) So they are still in Chapter 2 of their careers; the whole book covers only Chapter 1, law school. I think that some of the "lessons" they learned or impart are going to look different with the passage of time. Chapter 5, including their 25th law school reunion, should be a hoot, but I'm worried about what happens to them in Chapters 3 and 4. I agree with other posters that there is a strong '90's feel to their stories, I don't think the zeitgeist is the same today. Their discovery that you can coast at Harvard or Stanford or similar places is not particularly amazing, most people learn that as undergraduates, it's not really a law school thing and has been going on for at least a couple of centuries in Harvard's case. Byrnes has guts talking about smoking crack but that's a fairly unusual habit for a law student, let's face it, it's a truly bad idea and he is darn lucky he survived it. But I admire these fellows for their honesty and for capturing something real. I enjoyed the book and came to like the narrators, warts and all. Mostly I recommend it as a good antidote to that awful relic of a book One L for people thinking about going to law school -- just keep them both in perspective, the reality for normal people lies somewhere in between.

Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for law students
Review: For those who have passed the rite of passage of Scott Turrow's ONE L, Brushes With the Law provides a humurous and entertaining counterpoint. In essence, the two main characters engage in a startlingly large array of high-risk behavior, served with a small helping of existential musings. One of the characters, Marquart is clearly the more reflective of the two. Throughout the narrative, he peppers his comments with deep insights into the character and motivations of his collegues in Harvard Law, and ultimately himself.
The Byrnes character is a bit more stulted, he seems to live in the narrow world of immediate pleasure. Byrnes walks through the Blakes' proverbial "path of excess" with little regard for his friendships, legal-professional duties, and even his own welfare.
The most redeeming quality of this books is its ease of reading and lack of an pretensions. After a summer of heavy reading with included Hesse's Glass Bead Game, Kafka's The Trial, and a few of the Greco-Roman Classics, Brush With the Law provided me with a welcome refuge in the form of low-brow prose and pulp fiction. The antics of both of these slackers are entertaining, a times a bit worrying, but endearing.

Rating:
Summary: This book IS accurate and fun
Review: The surprise here is not so much in the clash of opposites: the libertine authors set against their Puritan law schools, the permanence of nature overlaid on human constructs, or the the addictive drives of rational nihilism that fuel parallel quests for earnest spirituality. All are presented with a perfect lack of adornment, and so we simply recognize, in law school's alien world, the same contradictions that enliven and frustrate our own places.
Nor are the pitch-line shock elements really so shocking. Hard drugs, high-stakes wagering, sexual experimentation, and masturbation have been acknowledged realities since Ulysses. That law students are pathologically private and risk averse is something to be noted; a sociological fact, but not one that leaves one's jaw agape.
The attraction here is the book's literary quality. Structurally, the dual narrative form has gained a following among novelists. By employing the same device, Brush With the Law smashes the linear pretense of too much narrative non-fiction -- and, indeed, the law's own arrogant self-conception of possessing a passionless certainty. At the level of character, that same passionless certainty turns up as the credo by which elite-trained lawyers intend to make their ways in both their careers and their lives. The reader stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the authors in their perplexity -- as 25 year-olds with obscenely high-paying "jobs for life" already in the can not only batter themselves into physical dilapidation by obsessing over trivialities, but stake out postures of moral outrage (over things like orgies, memo formatting, and free thinking).
In this, law school is someting more. The sterile office. The oppressive family. And Brush With the Law hits on the universal frustration felt by anyone who has ever stood apart from the crowd.
One imagines that the authors -- perhaps dead and broke, in fulfillment of their high-risk trajectories -- are, in any event, in a better way that those who surrounded them in law school.

Rating:
Summary: I know Timothy Kiefer...
Review: What's wrong is the last line of section detailing the authors' respective bios. It states that after comparing their respective
stories, they conclude "It sounded like a good story".

What a crock. Most folks whom I met while attending law school (I graduated from Harvard in 1979) worked awfully hard and while they were there, wanted to be perceived as working even harder. Then, after graduation, the reverse seems to happen, and people generally want to downplay how hard they actually did have to work.

NEVER have I heard any bull like this, though (and I would have, too). It is nothing but a ton of bragging about doing nothing, and doing well. If we are to believe these two, they lied, scammed and cheated their way through two first rate law schools, gambling, screwing, drinking and doing drugs rather
than spending time in class or the library. All the while making A's and B's. I'd bet against it.

They boast of doing all manner of illegal things during these three years. I guess though, that past all this we are expected to believe that they are above lying Why should we believe this story?

Anyone who thinks this is the way that one can get through law school is fooling themselves. Anyone thinking of going to law school should put this aside.