A Lawyer in Indian Country: A Memoir

3. The University of Chicago, the Army, and Seattle

14 three The University of Chicago, the Army, and Seattle in the fall of 1948 i entered the law school of the university of Chicago. As I approached the law school for the first time, it looked intimidating. It was housed in a massive English Gothic stone structure dating from the early 1900s, and it stood apart from other buildings on campus. The university was on Chicago’s South Side, a section of the city foreign to me. I was going to live at home and travel an hour on the El, the elevated train, to get there. My first class was torts. I took my seat near the rear of the classroom, an amphitheater with the lecturer below and a small desk in front of a blackboard. I looked around at my classmates as the room filled. They were almost entirely male. I spotted only three women; there was only one black man and one Asian. For the most part the group was much older than me. Then the professor came in, and law school was about to begin. It was not an auspicious beginning. Professor Gregory immediately began asking questions about a case. Though I had bought the casebook , I had only glanced through it, expecting there would be reading assignments given in the class—my junior college experience. Instead, to my dismay students began raising their hands. They had read the cases! How did they know? This was a hell of a way to begin! I sat through the remainder of the class listening to other students’ confident commentaries and vowing to catch up. After class, I asked one of them how they knew what to read and learned there was a reading the university of chicago, the army, and seattle 15 assignment sheet posted in the office. I hadn’t even thought of going there. It foreshadowed the trouble that lay ahead for me. I came to the law school with only two years of junior college behind me, in contrast to most of my classmates who had three or four years of undergraduate schooling and some who were World War II veterans. Still, I was confident of my abilities. But while my college reading had trained me to understand the language of the social sciences, the language I was reading in these law books seemed to come from a different universe. In fact, it was a different universe. The books were casebooks, compendiums of court decisions, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century, written by judges. While the recitals of the facts were easy enough to grasp, when the decision turned to legal analysis, I found the application of rules and the reasoning process murky and elusive. Much of what I read was turgid, dreary, and often deceptive, nothing like the straightforward language of political science or history. The opinions seemed to move toward one outcome, only to announce a different one. I struggled to master “the law.” I underlined, made notes, read and reread the cases, but the classroom discussion left me confused. I found the Socratic style of teaching only raised questions, but (of course) didn’t answer them. My classmates seemed to be agile thinkers who grasped the elusive legal principles and spoke up with confidence, while to me the subject matter was narrow and technical and unconnected to world problems. The focus was on conflicts between individuals or on disputes over property. Who wins? Who gets the property? Who gets the money? I almost never volunteered a response, particularly in the classroom of Professor Edward Levi, the intellectual avatar of the school. Levi was intimidating, cutting down unworthy remarks with superior wit and sarcasm . He later became dean of the law school and served as attorney general of the United States. The intellectual excitement I had felt in junior college was gone, and I found it difficult to sustain interest in the arcane world of the law. My confidence oozed away and I sank deeper into feelings of inadequacy. I began to doubt that law school was right for me. We had no midterm exams or quizzes, only a year-end comprehensive examination. My tendency to procrastinate was dangerous in such a system . I studied sporadically and as the time for exams neared, I vacillated 16 the university of chicago, the army, and seattle between panic and depression. I had never experienced such a feeling of academic...