Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace

1 0 3 R M R . C R I M E A N D P U N I S H M E N T A N D W A R A N D P E A C E G I S H J E N Roger Rabid, we called him. Jabbertalky. Evermore. But mostly we called him Gunner – Gunner Summers. And it wasn’t just the Asian Americans. It was pretty much all his fellow 1-Ls – the immigrants from Azerbaijan and Poland and Brazil. The students who were born here but who had been brought up to be respectful of others – kids of cops, farmers, teachers. We analyzed Gunner en masse: It was his upbringing. His genes. His ego. It was his insecurity – related, perhaps, to the fact that this was not exactly Harvard Law School we were attending. I was not of the persuasion that it was Gunner’s looks, too, that gave him the idea that he was entitled to more air time than other human beings, but others maintained there was a chart somewhere showing correlation if not causation: rugby build plus blond locks put you at risk, especially if you played tennis, sailed, and had really wanted to take Swahili but in the end had been forced to admit it wasn’t as useful as French. In truth, there weren’t a lot of people like Gunner in our ranks – people born with silver spoons in their mouths and their hands in the air. This was a fourth-tier school. But he inspired an expansion of our vocabularies anyway. By the end of the first month, everyone in our section could not only define but spell 1 0 4 J E N Y logorrheic. Pleonastic. Periphrastic. Indeed, you might have been forgiven for thinking we were strangely supersized contestants, preparing for the Scripps Spelling Bee. As for the sesquipedalian adjectives, those were courtesy of Arabella Lee, of course – Arabella who was born in China but who had grown up here and who everyone knew was smarter than Gunner, and more prepared, too. For example, in Property Law, when Professor Meister asked for examples of disabilities protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Gunner immediately supplied that significant myopia constituted ‘‘a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.’’ And such was the spell of his utter self-confidence that even normally perspicacious Professor Meister agreed until Arabella lifted her elegant hand. ‘‘What about Sutton v. United Airlines, 1999?’’ she asked. ‘‘Yes?’’ said Meister. ‘‘This was an employment discrimination case involving two myopic individuals who had applied to be airplane pilots, were rejected for failing the eyesight requirement, and then sued United Airlines, alleging discrimination on the basis of disability.’’ ‘‘And?’’ said Meister. ‘‘And they were found by the Supreme Court not to be disabled for purposes of the law,’’ said Arabella. ‘‘Ah. Well. That is indeed relevant.’’ Meister flushed so pink that were it not for his white hair and love of ‘‘screw-the-syllabus-let’sreally -talk’’ moments he could have been a grad student. ‘‘What a great example of how critical it can be to look up the leading interpretations of the statute,’’ he went on. ‘‘Especially those by the Supreme Court. Thank you.’’ Gunner scowled. But would Arabella ever wield the oomph she really should in society? Or out in the real world would the Gunners somehow always triumph? She was, to begin with, most impressively unimposing . When the Red Cross came through asking for blood donations , she couldn’t give; she didn’t weigh enough. Rumor had it she was a size 0. Worse, she not only thought before she talked, she never seemed to forget that there were forty of us in the section, so that if everyone talked for five minutes straight, the way Gunner M R . C R I M E A N D P U N I S H M E N T A N D W A R A N D P E A C E 1 0 5 R did, classes would be two hundred minutes long. Did this not spell defeat? Of course, it bugged a...