Brush With the Law
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It takes three years to graduate from Harvard Law School, but does it only take nine days to learn how to practice law?
Is it true that at Stanford Law School you can earn a degree by flying into town for finals?
In their book Brush With the Law: The Turbulent True Story of Law School Today at Stanford and Harvard, co-authors and practicing attorneys Jamie Marquart and Robert Byrnes explain how they mastered getting a J.D. in absentia.
Marquart, Harvard Law 1998, and Byrnes, Stanford Law 1998, entered law school with the the thought that they would dedicate themselves to academics. They were quickly disilliusioned.
But they did not waste the next three years of their lives. While their classmates spent sleepless nights preparing for grueling Socratic dialogues, they pursued their own versions of legal education. For Marquart, it was how to count cards at casinos. For Byrnes, it was the pursuit of pleasure through modern chemistry.
Of course, they graduated and went on to be hired at top-paying firms.
Read on to find out how ...
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Fifty-Six -- Byrnes
With me and Tim Apparel in chemical, academic, and financial alignment, I spent the next two months writing and receiving e-mails. Between January and April, 1,260 e-mails passed between me and Dawn; 110,880 words, longer than this book. There was a critical plot point: From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: recovered memory
niccola? she’s still in boston. From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: recovered memory
right, niccola. at the time i had the hugest college girl “thing” for you. i can finally relate this, much to your amusement. it was ironic—i was an alterna-gal and then you introduced me to niccola, who was about as blonde and mainstream as they get, so i figured i was utterly not your type.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: recovered memory
i remember everything but the “thing” for me.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: recovered memory
how disappointing. you were supposed to tell me how dark, intriguing, and utterly alluring i was.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: recovered memory
i did think something like that—dark, alluring, organically cool. those were hazy days for me, but the day you met niccola is vivid; you were over near the window, niccola and i were walking out the door; the two of you exchanged some unsuccessful banter about careers and connections then we left. i had the impression you were unimpressed by me.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: recovered memory
nice of you to remember my being by the window for the introduction. i recall it being a black-cloud day. i was sure that you’d pointedly made the introduction to your goddess girlfriend, niccola, to set me straight of any ‘seducing robert’ aspirations i might have had.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: niccola
she actually claims to be visiting here this weekend. she and tim apparel have fallen into a phone crush. niccola and I are post-sexual, but she’s arranging a fix-up with her actress friend, claire, who has requested someone who will “rock her all night long”; should i? can i?
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: niccola
do what you will and what you want!
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: the last true thing
it turns out that niccola’s actress friend (claire) is a true beauty; offspring of two princeton profs, plenty of intell. inside, concert violinist.
late getting rolling saturday … i woke for good at three after a wankie and restless day of what was properly beauty sleep; i haven’t much margin for aesthetic error, you know.
i pick them up at the airport, crank the music, roll down the windows; ’73 beetle roars, new engine.
we get here, the house; would claire like a drink? many, hold the water.
the fix is in. tim apparel is chatting with niccola; eight or so hours down the line, they’ll be screwing, and they’ll have company.
claire comes to my room to examine my cds; she finds satisfaction in van morrison, and i feign equal passion.
time for a tour of my pictures, carefully selected to show the evolution from uneasy adolescent to cocksure chap, sporting just a soupçon of dangerousness, and most recently standing on the half moon bay sands, sun striking the midriff, just so.
“do you still have that ‘six-pack?’” claire asks. i feign again: reticent, what-are-you-talking-about? embarrassment”
away we go! to san francisco; claire and i in the beetle; in another car: tim apparel, niccola, and francine lewis -- she, too, has taken a shine to tim apparel, and seems ok with sharing.
claire insists that we listen, at maximum volume, to haydn, #104, “london symphony,” running time approximately that of a hasteless car ride from palo alto to san francisco; we drink a bike bottle of icy vodka; our conversation moves like a fugue; she bites her lip as crescendos relax; when they rise, i witness extended air violin for the first time, and it is good.
at pomo, things fall apart:
niccola wigs out from some brutal stew of pills and liquor; claire and francine lewis erupt in conflict over astrology; finally, claire wigs out at niccola’s having wigged out; turns out claire is opposed to even a hint of insanity; the me and claire thing goes all to shit. claire will stay with her brother, san francisco resident, rather than step into the night with me. she has deemed me entirely resistible. i drive her to the brother’s place; we chat, kiss, stroke hair, smoke american spirits, exchange numbers, part; see ya’ … never …
tim apparel, niccola, and francine lewis all came back here, started off in the car, i’m told, before finishing on tim apparel’s bed; i stayed in the city, found paris, who is not in fact dead, to prove to myself that i could say no, and i did: had a beer at pomo, just a beer, me and paris, that was that, because i might have found a truth worth holding onto. i drove home at dawn with the replacements blaring. [and now a word from niccola, who is just emerging from tim apparel’s bedroom]
Dear Dawn:
Excuse me, but I am very much in need of a new friend. Someone dark, intriguing and utterly alluring. I have high standards for best friends & boyfriends … must be someone always making plans to be somewhere else and who moves with stealth, as if in possession of much secret knowledge. A puma.
Best,
Niccola
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: the last true thing
i’m still extracting the claws from my shoulder. i’m either disappointed that niccola is less discerning in her ability to pick up subtleties or that she’s so very protective of her darling robert. i, of course, pose no threat, being much more the wolf than the mountain lion.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: the last true thing
you think you’re disappointed? here i am, eyes averted from the claire failure -- with only some wild urgency causing me to commit several true confessions to your sole possession, and you are merely disappointed.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: the last true thing
you may consider me unappreciative of being the recipient of some gang-bang authored drug-induced snideness from your lost weekend.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: the last true thing
is that to say you’re upset?
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: the last true thing
is that to say that you’re concerned?
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: the last true thing
in fact i am. and the last thing about the truth was true.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: the last true thing
some acknowledgment of nastiness would be nicely in order. and i don’t know what that last truth thing was all about.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: that last truth thing
around the time i first saw you, my vision was already blurred by the kinetic swirl you seem to have heard too much about; all the riotous excursions that i assumed would end or slow down, not massively accelerate, in law school. it’s the kind of motion that draws you toward people with a mad passion but also flings you into separateness.
nastiness, you say; i hear the word but can connect it to no gesture, phrase, or thought, no sleepless sentiment recorded in the most candid 4am state-of-being audit.
you saw something i can’t see.
some things, though, i do know. if you have felt hauled into a twisted stimulus-response experiment, i would have to spill out the full inventory of my thoughts and disembodied feelings to show you the contrary, because i don’t know where to go, what to say. you already know everything i know about me. you do make me try and think harder, though.
so here it is: I repress voids, irretrievable losses—like what it would have been had we worked together in boston before i left for law school. had it been you it would have been at least as grand, but differently so. unknowably different, too. that’s life’s rich pageant, again, and again, with all its sparkle, all its colors of distress, green and grey, all its clouds, love untold, imagined pasts, paths overgrown, foregone, forgotten. and you do sparkle for me, because i remember the sun shining that day you were standing near the window.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: that last truth thing
it appeared that you had joined with niccola and focused sarcastic nastiness at my expense—whether in a drugged-out giddiness or because you had talked me up just a little too much to niccola and caused some territoriality i don’t know—but i respect the great history there, and have no aspirations or expectations to be another niccola in the book of robert’s journey. betrayal is something i am rarely able to forgive. i find people in general inherently disappointing. the diamonds among them that awake the soul in unexpected ways are rare, worth cultivating at great effort.
I sat unable to compose a reply. I had been awake for three days, all e-mails. Tim Apparel came to my door and said:
“Just downloaded a brief. Dumb it down a little and we’re all set for Moot Court. Bike ride?”
It was the only ride where Skyline failed to jolt me into fluid pleasure.
When we returned: Bababooey.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: that last truth thing
what i mean is, you are a diamond in the canopy of stars.
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: that last truth thing
with that, you’ve given me the sweet weight that will finally hold me in sleep.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: color me red…
and speechless… what’s the occasion? i was just minding my own business, not doing work … when suddenly, life (literally) becomes a bed of roses …
From: Robert Byrnes
To: Dawn
Subject: color me red…
do you know i had never before “sent roses”? it seemed worse than owning a rider mower or going to titty bars with the fellas from marketing.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: !!!!
just because some cultural standards are subject to mass consumption or veer into contrivance doesn’t mean that they are, in all situations, by nature, fraudulent; put another way: things that go without saying still gain something by being said from time to time.
i thought one romantic gesture should beget another:
any free zones of time between now and summer? or black-out dates, times that would just not be a good time to visit (exams, etc.)?
life is moving pretty fast, suddenly.
(and if you’re lucky, maybe the last person in the whole world you will ever want to kiss will also be named dawn.)
To: Dawn
From: Robert Byrnes
Subject: !!!!
all free zones, except the actual hours i have to be in an actual exam, which would fall only at the end of may, last week or so; even then, half of three days; you could sleep while I take the exams. only other binding commitment is april 14th—moot court oral arguments.
we’ll drive down the coast, throw down the roof, make sharp corners, take in the sights, let the wind knot your hair.
From: Dawn
To: Robert Byrnes
Subject: so, come on, take my hand, let’s go:
american airlines
BOSTON to SAN JOSE, 10 APRIL FLT129 arr 11:47
SAN JOSE to BOSTON, 21APRIL FLT128 dep 1:00
Dawn did arrive in San Jose on April 10, 1997, a Thursday. I’d gotten pulled over for speeding that morning on my bike. I was late; the gate empty; no airplane. Flight 129 had arrived and gone. I bolted out of the terminal, and there she was, the person I hadn’t seen for two years, looking the same, better, beautiful. Then:
Last first kiss!