a practical view of the prevailing religious system

Good lawyers must be able to argue both sides of any case. A challenging and perhaps beneficial game, but a game nonetheless.

Professor Paschal was a brilliant troll, although the term wasn’t invented yet, and he was merely twisting his knife into the intellectual self-importance of his youthful victim. “ Weeell, Miss Clancy ,” he bellowed, “ you might begin by tellin’ us jus’ what it is you’re vacillatin’ be-tweeeeen. A thin smile insinuated itself into at least one corner of his mouth. Professor Paschal leaned further into the lectern (if that was possible) and placed his right elbow thereon while resting his chin on his hand, head cocked to one side. Finally, Rhoda stammered out a sort-of reply. The pause was as deafening as it was long. She hadn’t even read the case at issue.Īfter Professor Paschal had posed his complex interrogatory, as was his wont, he leaned into his lectern, smiled grimly, and peered at Rhoda with a look that seemed a mixture of bemusement and contempt. Since Rhoda was a friend, I happened to know that her extremely difficult predicament was truly and utterly impossible because she was not prepared for class. In fact, it wasn’t just that she wasn’t fully prepared (meaning that she had read the required case, all the cases cited therein, the case comments, casebook notes and citations, relevant hornbook and law review materials, and anything else we could think of that might be relevant). One day, fairly early in the first semester, Professor Paschal called on a woman in the row ahead of me (who I shall kindly refer to – using a pseudonym since she became a prominent government attorney – as “Rhoda Clancy”) and asked her a typically impossible question. If we were going to compete at that level, we needed to up our collective game considerably. A student was called upon to answer a series of penetrating and perplexing questions supposedly designed to ferret out the nuances of some legal principle or another but which, in truth, served to demonstrate to a class full of bright and full-of-themselves college graduates that they were out of the minors and into the intellectual big leagues. The good professor led his classes using the Socratic conventions of the day. Nor did it hide his erudition – in addition to his credentials in the law, Professor Paschal had a Princeton Ph.D. That image could not mask a keen mind and a sharp wit. Professor Paschal seemed to like to portray himself as a bit of a good ol’ boy, with a protruding gut, truly dreadful, wild sports jackets and ties, hair slicked and parted just off-center, and a drawl as thick as molasses on a cold day (if not nearly so sweet). When I was a first-year law student at Duke (an astonishing – to me, at least – 45 years ago), my Civil Procedure professor was the delightfully named J.

A practical view of the prevailing religious system