The Paper Chase (1973) — "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind."

Weary Way. Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since its founding in eighteen seventeen, it has produced seventy five United States Senators, two hundred Congressmen, eleven Supreme Court justices, and an undetermined number of dropouts and breakdowns. That's just a screamer. Man screams every Friday and Sunday night at exactly twelve.

This is James T. Hart, class of seventy six. He has a birth certificate, a driver's license, a high school diploma, a draft card, a college degree, and he's about to spend three more years of his life chasing another piece of paper. Loudly, mister heart, fill this room with your intelligence. I haven't read the case in twentieth century Fox presents the paper chase.

All that stuff about grades is true. You got to work like hell. We use the Socratic method here. That just grades. Kevin, who come in here with a skullful of mush.

It's a number, it's a letter, but it determines salaries in the futures. Professor Kingsfield, Yes, you want to get drunk. That is the most intelligent thing you've said today. There's no guarantee that we're all going to be here in the spring, some of us might have nervous breakdowns. One more word of it, you Anderson, and I'll lock your head in your attash shade case.

What did you say, the paper Chase. Every guy in this house almost flunked out. The first year. It's not too hard to see why. They had broads on the brain.

Oh do you mind that someone following me? Just to the corners? All right, I'll walk your home, all right. The worst thing a lot of stop can do is. Get involved the girl.

I haven't been working hardness since I've been seeing so much of. You, and it's all my fault. Is that what you're saying? Why didn't you tell me you were Kingsfield's daughter. Our relationship has changed.

It certainly has. I feel like an intruder. Not a miss bad but a study. Oh my god, he's back to some different change. And so what do you say?

Really just said he hoped it wasn't a law student the paper Chase. I found something. There's a room about this where they keep all of the actual notes the professors took when they were law students. Here. I want to see the notes.

I want to see Kingsfield's notes on. Contract I shall be irrational. Panic has descended. Oh my god, what have you been doing in this room? He flup?

Me. Huh, she's a diamond. Close your mother. To the serious doubt about your becoming a lawyer, Okay, it's got you scared to death, and you're gonna pass because you're the kind of law school once you'll get your little diploma, your piece of paper that's little different than this, and you can stick it in your silver box with all the other paper. In your life.

You are a sign of a. Oh my god, he's back, a different change. So what do you say? Really just said? He hoped it wasn't a law student recording.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Christashuo, and I am joined by two people. One who's never been on this show before but has been on a podcast before, and the other has been on several podcasts with me, especially recently. All the Way from Somewhere was somewhere in Texas. For both of these people, First off.

He is my dad. He is a attorney and yeah, semi retired. My dad Mark Stashie Audi and all the Way from Somewhere in Texas. He picked this movie which is the ironic part because he's not a lawyer. Your friend of mine all the way from Texas Tech.

He is a professor of Communications and Media over there at Texas Tech, doctor David perlman. Aldy from West tex So, if. You are tuning into this episode, you know what we were talking about. Maybe you don't because you're probably my age, and I'm not sure that people my age have ever heard of this movie, which is a shame. But I feel like if you are a lawyer my age, you may have still seen or heard of this movie.

Maybe maybe, depending on who your parents were, and depending on if one of your parents was a lawyer on top of you being a lawyer. On this episode of the Culture Cast, we are going to be taking a look at nineteen seventy three's The Paper Chase. So. The film is directed by James Bridge, written by James Bridge, based on a book by John j Osborne Junior of the same name. The film stars Timothy Bottoms as James T.

Hart, a first year law student at of all places, Harvard who runs into well a lot of the issues I'm assuming first year law students run into at least in nineteen seventies, where this film is set. It is very much a film of a time and place, so we'll be talking a little bit about the time and place of it all. But it really is, in a lot of ways a graduate style look at law school, in that same kind of feeling out of place in the seventies vein that the graduate definitely leans into. I want to say, on the promotional poster for the film, they even mentioned the graduate it by name at the top of the post. So before I kick it to you, doctor Pearl mutters, since Mark has never been on the show before Mark, I'm going to kick it to you.

What did you think of film? When did you first see it? And what did you think rewatching it for the culture cast? Well, first place, I mean, I think it's a fair representation of the experience that people have in law school in the seventies, eighties, maybe even the nineties. I can't speak to today.

I went to law school in eighty two to eighty five, but I will say that it was very much along the same lines of the Socratic method lawyers and the law doesn't change that quickly, So you know, this probably could have been shot in nineteen thirties and probably been the same it's there's nothing in here that's seventies related in the sense of what's going on in the law school environment. I do think it it accurately reence, at least in the classroom, what some people's experiences may very well have been and are and going to law school in those decades. Today they may they may take a softer touch. I don't know, but back then, I mean, it is a it is a it is a rough experience. As John Housman explains, part of the the experience of going to law school is to change people into people that largely think and analyze the same and he I think I think it accurately underscores that in in the movie.

Uh the rest of it, well, we can obviously talk more about whether that's something that's actually going was actually going on in law school, but I think the classroom experience, it largely may still go on today because it's you know, again, the law doesn't change that quickly. All right, Doctor Perlmutter. I'm putting you on blast now because you, of all people picked this movie. You are not a lawyer, but you are in academia obviously, so I am very curious of all the films that you could have put on that long list of movies you sent me to cover. Why the Paper Chase, because it obviously jumped out of me given that I had obviously my dad had mentioned to me to watch it long ago, and I just had not, so obviously this was one that had stuck out in my mind if it ever came up again.

So Why the Paper Chase? Doctor Promutter, Well, I sent you a long list of movies, and I think one element they all have in common is they do a pretty good job of either opening up a window to a world that most people haven't had experience with, or building a world. So it might be another world like Alpha Centuri, or it might be Harvard Law School in nineteen seventies, which only a limited number of people have ever experienced. And this film was fascinating for me as well because my parents were both professors at another rival Ivy League University, and my dad physically looked a little bit like Professor Kingsfield and I I did not see this movie until I think mid early mid eighties, when I was an undergraduate, and I had not heard much about it, but I did.

I watched it, and then I went to my dad and I said, Dad, is that none of my professors are like this. Do you act this way to your students? Are Are they like trembling in their seats? And you come off as this like authority from antiquity or something like that. And he said, no, no, no, no, I'm much kinder to the students.

I feel sorry for him, especially the ones, the young students there. But we are tough, he said, I mean you have to be like, the degree has to mean something. And I actually that was a really good point he made and in some ways led me to being a professor and having the values that I do. Was that you can approach students in many different ways. And I like to think that I am relatively kindly compared to doctor Kingsfield.

But Professor Kingspiel, I should say, but the idea that the degree means something is still something pretty sacred with universities, and Kingsfield is as a type, he's an extreme type. I've met Kingsfields in the course of my career. I did meet Kingsfields as undergraduates. They were in different fields, they weren't all in law. Most of them were not actually cruel people.

If you've watched the movie and We certainly hope people watch the movie after this, or have in anticipation of listening, have watched the movie. But they had these ideals, and I think that that's brought out very well in the film. And then the last part why I recommend it was that, my gosh, Hollywood has not made a lot of movies where there is a professor who isn't doing something terrible and wrong. In the movie. The trope and type of a professor is almost always somebody who's I wouldn't even say that the hijinks that professors get up to in movie these and television shows.

But here's one who's like ethically just pristine, like he's an ideal, high integrity human being. Yeah, but look, I think it is. You know, luckily it's not misogenic. But there's no doubt that anybody that's been through that crucible will not see it as cruel and mean. Now, I will say this much.

You know, everybody's law school experience is different. But I mean I went to law school, like I said, in the early eighties, I was at the University of California. It wasn't Ivy League. But I don't think it matters whether you're an ivy league or any of these other places. It's all the same because again that this is the way the law is thought it needs to teach you is by learning and learning in this fashion.

You know, some professors would go you know, you would know when you would be called because he'd go alphabetically, or they would go through, you know, through the seating chart from left to right, row after row. So what he did was was particularly more cruel because he was trying to catch people. And you know, at the end of the day, one of the things that people don't realize, and I think this film brings out, although it doesn't really highlight it, is the fact that law school is one of those weird places where there's only one exam per semester. Okay, most other university courses you have multiple exams, you may have papers, you may have all kinds of things. The traditional law school is you take an exam at the end of the semester covering fifteen weeks, and if you're a one L it's all.

It's both semesters. The middle doesn't usually count. You usually have an exam after the first semester, and it may count with respect to those classes that don't repeat. Some classes are only one semester long, but those that are two semesters long, generally what they say is, at least in my experience, the grade is only the one at the end of the year. Okay, So just think about that.

It's a whole year worth of material that you have to cram into an exam. So it is you know, it has it, and they get it right here. Although they don't really highlight it, it really does change kind of the character what's going on versus other experiences. The other thing I'll say is, unlike almost any other higher education except for maybe doctors and maybe accountants, this is a professional So they're trying to make you into a mold of a different kind of person. It's not an educated person.

It's a person who's going to look at the at the case, look at the facts, look at the law the same regardless whether you're a twenty year practitioner or a one year practitioner. They want to beat you into a mold, and that's part of what the process is. It's that's what makes it ugly. That's that's when you think, when you look at it, you recoil a little bit about what he's doing. But at the end of the day, that's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to get people to think in a particular way. He in fact has a line, you know, he says where he's taking mush in your mind and turning you into a lawyer. That's what he's doing. He's trying to get you to think like every other lawyer and approach a problem in exactly the same way, which, by the way, limits in some respect new approach because everyone's thinking about the problem the same way. What almost dissuades thinking about things in a new way.

And I don't think that's the intention either, obviously, because I mean, like you mentioned, the law is the and you used to say this all the time when I was growing up, Like going to law school is not about being taught how to be a lawyer. It's like being taught how to think like a lawyer. And you would. Always, like we would always you would always tell me about that. And I mean the movie I think accurately reflects that thesis, because like you said, I mean, the entire point of the Kingsfield character is to take people that are unprepared to go out into the world in a professional field and turn them into someone that can do that, hopefully successfully and efficiently in a way way that won't.

Because this is the other thing that you know. I mean, they don't really touch on it a lot, but it's something that you know, I'm sure doctor Peerlmutter can speak to a little bit. All these people reflect on their university. And it's so smart to have the university be Harvard because if it were just you know, asshole university in the middle of nowhere. Who cares.

But because it's Harvard, because that alone on paper means something and has so much tied to it, so much. I mean again, like expectation, so manything that is part of this, Like he is making sure that they're prepared to be lawyers but also to be representatives of the law community from Harvard, a place where people will continue to want to go and be. Really I mean, they don't talk about it in this but it is a ruthless process to get into law school in and of itself. I mean Timothy Botam's character touches on it a little bit. He's like, you know, I knew these other two guys, and one of them was a genius, and he didn't even get a high enough score to come here.

But he never talks about himself in that regard, which is the funny part. But he always he's talking about the other people that he knew that couldn't get in. And it's again like this is a place you want to be. I applied to Harvard Law School, like I think pretty much everybody does, just to throw your hat into that. I mean, most people do, just to throw their hat into the ring to see what happened.

I mean I did. I don't know if I had gotten in there, I would have gone there anymore than I didn't go where I got in anyway. And this is the point of the podcast where I mentioned I was going to go to law school and I didn't. So there's a There's a couple other things that, in addition to the experience in the Kingsfield classroom, that I think are very true. Although it may be changing grades matter a lot, because it does.

If you're a top ten percent person or on law reviewer, both the opportunities you get are much different than if you don't. I as I understand it. And again it's been a while, but I've kind of heard that Harvard's gone away from grades. It's you know, basically become past fail because you're trying to keep you know, trying to eliminate this. I mean when I was going to school, you know, you always hear the anecdotal things about you know, the competition is so tight that you know, you have some sort of research project.

People go into library and cut the cases out of the book with a razor blade so that other people can't get them, so they can't get a good grade. It is competitive, and it's one of the things that they say but they don't really spend much time talking about, is that there is a lot of different experience between the one year, the one l experience, and the three year experience. They talked in about it when they're talking in the shower about whether you could have a girlfriend or not, but they don't really highlight much about it. What what happens to in a lot of cases and they again they don't they kind of touch on it, but don't really talk much about it. Is the what your path to the future is largely set by what happens in the first year and maybe a little bit of the second year, and why is that?

And the film doesn't touch on any of this at all. But after the first year you want to try to get And now I understand they law firms might hire you after the first year, but when I was going, it was after the second year of school. And what they were doing is that was the they were interviewing you in the fall of the second year. They would extend you an offer to go work as an intern in the second year of summer and you would get a job offer hopefully and which case, the job offer basically says, as long as you graduate, you've got a job with us. So it really puts an enormous amount of pressure on what happens in that first year.

So you know, they do accurately portray that there's a lot of pressure in the first year. They don't really explain why, but that's part of the kind of external pressure that put this kind of thing on. I'll tell you know, I've watched this movie. This is the third time I probably watched my life. There's a reason I don't watch it is because it gives me a little bit of PTSD.

I was going to ask that I assume it has to give you some level of flashbacks, because like, yeah, it can't be all positive. Like well, like I said, maybe it's a movie that some people will find amusing, but I don't find it amusing. I find I find it too touch, too close to reality. It's like someone who's been in Vietnam watching a Vietnam war movie that has, you know, realistic scenes. You you you you recoil a bit because you remember what this really was again, you know, it's the first year is about learning how to think.

That the quicker you learn how to think like a lawyer that and and most people have really good writing skills, the better your grades are going to be, and the better that you're going to end up in that second year, which really matters because that really does set your career in many cases for the rest of your life. Yeah. Well, you offer also another lens on this that I guess people in the seventies would have absorbed more without it being spelled out in the film, is that Harvard was Harvard. I mean today, Harvard is still Harvard, but you know, there's a lot of other famous, great universities in the world at Harvard's brand. It's not that it's diminished, it's just it's more crowded.

I mean, ut Austin has a bigger endownment than Harvard, for example, like UT Austin. I think when I was applying to law school was free and Harvard may have been above or below it by only one or two spots, like it's Harvard is capital H in this movie. If you go on the internet, you can find the famous Harvard letter or essay of application written by one John F. Kennedy, son of Patrick Kennedy, for Harvard, and it often gets passed around as being well, honestly unintentionally hilarious because basically he says, hey, I've heard a lot of good things about Harvard. I'd love to be there, right And today you have parents who are hiring like private consultants and videographers and from Hollywood to help put together their undergraduate Harvard as applications, let alone their Harvard Law school applications.

Harvard was for the elite of America, and up until World War Two, college was for the elite. You can still see in some of the older films like fifties and sixties, somebody will say, hey, college boy, most people did not go to college. What changed radically, my father being a very good example, was World War two and the GI bill that came after World War Two, and suddenly hundreds of thousands, millions of people who may have aspired to go to college and couldn't afford to go to college or just didn't think about college, were going to college. And that's where a lot of other universities began to rise because people were going to Not everybody could go even they wanted to. Not everybody could go to the very small, relatively small classes of a total number of students at the IV's or some of the other top universities, and so there was a democratization of universities.

There's there's lots of elite universities now, but Harvard still in the early seventies had that both like shine and also stigma. Like you you may have gotten like a big plus graduating from Harvard Law School in the Boston area. I mean, yeah, I'm sure a lot of Northeastern firms and Boston firms wanted to hire. I don't think that was necessarily true of Arizona firms. You know, they they may have seen a Harvard person in a negative way.

But the point was that these kids, who these these young people that we see in the movie A lot of people going to the film would have seen them as they were, which is the sons and daughters of the super elite, the privileged elite of America, and so torturing them, you know, in the classroom, them suffering a little bit in the classroom was not necessarily like something that we would immediately have sympathy for. It'd be like billionaires problems. So I understand what you're saying, sir, and you know, everybody had to go through something, and I'm sure you did, but the sympathy for Harvard students having a tough time at Harvard was not super great at the time that the film was made. Yeah, so I'll let me let me respond to a couple of things that you said, because I think it's it's important everyone kind of understand this.

The law in the past has been and it probably still is, very much hinges around relationship. So the reason people want to go to Harvard, there's a perception they give a better education. We can decide whether that's the case or not, whether they have a better endowment or not, we can we can debate that, but the fact is Harvard people are more likely to hire Harvard people and ut people are more likely to hire ut people. And I'll tell you Texas Tech law law people they graduate from Texas Tech Law School are more likely to high Texas Technical lawyers. And it's because it's it's very club and the fact that's what a lot of the fight to the glass ceiling and a bunch of other things.

What's interesting about this movie is the number of females in the classroom. The seventies was kind of a breakout where you know, in the sixties there just weren't as many women going to law school. It wasn't really thought of as a women's profession. You know, the seventies kind of broke a lot out with what was going on with that with that generation. So you know, they would have the seventies.

If you were someone who was older looking at this movie. In the seventies, what would have been remarkable to you is a number of women going to law school because you know, they don't really say much about it, but there were a lot in that in that classroom, and they were not wilting flowers that I think it was Miss Faraci. That was you know, responding and answering the questions, you know, straight up. But you know at the end of the day, no matter where you are, a Harvard having a Harvard label will get you further than having a label of you know, the local law school. It just will, just because people will assume certain things.

The other thing to understand is that depending upon where your journey in the law is, you have more opportunities if you go to certain schools than others. For example, my guess is if you ran the the resumes of those people who serve as clerks for United States Supreme Court justices, you'll probably see more Harvard Yale in Princeton than you will. Or be a Supreme Court justice, right, I mean, that's correct. It think I think there was a study like Harvard graduates have the highest per cap of that percentage of being on the Supreme Court today. Yes as well, I mean yeah, that's years ago.

Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, I mean it's again, you know, there's kind of a there's an assumption that this is kind of gone. And I agree with you that you know there, I'm not sure. I'm not sure people need to what's interesting about it. I'm not sure that it was trying to get you to sympathize with the characters because at the end, and again it's really fleeting. You have to understand, I think the paper that Kingsfield is grading is Timothy Bottom paper.

They don't say it. You can't, I can't. I couldn't see the name on that blue book. But that was my guess because you know, what's interesting is the way that the movie ends with him not seeing his grade. And I think it was, you know, I think it was trying to, you know, show that he's turning his back on the whole idea that you know, he spent all this time to try to get these great grades and he's kind of turning his back on it.

But it but if he's going to go back to law school, it doesn't matter that he threw it in the water. It's still going to be there, right. Yeah, And I and and it does. I mean, it's it is a little hard to see, but it is. It is his book at the end of the movie that it's grading.

And that's where the difference from the book is versus the movie, because in the book you never find out what his gradeed. The book actually leaves it a little bit more wide open than the movie does. I mean, the movie, I think kind of I think The part of the movie that really I think was interesting to me is when he's in the elevator with him and he's like, you know, I really enjoyed your class. You know, it really meant a lot to me, and he's like, who are you again? And I don't I mean, that was a bit overdone.

Well, yeah, I was gonna say, like, that's the part of the movie where like you were both kind of commenting on, like, he doesn't seem like he's cruel, But at the same time, how can that at the end of the film be it perceived as anything other than cruel? Frankly, but I think it was a I think it was done for cinematic effect. If you remember, he kept telling his girlfriend that you know, he thought he had a special relationship with Kingsfield, that you know he knew him, and you know you know that you know that Kingfield kind of knew him, and then you know, at the end, what that elevator scene shows is you don't know who he is. And remember and remember Kingsfield had given him the research project, right yeah before that, So here's a guy.

Yeah, so it's basically, you know, here's a guy. You gotta wonder whether he just was being you know, hardheaded or what was going on. But I mean, I think it was for effect to basically say, you know, he spent all this time to trying to show, you know, tell his girlfriend how how he was special to Kingsfield and he knew him and all this other stuff, and Kingfield just doesn't. You know. It's just it's it's almost like, you know, the the the trope in a in a movie that has a lot of you know, assassins, where you know, guy shooting somebody and said, hey, this is just business, it's not personal.

You know, you almost get the feeling. It's kind of the lawyer equivalent of it. I don't you know, I did all that. I don't know who you are, and it wasn't it wasn't personal. Well, it's what it reminded me of is and I know you've watched it, doctor Pearletter.

I don't know if you've seen it all, but that this movie at times reminds me of The Bear, where you have like the younger seeking the approval of the older or the more talented or more qualified. And in the third season of The Bear, there is a scene between Jeremy Allen White and Joel McHale. That is more or less ripped directly from the end of this movie where you have him confronting him and he goes who are you? And it's like, oh my god, Like the what's the worst thing that he could say to someone is not remembering who you are? When that's all he does is sit every day and run through his mind over and over again how much this guy has like destroyed his life or what what have you.

And it's like, I I again, like I don't I think Mark to your point, it's probably more that. I think it's more just as like the continued tetatae between the two of them of like, you know, the back and forth, the war of words, I think is kind of what that final scene is about. Because let's not forget though we didn't watch it, there's three seasons of a TV show called The Paper Chase, which is a real thing that you can go watch somewhere. I'm assuming I don't know how many. Waves it made when it came out, but there's a whole TV show following this further, like you know, ah, yeah, I mean again war seasons actually, so you know, having him go through year two, year three of law school.

Like again, like you know, the thing is to your point, Mark, like, there's still more story after this, and they even acknowledge it and tell it, so you know, Yeah. The other thing I'll say about it, and I would like to hear what doctor Permutter has say, is they got some other things right that. Again, it's to your point, doctor Permonter. It's exposing things that people would not have been in their ordinary experience. First place, you know, the Socratic method is not, to my knowledge, used in anything but law school.

Okay, I mean it's a it's almost a unique kind of animal, at least in the modern era. The second is the whole use of these outlines. Outlines are not something that I would say most college students even even come close to touching. I mean, if you think about it, right, if I've got a class and political theory, I'm not writing an outline about you know, the books I read or necessarily what's going on. I have notes from the class that I try to condense into something that I try to you know, learn, in which case that I'm going to kind of regurgitate on an exam.

The outlines, to my knowledge is is very unique to law school and they really touch a lot on it, but they don't really explain the fact is the books that people use are a lot different than books used in the In an ordinary college course. You know, if I go and take a chemistry class, you know, chapter one talks about, you know, I have a Godro's number, and it gives a whole bunch of you know, explanations and how to calculate and what to do with it, blah blah blah, and you know, goes on and on chapter after chapter. In law school, what you get is chapter one, here's case carbolic, you know, acid versus whatever. It doesn't explain why the case is there. It doesn't explain what the case is, what's supposed to stand for.

It doesn't have anything. It's it's like I just grab a book off the shelf and you know, one of the case reporters, I'm reading the case. Okay, So what ends up happening in law school and this is part of this kind of learning changing the mind is you have to learn how to put all that stuff together. The professor is not helping you put it together. At least he wasn't in the seventies.

He wasn't in the eighties. Maybe they do today. I don't know. So in fact, it springs up a whole industry we can talk about later about people. You know, you could buy outlines that basically explain what the law is, as opposed to you having to create them.

Okay, but at the end of the day, you as a student have to create these outlines, and they're unique to each person or group, and they're unique to every class because you've got different cases, et cetera. And you know the study groups again, you know, if you think about chemistry, I don't know that you have study groups for chemistry, but here it is. You know, typically I didn't participate in any of them, so I really can't say the inner dynamics of those. But that's a real thing. So there's, like I said, there's a lot of things in this movie that are real people busting down emotionally.

I won't say make suicide is necessarily you know, something that's a regular event. I don't know one way or the other. But breaking down mentally, yeah, I mean there's you know, there's a pretty good wash out rate, not because you flunk, but people just give up, They just walk away from it because it is It is a kind of one of those kind of experiences, almost like boot camp, where they're trying to get you to behave and act in a particular way. So you have to create your own outlines that teach you the law that you then have to You don't regurgitate the outline. What you have to do is you have to use the outline that you've written to be able to answer the question because guess what your exam looks like a case.

They give you a bunch of facts and then they say, you know, what are the cause of action or what should what should the plane if? Or what should the defendant do? And you basically have to use the learning to create basically your own kind of answer. So it's a it's kind of a unique kind of thing. It's not really you're not there to regurgitate car bill, you know, acid case.

You're there to regurg it to you to use what the what the holding in that case was, to decide some other set of facts and try to extend the answer in there, which makes it kind of unique. And I'll say this, you know the guy with the eight hundred page outline, those exist. The ones with the two page outline, those exist. I mean it's you know, those are all part of those are real things. You know.

Whether whether it's all the time, I don't know, but you know, everybody's got their own own style. When I took exams, I had an outline I you know, created myself. And then I created another outline before I took the exam that was shorter, that would allow me to actually get to the answer quicker. And you know that I could actually memorize. You can't memorize forty pages, but you might be able to memorize five.

Yeah. And by the way, Chris, I hope you attached the notes for this episode your dad's outlines. I think we all want to read them. Oh my god, I can't even I can't even imagine what those were. Well, I'll tell you that people use my outlines to get good grades, so a lot.

Of other than they were really good. I can't imagine what they look like, but I'm sure that they were, you know exactly. I know how good of a lawyer my dad is, so I know that didn't just know what happened yesterday. I definitely think your dad is an excellent advocate and a counselor. Right now, so the Roman historian Livy made a comment in one of his writings about the gods do not give all their gifts to one man, and I think this movie sort of pulls that out.

There's there's a character here. He's named Kevin Brooks. We have to remember this is graduate school, right, so this is not first year freshman college. This is like these people have already graduated, probably with top yes, with top grades and recommendations and everything, to get into Harvard Law School. So there's a prefiltering, right.

This isn't this isn't a Bell curve of humanity here. This is like the last three percent or two percent of a Bell curve. Now, this is Harvard in nineteen seventy So some people got into law school because, yeah, their father's brothers cousin is a Supreme Court justice. There's somebody gave him a billion dollars to Harvard too, So I mean there's other ways to get in besides pure ability in nineteen seventy three. But there's a.

Character called Kevin Brooks, and he is sort of the antithesis of what Kingsfield wants. He is portrayed as like super smart in memorization, like he got through his undergraduates because he memorized everything and was able to be able to regurgitate everything in the final exam. But that's not law school, as you are saying, sir. Law school is about thinking. It's about reacting on your feet, certainly being familiar with the law.

If you're arguing the case before his Supreme Court and you go like, oh, yeah, in that case, I forgot what it's name. But you know, the one with the thing, you know you're probably not going to do well, but you do have to remember an immense amount of stuff. But this Kevin Brooks, the one who will just give it away at some point, tries to commit suicide because he's never failed at anything in his life, because he is a certain type of intelligent, right, so the gods have given him a certain gift. But it's not a gift that's going to help you pass Kingsfield's class, or probably pass law school, or probably be a good lawyer. Because he doesn't seem to be able to take and synthesize and apply what he's learned.

And I want to give you one example of this, probably of the one of the most famous lawyers in the history of the world, who didn't go to Harvard a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Just out of pure coincidence, I was looking something up related to this. Lawyers spend a lot of their time talking and advocating and counseling and speaking, and so being able to get up and speak succinctly to a jury or to you can fill us in from getting this from my lawyer friends and from television and movies. But so Lincoln famously had these debates with Stephen Douglas in the eighteen sixty presidential race, the Lincoln Douglas debates, and these were like they would get up and debate for seven out, slavery, all the caraffs, all the issues of the day.

And somebody on the internet asked the question about like, well, I read that they were like twelve thousand people at some of these debates. How did they hear what people were saying? This is before podcasting, this is before like megaphones. And there were some answers. But I had remembered something I read in college, so I looked it up.

A very obscure little article said that Lincoln spoke from notes, right, He did not have seven hours, He didn't have like fifty pages typed single space that he just read. He was making up as he said he had. He had certain key, key ideas in his head and maybe some phrases from antiquity, but he based spoke from his mind, creating argument. And so afterwards when he wanted to quote himself or quote Douglas, he bought copies of newspapers because journalists would sit in the front row and they would try to write down the entire speech and it would be reprinted in newspapers. And by the way, the funny thing of that that was is that he would get Republican newspapers.

He was a Republican and Democratic newspapers, and he would quote Douglas from the Democratic newspapers because he assumed they would be more complete, get it more accurately, and he quote himself from the Republican newspaper. But the point was that very early on in the law and that you can go back two thousand years there's a famous book by Seneca. The philosopher had a father who was a lawyer. This is two thousand years ago, and he writes about, oh, you know, to be a good advocate, you have to not just know the cases of the law, but be able to immediately martial arguments in your head. So this emphasis on that is as as you're saying, sir, it's not unique.

I mean like engineers need to do this. I can tell you in communications school we need people to martial arguments. But the emphasis on oral synthesis is one that I sort of simply I give Kingsfield a pass here. I'll give a pass, not an a plus, but a pass because it is so important to the perception of success there. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I mean, you know the the The funny thing is, uh, I'm not sure all lawyering is that. Okay, I'm not sure. If you're writing, you know, trust in wills, that that that that that's going to be the top skill you need if you're litigating a trust or will. Yeah, if you're negotiating with somebody I trust. I use trust and wills as an example, because you really are negotiating with anyone, it's your client who's writing the will.

Okay. If you're negotiating in a contract scenario, yeah, you need to be able to martial arguments. You may have some advanced notice because you've exchanged drafts. You might know kind of where they're going, et cetera. But that is, you know, I will say that modern law is a lot different than probably what Abraham Lincoln went through in the sense of the amount of preparations that's done, especially in these larger cases where there's a lot of money at stake.

I mean, they'll be mock trials, they'll be mock jury selection, they'll be mock a lot of stuff. So by the time you actually get to the trial, you've had a bunch of practice around it. I'm not sure that Abraham Lincoln had any of that. So, you know, he had his client, he stood up, and you know, he might have thought in his mind what the other side might say. But I'm not sure he, you know, went through his extensive a preparation as I've seen a lot of major law firms do.

Now, the other thing I want to mention, because you mentioned the Kevin character, there's one other aspect to this that hides in in his character that is important, and that is I'm not sure he was there because he wanted to be a lawyer. He was there because his wife's father had a law firm and he had a job after if he got good enough grade. Uh, And law school is one of those weird places where you know, if you go to college, go to undergrad and you go there to be an engineer and you find out that that's really not your cup of tea. There's lots of other things you can go do. You in law school and you find out that the legal profession is not what you want to do.

There's nowhere to go, right. You either in or you're out right, and there's it's not like, oh, I'm going to go do this. No, there's a gentleman but on steroids, right yeah, and. You can't escape. So, you know, I saw in my experience, you know, and I counseled you know, one LS when I was a two L and a three L.

You know, they were there and I ask him, why are you here? And they said, well, you know, my mom and dad thought would be great for me to do this. I said, look, this is one of the toughest experiences you have. You got to want to be there yourself. And I and I think the Kevin character brings it out.

I think his his his failure was not only what you pointed out, which is he's had the wrong skill set. He had a phographic memory, but not the ability to apply it, which is you know those are two separate. You can have a photographic memory and know how to apply it, that'll make you an enormous success. Have a photographic memory not knowing how to apply it, you're not gonna go anywhere. But I also got the feeling that he wasn't there because he wanted it.

He was there because his wife's father had a job for him, and that's what it was expected to he do in order to take care of his wife. And that's why I think the pregnancy adds fuel to the fire. He just sees the world closing in on him. He's got all these kind of obligations and he doesn't see how he's gonna make his way through. He produces an outline of three pages that is essentially useless.

I as as the one of the three of us who was gonna go to law school and then didn't go to law school for reasons that are again like not to go into him. But I can understand where that character is being written from in terms of, like you said, Mark, the idea of you're there for the wrong reasons and if you're if you're gonna put yourself in this deep of a situation, you gotta really want to be there, because the people that are gonna put themselves this far into it aren't gonna complain about being there. They're gonna rise to the at least the good ones will rise to the occasion of being there because they want it so badly they'll do whatever it takes to go back to my comparison from before of the Bear.

In the Bear Jeremy Allen White's character, I mean essentially is you know, waking up, eating, sleeping and living food and then going to sleep for four hours and waking up and doing it all over. And you get a sense in this film and again just kind of of and Mark, what you're you're talking about, you know, just in general, in terms of the comparison to the real life, you have to really commit yourself to law school, at least in the first year, which is why this, I mean, this movie is so hell bent on it being first year law students, because, like you said, Mark, it is a thing that if you're not there for if you're there for the wrong reasons, it's going to become a parent at least very quickly to you that you probably shouldn't be there at all.

Yeah, I mean, this is it's self selection at its maximum, right, I mean, yeah, yeah, they're not going to tell I mean, I agree with you, doctor, doctor promoter. These generally at least again, you know, general is always you You always get problems when you generalize and when try to get into specifics. But a lot of these top schools, let's call it the top one hundred, are going to have the best of the best. They're going to be people who were very successful in college. They were very successful in taking standardized exams, the alsat and they're very you know, so that's who these people are.

So you know, when I said writing is basically you know, if you don't If you can't write, law school is not a place for you. So you know, everybody there can write well, everyone there generally can speak well, and they should be able to read very well. I will say the one thing that makes law school the one different here. They don't really show it here, although they allude to it. You know, the the amount of workload he's talking about, you know, five hours, six hours, seven hours of study.

Yeah, but that's also a function largely of how quickly you can read, the faster you can read. It's really a reading exercise how quickly you can read and synthesize. If you can read really quickly and synthesize fairly quickly, it's not as big a load as if you don't aren't able to do those two things very quickly. And I mean, I do think they show the long hours I think most lawyers, most law students experience is probably replicant of that. They probably do spend long, long hours.

And the exaggerations are have a point like the hotel sequence there where they just are going all in and you know, I guess regressing back to place this hearing times or something threatening the hotel and the nale for the rest of us at universities is a doctoral program where you're spending this unbelievable amount of time to produce one document. Now, of course, you are taking classes and those classes have discussions, and there's papers, and nowadays you're supposed to be publishing in academic journals during the law during the doctor program as well, but they mainly you're supposed to produce this far to five hundred pages of original scholarship with a thousand footnotes to prove your worth to enter the body of the Professoriat and there are so many people who are very very smart in every dimension, like they can synthesize.

They can't, but they are just not able physically or mentally. And that's not a denigration of them, that's just a fact that they don't want to spend that much time doing that one thing. And I can tell you that I would never do it all over it if I had a choice. And so the movie, I thought, really does show something that I find missing in a lot of more modern movies when they're trying to show a profession, and that is work, like actual work. It's sort of my old man mark.

I don't know if Chris has told you, but I don't actually need to use a cane yet, but I keep a cane here. I'm sure this is a podcast, but I actually have a cane. It's my grandfather in law's cane that I shake sometimes at Chris, but very rarely, but just when I get mad about something. But it is interesting to me how you'll see on television or movies or law series, you'll see like the slightest suggestion that maybe being an electrical engine nearing or an architecture, or in law or in medicine, involves some work. But I think a lot of Hollywood folks think it's boring to show people working hour after hour after hour after hour, you know, grinding themselves there.

Now, maybe they try different ways to give a hint of that. Well, they actually did a very good job in one thing, and maybe you know, I resonate with it, and maybe I know you saw it. Maybe you didn't resonate with you the whole thing with the helping the professor with his treatise. Okay, so the experience, I won't say that's what happens in law school. That's let's leave that there.

But you know your experience coming out of law school, at least in the seventies and eighties and nineties, if you go to a big law firm, you're a shock troop. So you know you they would be oh, the client, you know, have an issue to come up on Friday afternoon, and you know you, as the first year lawyer or second year lawyer, the partner would call you in and say, hey, we need this research. We need a memo online desk by eight am Monday morning to give to the client or for me to review that be it for you know, markup and give to the client on Monday, and so you know, they really show that they do it in a different context because it's it's law school. You can't show it as a work context. But that's real.

That was a real experience in that timeframe and probably still is, you know, with with the AI tools everything that's going on now. I really can't speak to what the current experiences. But in this in the seventies and. Eighties generational ship you said up through the nineties, right, Yeah, And I do think that I wonder if the paper chase were like redone today, what how they would play it. But there is an issue and has been really since millennials entered the workplace, and because I was an administrator and I did a lot of alumni and industry outreach, and because communications creds end up everywhere.

They end up at airlines, they end up at oil company, they end up with the law firms. Have a communication end up his lawyers too. Yeah, at least undergrad community gash. Yeah. Journalism has always been a very thought of, this very strong track to go to law school afterwards there and still is today writing and talking and researching.

But I think there's in the workplace now there's sort of this is before Ai. But Ai has only been really with us for a couple of years, so it's still playing out what's going to happen with Ai. But I think that there has been an adjustment. And I remember talking to somebody who ran a consulting firm, and he ran it the way I think his father ran it in like the thirties or something, and this was a very high end consulting firm. He would hire people, Yeah, he would hire people from Texas Tech and the Harvard and ut Austin, and they would be on a five year track to become this is not law but another kind of consulting.

And he would work them really hard, like super hard. And then you get to a certain level and then you can pull back back a little and you have other people who are working that hard for you. Right. So, but then he suddenly encountered the millennials, and he suddenly encountered somebody saying to him, Yeah, but my cat has yoga at three o'clock. I can't cancel the appointment.

What do you mean I have to stay at the office past three, you know. And interestingly I saw, because I was talking to these alumni over time, there was a shift. At first, they were extremely resistant, like in my day, you know, we broke rocks and you know, we jumped off cliffs whatever we had to do with things like that. But then they realized that they wouldn't actually have anybody working for them. Even the best students wanted to have some aspect of a private life.

They wanted to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They wanted to have, you know, a cat, and not spend time with that cat. So I think it's very interesting how the workplace now there's more, or there was until two years ago, more of an accommodation. And that's why this film seems like it was from not just from like fifty years ago, but maybe from five hundred years ago. Yeah.

Well, you know interestingly that you mention it and I won't get into the millennials. But so the loanworks very similar to what you did just just described. You know, it used to be when I graduated, it was seven year partner track, so you spent seven years toiling in the vineyards to then get to be the junior most partner. And by the way, when you got to be junior Mark's partner, you had other people working for you, But the work didn't stop. You know, you had billables.

You still had to kind of keep grinding away. So it just changed what you were doing. It didn't you didn't get easier. It just changed what happened. And maybe is reflecting what happened in the millennials, is it started to be eight and then nine, and then ten and then eleven, and you know, at some point people, you know, how far out does it need to be when you just say, I just that's that so far out I can't even I don't even know what I'm gonna pay.

Yeah, I don't know where I'm going to be nine years from our ten or eleven. So you know, it really speaks against I mean, Chris hasn't really explained. My journey in the law was much different, and in eighty five it was incredibly different than anyone else. I didn't go to a law firm. I went straight to a corporation and always for the most part my entire career, at least until recently, I was in law.

I was in a corporation as an executive, you know, giving legal advice and in some cases being chief of legal of three different companies. But my journey was different. So I can only see it from the side, but I actually signed out of it because of what I saw, not because of pay per chase, but because of the paperchase reality. You know, if you're gonna you're gonna struggle and struggle. I mean, I'd rather do it in a different way.

Now they get paid really well. But you know, the life work balance is is real. What you're explaining is real, and you're right, this does look like five hundred years ago, because you know, everybody that's supposed to work works hard, and you know, does whatever is it takes. I'm not sure that people buy into that as much today as they did in the seventies and eighties. And by the way, some of those people rebelled from it.

Obviously. I would say, you know, I have friends that went to law school that are lawyers. Mark, you know, two of them rather well. I did not perceive that either one of them had this experience in law school. I heard them talk about law school, and I've heard them tell me how hard it was.

But one of them had a girlfriend the whole time he was in law school, from before when he was in law school all the way through law school and married her and has kids with her. Now, so you know that the the the idea. Was she the professor's daughter, the most feared professor's daughter. Right, which I mean look obviously for dramatic effect, that was a choice that they made. But no, she was not.

So there was none of that from their stories that they told me. The things that I heard were different because you know, again I had enrolled to go to law school in twenty fourteen in Nebraska, so they would have been going to law school from fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, possibly even into seventeen. So what I'll say, and I mentioned this earlier, and this may this contributed to so and I don't know how far back it goes, maybe it goes into the seventies, but definitely was a thing in the eighties. There are companies, one of them I won't mention their names, but there are companies that produce outline okay, so they're yeared towards passage of the bar okay. And obviously none of this in this movie talked about passages of the bar.

But these outlines you can basically you subscribe when you become a one L and you pay you know, a fee, and you get these outlines throughout all of law school. So you're in property, they delivered you a book that basely tells you what the law is from A to Z improper. Okay, and it may be your experience. What you're speaking to, Chris, is that has crept so much in that the Socratic method just doesn't have any appeal anymore, because again, the whole purpose of Socratic method was to make the student discover the law on their own. Right.

Okay, you're given a case and it does. They don't tell you they have a holding, they have facts, they have the legal reasoning, and they have the holding. But the holding doesn't it's not highlight it doesn't say this is the important thing about this case. So you know, at the end of the day, it may be that it's changed dramatically from this. And this is now just a historical artifact because in the seventies and eighties this was the way you learned the law.

Now, I will say I knew people in law school that did subscribe to that service and did use those outlines and probably weren't producing their own. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very interesting point because Mark, we are now in a liminal threshold here in higher education. We're Among the many crises we face is the crisis of AI and what do you do when every student has access to those outlines right for everything? Which AI?

AI had so many problems, and I actually it's been my research area for the last three years and including the hallucinations and the misrepresentation and a lot of the issues. But I find it fascinating that one of the discussion points we've been having is, well, maybe the only solution is to return to the Socratic method, because the only way that you're going to get the student unfiltered. And I really don't want to either under emphasize or overemphasize the problem. But if you want the pure reaction of a student to knowledge without any chance, ants that they've gone through AI, that's in the classroom, live with their phones in a bucket at the front of the class, ask them questions. So uh.

The famous line from the poet Milton about the ad the attic the grove of academ where the attic bird trill to war world no desocratic, that of course comes from Socrates and played open ERSO sitting there under the olive trees having discussions, and that all the all the dialogues we have are essentially supposed to be versions of those. Maybe we're going back. Well, you know, it's actually they actually kind of emphasize it here, right, So when they when he asked Kevin the hypothetical you can't find in the book, right, Kevin is trying to find in the books. I mean, there's there's various aspects that flow from that one you've already talked on, which is you know, that shows that you know, just knowing that the facts is not enough.

You have to know the analysis. If you don't, it falls apart. But it also points out the Socratic method is meant to be an extension of things, not something that necessarily you can just look up in a book and say what the answer is? Right, and it does. They don't do a very good job of it here in this movie.

But the idea of the law is always about the next set of facts, right. Uh. I was recently working on a on a case and the facts came out that you know, you can't this this particular uh set of facts ended up with an outcome. But what you have to understand is the case is limited to those facts. The next question that the good lawyer asks is based on the facts and the holding does it extend to a new set of facts?

And that's what Kingsfinn does in those in those hypotheticals, he poses, what about this? Well? What about this? Well? What about this?

And I agree with you, there's no way that AI, if you've collected all the phone you know that that don't we give them the answer? They have to come up with by themselves. That but it's the key. You have to take away the phone because otherwise they'll just typing the phone. They're going an answer that they'll spout off right.

And that for me, you know, again, to speak to something that I experienced when I was in high school. My favorite course I was in in high school was ap World History, and that was because the professor who taught that course every exam, yes, there was a multiple choice section, but the multiple choice section was weighed less than the writing section. And the writing section was here are you know four first hand or secondhand documents, synthesize the information within and tell me, you know, make a statement or make an argument or you know and you know, and your argument could have even been wrong, but as long as you used evidence to back up your argument, that the professor would give you marks within a reasonable grade.

And you know, I think that, yeah, that that is gone in a lot of ways from teaching now, because I think it's much easier to just teach to an exam or teach to multiple choice, and when you just are doing that, or when you're expecting the that is all you're going to get. You can utilize other things to get the answers or circumvent having to do the work. I mean, again, AI is useful, But the problem with AI is, like any other tool, you can't control how you know, It's like a car. Some people use cars to run people over, some people use cars to get to and from work. Some people use cars for a job like an uber driver.

Some people have cars as part of their workforce in terms of you know, over the road trucking or something like that. But you know, broadly, AI is not awful. It's just the way it's being used. I think sometimes you know, well, if you're using it in an academic capacity to circumvent having to do work of your own, not great. Really well, well, I think what doctor Prometer is getting to and I think this is the key, and I think this, you know, I think This is a good place to kind of highlight it is what are we trying to teach when you go to a university or you go to law school, Are you trying to teach a bunch of facts and figures?

Or are you trying to teach someone how to think and facts and figures? Google is always faster than anybody else can ever be. Okay, you know, if I if I want to, if I want, you know, you know, give me the the population of Arizona. You know, at Google's probably better than me trying to figure it out and remember it. Okay, uh but Google?

But but AI is not as good at reasoning. And I'm not and I'm not degranating AI, but you can't substitute for your reasoning. You know. I think what they're trying to teach here and what they're trying to highlight in the paper Chase and doctor Promote, I think you're saying what you're trying to teach otherwise in the university is how people think, not what they know, but what how to think, how to think about a problem, how to address an issue, because it's it's everywhere, I mean, everything that we face as as a humanity needs as problems that you have to face and reason to conclusion, and if you just let AI do it, then it's reasoning for you. It's just not the same.

Yeah. The one thing I would add there, I have a quote in my head from Stephen King, who honestly I'm not a Stephen King fan in the sense of like, I just don't read a lot of this stuff and maybe I should more. But he had some pull away quote that I thought, gosh, that really sums up the challenge of being a teacher anyway, K through twelve university, law school. Whatever. He said he met a lot of people who wanted to be authors, but very few who wanted to write.

And boy, that sort of explains what I think is the problems with a lot of Hollywood movies and television shows and video games and books, is that I think you need both. Like I see sometimes in like Reddit, New Writer or something, somebody says like, I have a great idea for a science fiction novel. Should I read any science fiction first? And I was thinking, yes, I think you should, young woman or wherever you are, you really should read before you write. I mean, you should have experiences.

There's a lot of things you need to do. But I think the accumulation of facts and learning fact how to understand facts, because facts without a context can often be meaningless. Right, that's right. People can throw out fact, but the questions, like larger questions or questions about attribution or conclusions we can draw. Let's go back to that AP history class, you know, probably in nineteen seventy three for the AP history exam what were the causes of the Civil War?

Right now? I literally had a high school teacher who taught a semester for us on the Civil War, and he taught what he thought were the causes of the Civil War. And I think we're still discussing the causes of the US Civil War, and there's a current consensus, but I can tell you it's actually different than the fifty year ago consensus. And you know, if my mind is preserved in ai aspect, maybe I'll find out what the consensus that fifty years from now. The number, the amount of fact has skyrocketed because more and more people are doing dissertations on like you know, one tiny county in East Texas and recruiting patterns of young men deciding to go fight in the Confederate Army and why they did, and letters and diaries home that hadn't been discovered.

My point is that ideally, university, law schools, whatever, should be places where people learn how to process large amounts of information and then synthesize and articulated for a point. Right, yeah, but I you don't want The problem is I think and Ao you mentioned, I bet that if your teacher fifteen years ago, whenever it was that you were into ap history, had asked, had given an exam question, that he expected you to give him the answer that he gave you in class. Well, no, I well, I mean yes, there are teachers like that. I think there's a lot. I think there's a lot of it that.

Try some population of teachers who get into teaching because they like to hear themselves. Well, that sounds of cheering yourself. It's it's easy to grade. It's easy to grade when you have an answer. It's harder to grade the getting to the answer, right, I mean it's easy.

That's part of the reason why people do multiple choice exams. Right, So there's four answers, there's one right one and there's three wrong one. How you arrived at the right one could be that you you know stole into the exam room the day before and got the answer she'd memorized it. Okay, you could know how to get to the right answer, you could have guessed the right answer, et cetera. And what I think this is trying what they're trying to show in the paper chase, and it is hearkening to something else, which is it's really if you put a set of facts down and you say, what are the kind of of action?

The idea is is what you're supposed to be showing is how you think, not what you I mean, you got to know what the heck of torte is or what the heck of contract is, and you may need to know the four elements of contract formation, but you're not expected to know all the body of law around what is and isn't consideration. For example, they use that in the movie. He says, you know, consideration could be what you give someone or what you've ceased to do. You're not expected in law school, and I think they do a good job of filing here. You're not expected to know the fact.

You're not expected to know every case that's out there that contains the law. That's what you're supposed to be trained to be able to go fine right and find the cases and analyze the cases to come up with the argument that says, these five cases say consideration has to be given to the other side. These five cases can be interpreted to say that I don't have to give it to the other side. So therefore, if my case is one that we're you know, that doesn't have any consideration going to the other side, that's the that's the cases I want to use. That's why I'm going to argue to the court they should follow because remember, judges are following the law creating the law.

At the same time, we are in a common law institution, not a civil law. And therefore it's a thinking exercise. So you know, they don't really show when they grade the paper because they don't show what the heck he's grading. But at the end of the day, it's really hard to grade because which you really should be grading is not the regurgitation of the facts or of carbolic you know whatever. It's Hey, look, you know, here is the way to think about this.

You know, the structure, that's what the outline is. The outline is a structure. What are the four elements of contract? Formation. But you're not expected to know every possible way that any one of those elements could be met, because it's impossible.

That's what you should go to the library to figure out when you have a problem. Yeah, and there are some differences in different fields, by the way. I just I want to talk for just one minute about something that I found funny at the end of the film there where Kingsfield is grading what, as Chris pointed out, what I assumed to be Heart's final exam paper. There is that he looks at it so quickly he just like skims it and then quickly writes it grade and then off to the next one. And I'm thinking of myself, like, boy, I would really feel bad as a professor if I took that shorter time the Greatest Students paper.

First of all, as a journalism professor, I'd be reading every sentence and like correcting and read like you know, oh, misplaced comma. You know what depends on what you're looking for, right, Yeah, exactly. I'm just saying that that again shows the differences. That you may may not need to be that. I'll tell you the one thing I was curious about the grading though, you noticed he added some scores at the bottom.

He added an eleven and I sent something else. I don't know where he got those from, whether those were the fudge factors or something else, because in my experience so and I'm sure it's still the same in college. Maybe not. The blue book doesn't have the name on the front. It may have your student number, but it's usually on the back, so they're not supposed to know whose paper or blue book they're grading.

In the blue book that he had, I think the name was on the. Front of the plot, well, I no, it was written right on the front. Yeah, So you know, I'm wondering if it wasn't a, you know, it might have been the twist of yeah, he didn't know who he was. You know, they was pulling the you know, I don't know who you are thing. But he's given him eleven extra points to give him the A because he knows who he is.

Because when you look at what he was grading, none of those numbers that he used was eleven, you know, thirty. This clearly looked like he was adding something there that I couldn't figure it out. Yeah, And that's another huge difference today is that we are expecting then I think it's reasonable to be asked to justify a grade fully. So in other words, we were okay, you know, I'm giving you ten points for your you know, grammar, spelling and punctuation. I'm giving you nine points for your argument.

I mean that. Again, I don't know Harvard Law anybody there, but a student who asked, like on what they you know, can you explain to me how I got this grade. We're supposed to actually show them how it added up, and and and I think we would be in trouble if it said there was a fudge there. You dated my daughter, but I'm not sure you might be my son in law. So there's eleven points for that.

And like you gave me a good ant. Now the prior record stuff right like that? That would be unethical for me when I'm grading a paper. I do not. I mean, I consider it to be wrong to take in anything previous the student has done.

Maybe maybe in other systems as s acceptable. Yeah, no, it's no different. It's supposed to be completely numbered. There weren't even a name. I've had students, you know, especially in graduate courses.

I've had students who are just super shy, and they really Now, if there's a class contribution part of your grade, they're not going to do as well in that one, and that's something to work on. But like if I'm reading a paper, I'm not saying, Gosh, I really like this guy. He's so articulate. I think I'll, you know, give him eleven points. So I got to go ask if somebody from Harvard who's still alive from Harvard Law in nineteen seventy three, has to explain the grading system.

But there's actually one other thing that's interesting, and they don't. They don't really talk about it. But harken back to what I said about how law school, how your grades come out your participation in class. The most I ever heard anyone professor say that you got for it was five percent of your grade. So you could sit there and do nothing.

He could call on you and you could say pass or my dog ate the paper. All he can do is embarrass. You mean, it's all in all centers on the final exam that's supposed to be anonymous, So you know, you think about that for a second, right, I mean he's supposed to grade them with numbers, and at least when I was a law school, they were posted via your student number. What your name didn't say mark stash, you got an A. It said number one, five, six, seven, eight, got an A.

Right, we did. We did post grades with names. I mean that's we can't do that now. But but like I remember, it was numbers. By the way.

Yeah, no, I I swear to god, I had a professor. I won't say where I had this professor, but like he had our name, our social Security number in our final grade posted outside his door. This is numbers and grade. So you knew your number because there was a student number, because in the eighties they started switching off of Social Security finally and started using a unique number for you. But they're not even supposed to know who the paper is supposed to be.

A number that you know kind of ties into that. So you know, at the end of the day, the whole exercise in the class is nothing other than just what it is. It doesn't affect your grade. The people have volunteered weren't more likely to get a's than the people who sat in the back and gave. I'm slightly suspicious about that.

You know, showing the way he grade that paper, I'm suspicious too, But that's I suspect kind of the the thing. But the other thing I'll say is I was one of those guys that volunteered a lot, and it actually has there's a reason for it, okay, and they don't really explain he doesn't explain it fully. But if you volunteer a lot, the professor's unlikely to call on you when you're unprepared, okay, because they get tired of, you know, hearing you, or they're tired of you vol so they they they are unlikely to call, you know, when there's when they come and say, okay, we're gonna start you know, we're gonna start calling. They're going to call on somebody they haven't heard from, not from somebody they've heard twenty times in the last week from.

So there's actually a strategy. He doesn't mention it, but that is the strategy that a lot of those people were employing. Is if I volunteer that he probably unlikely to call on me when I'm not prepared. I mean, it's a good strategy. It's a heckermetry being proactive.

I mean that's the way I work. Anything else want to say about the paper. Chase, I think it's worth watching as a as as an artifact of the way law school may it definitely was, you know, before the seventies, in the seventies and into the eighties, probably less so if one's going to law school today, I don't think one should be looking at that and have an expectation that this is necessarily the way it's going to be, because there's a lot of other things that are happening there. And the other thing I'll say is, you know, there's another movie that shows a similar kind of thing. It has similar tone, but it doesn't in a much more lighthearted fashion, which is Legally Blonde.

It's also Harvard Law, and you know, she has the experience with the professor, with the professor gives her a hard time. It ends up differently a lot differently than this movie. But I think they're good bookends to look at, if you if you know, if you want to kind of look at, you know, the portrayals of law school and and because those are the two movies that I'm familiar with that that do a reasonable job of at least trying to get at a lot of this kind of pieces. Obviously, Legally Bond has a lot of other stuff in it. It has stuff before law school, and then it obviously has stuff with you know, doing with the professor.

But I think they're both good bookends to look at. I agree. In fact, I always thought Legally Blonde was directly referring to the paperchase. Of course, yeah, absolutely. The whole thing's in the classroom.

That's exactly you know, you know with the you know. I'll tell you the line that if you asked anybody who saw the movie in the seventies and eighties, what they would remember is here's a dime, go call your mother, tell you're not going to be a lawyer. Well, I the one that resonated with me. It was the one at the beginning where he's like, come fill the space with your knowledge. Like it's just like such like, oh my god, like geez, Louise, this guy.

I really enjoyed this movie. I'm so glad I finally watched it. I Mark, I can understand why this movie would give you PTSD. But I also think because of the way things have changed. I think it is interesting to watch this and go, oh wow, things were like this at one point, but I think in a lot of ways the system has softened to the expectations and differences of the people that are coming into the system, and I think that that's important obviously in the short term and in the long term so well, given that neither one of you have anywhere to plug, I guess I can plug myself.

So Weirdingwaymedia dot Com is where you can go to find all the things that I work on, including plenty of things that I don't work on, like eighties TV ladies and the Projection Booth and Midnight Viewing and the Film Entaries podcast and the Feminine Critique, a lot of things. You can find all of those Overwirdingwaymedia dot com, like rate and review the show wherever you get it. Hopefully it's on iTunes and Spotify, because that's where it helps the most. Doctor pearl Mutter, thank you so much for picking the film, and Mark, thank you so much for joining us for the first time. I think it went rather well.

I didn't even say much, which is a good episode for me. I just sit here and listen. So yeah, and as allways, well that we'll catch on the next episode. Boo