- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Kunati Inc.
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1601642695
- ISBN-13: 978-1601642691
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,079,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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As an undergraduate I was lucky enough to study intensively with Marvin Mudrick, author of "Books Are Not Life, but Then What Is?" (I've yet to hear a convincing answer to that question.)
I was just 16 when I began at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which Dr. Mudrick founded. When I once confessed to him how self-conscious I felt about my age, he demanded: "Why? It's not like you have two heads." He didn't mean it metaphorically. But as a metaphor it exactly captured what it felt like to be a high school junior living the life of a college freshman.
UCSB was a big state university but the College, housed in a converted WW II-era Marine Corps barracks, was a tiny island in the middle of it. It had just 130 or so students in my day. Among them were Jervey Tervalon, Lydia Bird, Kia Penso and Steven Voien, all of whose books you can find here on Amazon. There was a lot of talent in a very small space.
But most of the thousands of other UCSB students weren't future authors. An impressive percentage lived up to the stereotype of a tanned, swimsuited, surfing student body. I was a member of that body, but then again I wasn't, for in the privacy of my own pale body I was scared of the ocean. We didn't have such noisy, heaving things where I came from.
It was a bit difficult to say where exactly I came from, except that it was inland. I was born in a city from which my family moved before my first birthday. That cross-country move provided a neat geographical dividing line between my infancy and childhood. We spent the next 10 years in a green, prosperous suburb of Cleveland.
And then the family moved to brown, impoverished New Mexico, drawing another geographic dividing line, this one between my childhood and adolescence. I think it's not actually possible to find two places in the contiguous 48 states less alike than Shaker Heights and Albuquerque (though an Amish farmer driving his buggy down the Las Vegas strip might disagree). Everything my childhood home was, my adolescent home wasn't.
That upbringing was training for my college experience of having two heads, of being simultaneously a part of and apart from my environment. A year in Dublin at Trinity College gave me the perspective to understand just how thoroughly American I was in my attitudes and assumptions. Living abroad at a young age is the only reliable way to learn what things you take for granted.
But then I decided to go to law school. For the Sake of Argument begins: "My decision to apply to law school was shrouded in such ignorance about the legal profession that I find it hard to reconstruct what was going through my mind." I had very little idea of what I was getting into.
I was soon to discover that the pall of half-knowingness wouldn't soon lift. Law schools withhold information from their students with the passive-aggressiveness of a lover your friends would advise you to dump.
I started at a public law school, transferred to a private one, and even spent a year studying law in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. I can report that the German system of legal education is rational.
Once you have the law degree in hand, you quickly discover you know almost nothing about the practice of law. I don't mean only that you don't know how to practice the profession, but that law schools don't consider it part of their job to ready their students to make decisions about their careers.
I interviewed with many law firms and found it impossible to detect any difference between them, even though law firm are as distinct as families. Not one of the firms provided an honest preview of the worklife on offer. No one lied to me, so far as I know. I just wasn't told the important things. I didn't know enough to ask.
Over the course of my career I've worked at a large firm, a small startup firm, and for the government. I've done criminal and civil law, big cases and small, in trial courts and on appeal. I've written law review articles and taught Paralegal Studies courses. I once tried to become a professor. Like a collector of vintage postcards, I've acquired a lot of perspectives.
I wrote the book with the ambition of including everything I know now that I wish I'd known then, with the "then" being each time I made a lifecourse-altering decision about law school and my legal career. The decisions were made with such lack of knowledge that it's hardly an exaggeration to describe my 27-year involvement in the legal world as a succession of random events.
After reading the book, you won't have the excuse of such ignorance. But then, you won't need it.
I'm a great fan of Scott Turow's One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School, but no one will ever confuse the two books. Not only does For the Sake of Argument start the story before application to law school and continue it well into the subsequent career, but the earnestness of the first year law student has long since been beaten out of me, as I'm sure it has out of Turow.
The most important professional skill a young lawyer can develop is an appreciation for absurdity. It's the best protection against disillusionment.
My ideal review of For the Sake of Argument would describe it as "the funniest serious book about the law ever written." Lawyer friends who read the manuscript worried that I went too far in places. But, as Dr. Mudrick (who was hilarious) liked to say, humor excuses everything.
If the book makes you laugh, I'll know I went too far enough.
