On Justin's Classmates

My dear Horatius,
In my last I no doubt gave you more information than you wanted about my professors here at the Yale Law School. You did ask for it, however. Not only that, but you asked me to say something about my classmates to boot, and I shall comply with that request presently.
First a word or two about Eli, whose health since her latest return from the hospital has been better than it has been since before her first fateful trip to Yale-New Haven. She has slept better, smiled more, and shown more developmental promise in the last several days than she has for a long time. We (Lia in particular) of course continue to worry and our hearts skip several beats upon the occurrence of anything out of the ordinary. Worries notwithstanding, we adore the little lady and cannot say how glad we are to have her home.
Now, then, let me introduce you to the Yale Law School Class of 2009. First some demographics: there are 190 of us, representing 81 undergraduate institutions (two of us represent the Lord’s university [that would be the BYU] and one of us represents its incarnation to the north [BYU-Idaho]). About 56% of us are men (which leaves 44 % women for those disinclined to solve for X in 100 – X = 56). Around 40% of my classmates represent ethnic minorities. Collectively, we have lived in 50 countries and speak 23 languages (which is more impressive, with only two foreign-language-speaking returned Mormon missionaries, than it sounds). 32 of my classmates hold graduate degrees (2 of them PhD’s) and 4 have been officers in the U.S. military. One of my classmates was a professional tennis player, another invented a nationally marketed game; one wrote a 300-page book in Korean, another was a Jesuit priest in a former life, and still another worked as an organic farmer.
Now for a few personalities. I only know the one-third or so of my class with whom I actually have a class or two (or four in the case of my “small group”). One of those I don’t know is Ronan Farrow, the youngest member of my class (19). Ronan was (is?) a child prodigy, accepted to the law school at age 16 after graduating from a special undergraduate institution for advanced youth. He deferred matriculation for three years, much of which he spent as a reporter and activist covering the ethnic crisis in the Sudan (he was published regularly at the Washington Post, the NY Times, and other major venues). Sadly, Ronan’s parents never married and went through a nasty breakup when he was about 5. His mother is the actress Mia Farrow, his father some movie-maker named Woody Allen.
Most of us are more normal than that. My two best friends are a Pennsylvanian named Dan Luskin and a Virginian named Sander Daniels. Dan graduated from Harvard College in 2001 with degrees in Biology and Psychology, then spent the next five years working in New York (he was an ocular witness of the fall of the second tower on 9/11) and D.C. before coming to Yale. He’s a fiery Yankee-type, equally versant in the lexicon of the academy and the shipyard (though he resolved, without my asking, to watch his language around me). As a 1L representative of the Yale Law Democrats, Dan spent the past week in D.C. and northern Virginia, electioneering on behalf of democrat challenger Jim Webb for the senatorial seat of Virginia’s incumbent (and erstwhile 2008 Republican presidential hopeful), the racially-insensitive George Allen. Demo Partisan that he is, Dan acknowledges a sort of inner “Rockefeller Republican,” though he feels the GOP has wholly betrayed its historical commitment to a small role for government and a large one for Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Dan is also a genuinely good guy who shared notes with me when Eli was in the hospital and has invariably expressed the greatest respect for my faith (he himself is a fairly secularized Jew).
Sander grew up in a wealthy Virginia suburb where his best adolescent friend was a Mormon who later served a mission in Brazil and now studies at BYU. Sander graduated from Yale College in 2005 with degrees in international relations and environmental engineering. This past February, Sander married his high school sweetheart, Bianca, a graduate from Rice who now telecommutes for a consulting agency in D.C. (For Bianca, as for Lia, the idea of life in New Haven, Connecticut apparently took some getting used to.) Sander is an unassuming and affable fellow, but within his belly burns the fire of diplomacy and intelligence, and news such as North Korea’s recent successful nuclear test sets his being aflame.
Neither Dan nor Sander is in my “small group.” A small group, as I mentioned in my last, is a group of twenty or so students who have all four first term classes together, one of them (contracts in our case) being comprised solely of the membership of the small group. Our small group, like all of them, is a varied lot. Ira simply exudes a sense of cold, calculating, brilliance whenever he speaks. His undergraduate degree is in history from Swarthmore, and he’s in the midst of graduate work in philosophy at Michigan; but every comment he makes bespeaks a perfect fluency in the dismal dialect of economics. He’s a nice fellow in any case, married to a girl he apparently met in Russia (there are only a dozen or so married students in my class, lest my mentioning two of them create an erroneous impression that BYU is less demographically peculiar than it is). Martha is an eminently sincere soul who works prodigiously harder and seems unwarrantably convinced that the rest of us are smarter than we are. I look kindly on Martha: she once told me kindly how much she enjoys it whenever I comment in class and on another occasion predicted rather extravagantly that if any one in our class had a good chance of clerking for the Supreme Court, she felt that I did (she may have meant a chance at clerking for one of the more conservative justices—I had told her, as I tell everyone here, in part for shock value, that if I could clerk for any of the Illustrious Nine I would choose Mr. Justice Scalia). In addition, during our class hike in September Julia took kindly to Martha and held her hand as she galumphed down the hillside. Martha is another Yale undergrad who spent the last two years in D.C. as a legal researcher for the Department of Justice.
Elsewhere in my small group—Pat is an over-muscled intellectual, whose interests include coffee, intelligent discourse, and, manifestly, himself. Pat strikes a pose of calm, superior urbanity—his passions apparently aroused only by his intense dislike of Professor Bruce Ackerman, whose Con-Law class Pat has ceased to attend. Bill is a likeable, everyday chap who happens to have gotten himself into Yale Law School. Zach is a cool-as-punch Texan—ever unruffled, often smiling, never laughing. I like Zach a good deal, though I don’t know him well (we bonded briefly at a class party as we briefly discussed the gridiron prospects of his Longhorns and my Cougars). Sarah, like many of my classmates, went to a boarding school for high school (I hardly knew, before coming here, that such things still existed on a wide scale—perhaps they don’t exist on a wide scale but all their graduates end up here). She’s spent the last couple of years in India doing who-knows-what for heaven-knows-who, but all of it in India to be sure! Solène is a Frenchwoman who in a less liberal environment might take much good-natured ribbing for the manifold historical failures of the French military—but we are the Yale Law School, not the West-Texas chapter of the Minutemen. Victoria is the most Californian of all of us, ever eager to socialize but also a wondrously serious student meticulously addicted to plotting her days and nights on her beloved iCal. Diana is another lifelong Yalie whom I’ve befriended in part because she looks like a girl I knew in high school. Edith is the only African American in our small group; she is sharp as a tack and wonderfully articulate—also married with a PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago. Anant is our group’s only ethnic Indian (as in with ancestry in India), a graduate of MIT who sounds the part, overly serious and occasionally quoting funny lines from The Simpsons but never quite getting the tone or the accent right. There are others, but the ones I’ve cited are representative.
Finally, a few generalities. Politically (surprise!) we are a very left-leaning bunch; in the name of balance I often feel pressured to strike a more conservative pose than I normally would (hence my saying that I would choose to clerk for Scalia—which is true, but more because I think Scalia the most interesting of the justices rather than the justice with whose politics I am most sympathetic). But politics don’t come up too often. Class discussions generally deal with high legal theory rather than current events. When current events do come up, it is usually in the context of the Bush administrations desire to fling the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions to the wind in the detainment and trial of “enemy combatants.” In this case the grounding assumption is always that the administration is wrong—a fair assumption around here.
We are, by and large, an inordinately privileged bunch, but most of us are reluctant to admit as much. Most of my classmates come from stinking rich backgrounds but not for their lives would they admit to being “rich”: “We weren’t rich growing up,” they say, “but we were upper middle class” (the middle class evidently excludes only Mr. Gates, Mr. Perot, and those beneath the poverty line). Happily, though, there don’t appear to be many brats among us. Most of us realize, sensibly enough, that we are highly lucky to be where we are and—call it noblesse oblige—feel some responsibility to repay our debts by positive contributions to society. Most of us are, of course, animated by vaulting ambition, though few dare admit the fact. The atmosphere is highly collegial; competition is looked on with disdain, and therefore there seems to be a tacit agreement not to talk about the tacit competition among us for the posts of supremacy in the legal world.
From a social standpoint, many of my fellows cast themselves as partiers. There is much talk of drink and devilry. But most of this is pure posture; the students of the Yale Law School are a serious-minded and hard-working bunch, the moderation of whose revelries suggests they represent an ill-understood social ritual rather than a devil-may-care abandon. One wonders at the need for such pretense. In extolling the virtues of the family life to my fellows I often invoke the family’s obviation of the cumbersome need to “let go” from time to time; instead I have something of great importance to hold on to.
More could be said, but I’ve said too much already. Suffice it to say my classmates are an interesting and impressive bunch. Very impressive, as it happens. Ten days ago we had a small group party at the New Haven home of Professor Robert Gordon. On that occasion Lia met most, if not all, of the members of my small group. When we got into the car to head home her first words to me were, “Do you wonder how you ever got into this school?” I do indeed.
Until my next I remain

Affectionately yours,
Justin

p.s. The picture posted previously of myself with a ridiculous coiffure that Lia impishly called "senatorial" was a joke, the product of Lia's having too little to do when I was too engrossed in some volume or other of forgotten lore. This is my true "Yale look." :)