I had a cousin named Anushka who was finally engaged to be married. She was twenty-five and just finished with pharmacy school; not quite a medical doctor, but close enough to be a good catch in the Russian-Jewish dating world, even if she was a little on the heavy side. She and her boyfriend had been dating for a good year and a half when he finally made the proposal and together they set out on a grand tour of the continental US where she paraded him in front of her relatives, showing off in equal parts her ring and her catch. Their wedding invitations came in the mail the same week that Anushka and the fiancé made their stop in California before heading off to spend a long weekend with his family in the mountains. By the time of this long weekend, the hotel for the receptions had been booked, the Rabbi hired, the chuppah dusted off, and the grandmothers were already exclaiming to their single grandkids, “Now Anushka is settled and it is your turn next, if only I live to see the day.” (Cue big sigh and hands pressed to the heart).

But the week after the ski trip, uneasy ripples began traveling through the family newswires: with only a month to go, the wedding was rumored to be off. What had happened? What could possibly have gone wrong? Then my mom got the phone call. Anushka’s mom called to lament and to share her heavy burden. Although it was hard to get much out of an inconsolable Anushka, the story that was cobbled together was that after the weekend in Colorado, the groom-to-be’s family had been so aghast at my cousin’s table manners (combined with a foot on the table incident) that instead of wedding bells, it was the death knell for the affianced couple. Personally, I always thought she was the one that dodged a bullet, escaping the shmuck and his family, but nevertheless my family now has a running half-joke/half-cautionary tale about cousin Anushka whose engagement ended over poor table manners.

In class we have often heard it repeated that law is the weakest form of social control. And in response to the query of what is a strong form of social control, I remember one answer being, table manners. And even many years later, now that Anushka is married to someone else with two kids, I think she would definitely agree, table manners have certainly been a stronger and more impactful form of social control than any laws of either this country or the country of her birth.

A cute story, told with your accustomed wit and grace. A little hard on poor Anushka, I think, but in families we laugh at ourselves, I hope, more than at one another.

However, you can't use 435 words to tell a story that is at best tangential to the purpose of your essay. I appreciate your solemn demonstration of the social power of table manners. But if I say "people who have committed murder to protect their business would not slurp soup or eat with their hands in a fancy restaurant," I can make the same point in two dozen much less witty words.

But for a long time and perhaps still, I have believed that not only is law a strong form of social control but even more so that lawyers are important and influential masters of that social control and it is in law school that they learn this mastery. That it is in law school that they transcend the barrier of thinking like a “normal” person to “thinking like a lawyer”. I have often heard people saying that they want to go to law school to learn how to think like a lawyer, but unless it was on one of the days I overslept, I am not sure that lawyer-thinking skills have been imparted to us. Other than in this class, we haven’t been exposed to any lawyers actually thinking or acting or being.

Well, that's not quite true, is it? All those "official" sources, the judicial opinions, the statutes and regulations, are also exposure to lawyers thinking. But they present the thinking by taking us to the funeral, after it's all over, when the corpse is laid out so respects can be paid.

You have got lawyer-thinking skills you didn't have before you came to law school. But they were being taught on all the days, including the ones you overslept and the ones you didn't. It happened gradually, the way learning a language happens, not suddenly, the way an apple falls off the tree and hits you on the noggin, or a foot falls on the table.

There are two quotes that sum up one part of the compendium of reasons of why I want to be a lawyer. The first by Jerry Seinfeld, “To me, a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.” And the second is from The Godfather, the book, which never made it into the movie, but was uttered by Don Corleone to his sons about why his consigliere, Tom Hagan, was so important, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than one hundred men with guns.” Now not to say that I am interested in stealing any money, but these quotes both epitomize this notion I have of lawyers as having some sort of superior knowledge that other members of the population don’t. They think in a way that others don’t. I always imagine the lawyer and the doctor as having people’s lives in their hands. When someone is in trouble they think, I will call a lawyer and then I will know what to do. I watched an interview with Benjamin Brafman the other night where he talked about how often times clients who come to him have no one left, they are on the brink of suicide, and he is their psychiatrist, their confidante, their advisor, their support system, and at the end of the day he is the one person standing between them and the cell doors.

This is not about whether law is a strong or a weak form of social control, is it? This is about whether the good lawyer is a strong social actor. And you know the answer: she is. Law is only part of what makes her strong. Yes, she knows how to read the rules on the inside of the box top, and she knows how to make those rules dance.

She remembers everyone and everything, and she remembers why she needs to remember.

She sees and hears things happening in society before other people, because she reads social signs the way a hunter in the wilderness reads animal spoors.

When she applies force she applies just enough at just the right place and at just the right time. One hundred guns can only fire one hundred bullets in the correct general direction. One dagger point pressed home with the strength of one arm can change the history of an empire.

She exists in the milieu where property and power make their inevitable marriage. Men with guns can only find cash in the bank. She can find a right to profit from other peoples' money in the same bank, good for a lifetime and no chance of being shot down by police on the street.

Sometimes she's using law, and mostly she isn't. She understands social action and individual psychology as well as rules. Her politics are as much her skill as her forensics.

Her table manners, her etiquette and social persona generally, matter too.

But at the completion of my first year of law school, I feel no closer to being any of these things or having any specialized knowledge or knowing what to do if somebody calls me up and is in trouble. In fact, I probably know more about how to hold a fork than I do about being a lawyer and my biggest fear is that I will graduate law school with no more skills than I started with and that I won’t ever learn how to be the kind of lawyer that can help people, who knows the rules on the top of the box, and who wields power with my briefcase that rivals that of a hundred guns.

That shouldn't be your biggest fear. Or rather, if it should, you are fearless. When you figure a couple more things out, you're going to start on the journey that will make you a hell of a lawyer. In the meantime, please make this essay better.