VII

Jim Rowe returned, having done a little better than just scrape by, his ingenuity and literary gifts coming to his aid. I regretted my decision to leave our Brattle Inn residence, and after a year with Donald Field returned there both for my third year of law school and for the fourth, postgraduate year to which those who had been anointed as Louis Brandeis's prospective law clerks were entitled.

I enjoyed the work of the law review. Even more than the Crimson, the law review was a diurnal affair. Few of the editors worried about their law school classes. It was heady to be able to edit one's own professors, or professors from elsewhere—I remember editing an article by the man I most admired in the law, Columbia's Karl Llewellyn. I should add concerning editing that it has helped me as a writer to have edited the work of others as well as to have been edited by the stringent standards of the law review. Sometimes these seemed silly standards, as when even a biblical proverb was said to require a citation. I was elected legislation editor, a position that took me out of the area of case law and into legislative draftsmanship and public policy. I took part, with fellow editors, in an assessment of the constitutionality of the early New Deal legislation, my assignment being Section 7a of the Wagner Act, whose constitutionality I defended and whose vague language was seized on by John L. Lewis and his cadres of organizers to encourage workers to join unions; the act was ultimately sustained by the Supreme Court.

A few of us debated the merits of Legal Realism, then in vogue at Yale Law School, which seemed to me to be simpleminded reductionism. But the mode of analysis of many of the Harvard Law faculty was not vastly superior, though it was more attractive because it did not seek to shock. It assumed that the task of judges, within the limits of

precedent, was to balance interests. Decisions were admired that appeared appropriately to have balanced interests of contending parties and the larger groups they might be thought to represent. For example, decisions, even by the most strained reasoning, that found large corporations liable in suits for negligence and ignored the negligence of the presumably impecunious plaintiff were generally justified because they spread the risk of accidents, even though they did so in haphazard, nonactuarial ways that were of enormous benefit to the litigating bar and sometimes produced a windfall for the plaintiff. Law professors made no accompanying investigation into the real interests; assumptions were made of a generally liberal sort as to what was in whose interest, and the question was happily left at that. In fairness I should add that many of the law professors were men of exceptional integrity, fair-mindedness, and dedication as teachers and as the scholarly house-keepers of the law. Half a dozen became good friends during my law school years. Felix Frankfurter, to my surprise a pedantic teacher, was a frequent, lively host, quick to explode in outrage at local or national injustice, corruption, or stupidity, happy to introduce the young men he sponsored to each other and, where appropriate, to people in power.