Throughout, the classroom is the center of the Law School. In college, a student who went to all his lectures was an oddity. In the Law School, partly because of the perfect attendance habit of the non-Harvard graduates, a student who misses lectures is unusual. Besides running the risk of having one of the three or four professors whe reward poor attendance with an appropriately low grade, the truant student misses the most invigorating part of the school.

Under the Socratic method of teaching, students are constantly called on in class, to give what will almost inevitably be a wrong, or incomplete, answer. A professor will continue to question a student, to exact more information and analysis. At the end of an exhausting hour, the student will find to his amazement that, like the magician who can pull an object from the pocket of an unsuspecting child, the professor has extracted an accurate analysis.

Every class remembers its first meeting with a certain colorful professor, whose first class two years ago began typically when a student was asked to state the facts of a case.

"Well...," began the hapless student.

"Well? Well? Where does the well appear in the case?" screamed the professor, as the next student was summoned to respond. A bit overdone, perhaps. But the class learned fast that sloppiness is not tolerated.

Faculty Is Spectacular

The Harvard Law faculty is sepectacular. It is awesome--even frightening. In no other school, including the rest of Harvard, is there such a concentration of brilliance as in the Law School's close-knit, tribal, Faculty.

The faculty members are self-important. Perhaps it is an egotism born of the confidence that each of them knows as much as any legal scholar about his respective field. Yet still they quest after more knowledge. They serve on Commissions, on editorial boards; they lecture, write, engage in private consultative work on the side, and still find time for more.

And "more" includes students. With the exception of one senior faculty member who evidently takes pride in an overstuffed day and accordingly informed his first year class this year not to bother him in his office, all the faculty members are accessible. Dean Griswold, for example, who is frequently lecturing or consulting abroad, will always speak with a student, frequently on less than a day's notice. Likewise, the thought of Freund or Howe or Braucher's turning away a student is unthinkable, despite the grinding schedules these men keep.

By the end of three years, the vast