One hundred and forty of the nation's top college graduates arrived at the Law School a month ago to find they were the guinea pigs in an experiment that professors say may change the way people think about law.

A quarter of the first-year class at the Law School was handed over this fall to four teachers who spent the summer planning a potentially revolutionary first-year program.

For the students, the experiment is a risky way to spend one-third of their Law School stay. But for the quartet of professors, the experiment is the first step towards an entirely new approach to legal education.

"That's the dream," says Morton J. Horwitz, Warren Professor of American Legal History. "I think people are going to think about law differently when we are done."

He is joined by Abram Chayes '43, Frankfurter Professor of Law; Frank I. Michelman, professor of Law and Todd D. Rakoff '67, assistant professor of Law as organizers of the new program.

And for the 140 subjects? "These kids are going to do fine," says Chayes. "There's no chance they are going to be scarred in any way."

It is difficult to find a student in the group--formally called Section One--who does not agree. In fact, a number of other first-year students wish they too were part of the randomly selected 140.

The subject of all this excitement is the traditional first-year curriculum, founded at the end of the last century and continued, despite increasing criticism, to the present day. In this experiment, the Law School is beginning to tamper with the once sacrosanct first-year program.

Wiping Out Tradition

"We're trying to get rid of the traditional course boundaries," says Horwitz, whose specialty is Torts. The group is doing this going in two directions at once: more coordination in the teaching of courses and the creation of new "integrated" disciplines.

(The fifth required first-year course, Criminal Law, is being taught in the traditional manner by Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz. The class is thought of as the experiment control group.)

As the coordination part of the "Grand Experiment," as the professors refer to it, all the first-year classes--Civil Procedure, Contracts, Property, and Torts--deal with the legal ramifications of acts and omissions.

For two weeks, the concept worked well, professors and students say. The topic "is dressed up differently in each field, so that you don't immediately see, unless someone directs your attention to it, that it is the same thing," says Chayes.

He adds that the coordination lasted only two weeks because "we couldn't scramble everything the first year."

In addition to the two-week program, the entire section meets every Friday afternoon in an hour-and-a-half Targets of Opportunity session. These meetings--one-third of them student-organized--can be compared to high-school assemblies with all 140 Section One students sitting in Langdell North Middle at the end of the week to discuss subjects of universal concern.