They don't use four-color click pens, but listening to the myths at the Harvard Law School (HLS) suggests law students may be just as uptight as their medical school colleagues.

One story circulating on campus describes the leader of a study group preparing for a recent exam who required the transcripts and resumes of other students who wanted to be part of the exam prep contingent.

The story, at least one third-year law student believes, could very well be true.

But the rumor is only one of a number of similar horror stories that paint HLS as a place full of backstabbing students concerned only with getting ahead, an unusually hard and arbitrary grading system and faculty more concerned with their own academic work than interacting with students.

Most students acknowledge that a cutthroat reputation figures prominently in widely read guide-book descriptions of Harvard's law program and serve as a basis for HLS's poor showing in the quality of life component of the U.S. News & World Report's annual law school rankings. In those rankings--which administrators and students love to hate--Yale University's law program has claimed the number one spot for some time.

Indeed this sort of mythic lore about the law school has been a thorn in the side of HLS administrators for more than two decades. Thanks in part to commercially-successful works like One L. by Scott F. Turow (HLS '78), or The Paper Chase, a book-turned-movie about the darker side of HLS, Harvard has struggled with the notion that one of its most prized graduate schools is less than perfect.

But it was not until recently that the school began looking for ways to rectify the problem--including the hiring of an expensive consultant to pinpoint some failings--perhaps because most students have not stopped agreeing that the rumors have more than just a grain of truth.

Some others contend that the perception of HLS as anything less than a top-notch facility is merely a misperception--and a work of rumor--and fails to reflect the school's reputation in the academic legal field and among potential employers.

But some students and professors say HLS has far to go in bringing the institution as a whole to the level of its competitors in New Haven or Palo Alto.

And these critics find it ironic that the school is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on determining problems it could have learned simply by listening.

SOME INITIAL EVIDENCE

Even critics of the school agree that HLS "pretty clearly" retains its top academic reputation even over competitors like Yale or Stanford, according to Weld Professor of Law Charles R. Nesson '60.

But when taking the overarching student experience into consideration, Nesson says the school's top billing--so prized among the Harvard establishment--quickly gets lost.

In particular, Nesson suggests that HLS' more rigorous system of grading, in addition to a lack of personal interaction between faculty and students, lead to a sense of frustration within the school community.

"The intellectual excitement of the faculty doesn't get translated to students," Nesson says.