After a decade of higher education at Dartmouth, Brown, the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Stanford Law School, Robert E. Byrnes says he now works mostly as a bike messenger, with occasional litigation now and then to “make some extra dough.” Real life is a lot like college, Byrnes muses. “You just dick around and dick around and then when something really needs to get done, you mobilize,” he says. But Byrnes and 1998 Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate Jamie W. Marquart were not completely unoccupied during their law school days, as they explain in their new book, Brush With the Law. Marquart developed a gambling habit, while Byrnes spent his time smoking crack and having sex involving—depending on the occasion—one, two or three individuals, sometimes including Harvard undergraduates.
Byrnes, who graduated from KSG in 1991, has an impressive slacker resume to rival Ferris Bueller’s. During a four-year stint as head speechwriter for former Mass. Gov. William F. Weld ’66, Byrnes “worked” mornings and spent afternoons drinking and playing on a dart team at Drumlins, a bar on Mass. Ave. recently rechristened People’s Republik.
Sometimes, a menage-à-trois would break up the monotony. After meeting two Eliot House sophomores one night at Drumlins, Byrnes says he invited the two women back to the governor’s office for a night of Jack Daniels and physically challenging debauchery. “It’s hard enough to have sex with one person,” Byrnes recalls. “When you are dealing with a multiple-person sexual encounter, there has to be complete consensus about everything.”
Atop a 100-year-old mahogany table under the sparkling gold dome of the State House, Byrnes took full advantage of gubernatorial keycard access. After the fact, the two girls began rifling through the legislation on Weld’s desk. Byrnes sent them back to his apartment, fell asleep on the State House lawn for an hour and then wrote a speech in 30 minutes that Weld delivered in front of current Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. “It was less of an incident than a way of life,” Byrnes says of the jaunt.
Byrnes, who later married Dawn L. Ebert ’92, has always had a thing for Harvard girls. According to Marquart, the undergraduates at Harvard are less irritating than the HLS students. “All the top five most-competitive fucks from each college go to law school,” he says. “Take your undergraduate experience and make the people more competitive and intense and less creative and you get law school.” He recalls HLS students getting together before they bought books to plan how to pick up undergraduate girls. “These pimply guys think they are going to get some ass getting their books,” Marquart says of his possibly delusional classmates.
In their slacker-lawyer handbook, the work-averse authors include tips on how to obtain reading summaries and avoid classes with mandatory attendance. Still, Marquart and Byrnes are pleased with the way they spent their sizable tuition. “I would recommend law school to anyone,” Byrnes says. “It was a great three-year vacation”
While the two authors seem to possess little rationale for becoming lawyers (Byrnes’ dream is to open a bike messenger company), they do know why they wrote this book. “We had to avoid being big, fat, drunk law partners in 20 years,” Byrnes jokes. “We thought about doing a radio show but any jackass can write a book.”
Although the preface to Brush With the Law includes a letter from a Yale law student warning about the influence flippant books might have on the legal profession, Marquart and Byrnes assure readers that their bons mots are harmless.
“Harvard as a mythical creation is more enduring than Santa Claus,” Byrnes says. “Our book is not going to topple that.”
—E.L. Olive
