My First Year Moot Court Class
"It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue"
Oscar Wilde
I was in my jacket and tie, and standing in the hall bordered by the student mailboxes, feeling a bit nervous. I knew I was nervous by the way the sweat sometimes startled me when it dripped from my armpits and rolled along the sides of my waist.
I kept trying to study my notes for one last time, and I wasn't succeeding, and, as I read the same paragraph for the fourth time, a voice kept intruding on my concentration.
I ignored it, and tried the paragraph again. The Paragraph said something like: "The US Supreme Court has ruled in the case of such-and-such that there is a penumbra of privacy related rights to do with........"
And there was that voice again. That crude, laughing voice. It croaked: "HA! HEH!"
I didn't look up. But the voice crept in again: "Heh! Ha! Heh, Heh Heh! He ripped me a new asshole!" The unmistakably female voice said to the partner in her conversation.
"A new Asshole!" the voice repeated.
With that, I finally glanced away from my papers and looked at the person who was talking. It was a woman. That woman. The woman from my first year class section. I didn't really know too much about her, although I had noticed that she had rather unusual blue eyes, rendered more unusual because of their piercing, and sort-of penetrating aspect. Not that piercing eyes were anything unusual in a Law School. In fact, I was getting tired of looking at piercing eyes by that point in time.
I had never heard this woman speaking casually before, although I had heard her speaking in some of the first year law School classes that we had taken as classmates, as I say.
She had obviously just finished with her oral argument for her Moot Court Class, which was part of her Legal Methods course. If I recall correctly, the Legal Methods class was the only class we did not have share together or have in common. So her oral argument had therefore been made in front of a different Professor than the one I was about to speak before.
The woman was relieved her argument was all over, and she was talking about her experience.
"I was his Bitch!" She crowed. "And He ripped me a new Asshole!" she cackled yet again.
I gave up on doing any more reading of my notes, and put them in my duffel bag, and broke in:
"Who?"
She turned her strange eyes towards me and said:
"Professor FitzClaw."
Everyone in the school knew who the infamous Professor FitzClaw was. On his better days, he was secretly referred to as the meanest and dirtiest SOB of an instructor that ever pounded black, tassled wingtips upon the paved portions of Terra Firma. (beat the boardwalk in burnished brogans?)On his not so better days...well.... lets just say the solar plexus in every student's breast pumped lots of fear induced adrenaline.
"Oh Wow! I said. Professor FitzClaw!" I heard he's tough. What was it like?"
The woman shook her head and said: "You don't wanna know."
And then we talked some more about her recent Oral Argument Experience. It made me a little nervous hearing about it, but I didn't think I was in for quite so rough a time as she had had. That was because my Legal Methods Professor was completely different form Professor FitzClaw, (more re him here?)and I was rather fond of her.
She was very mild mannered, and, if I may be so bold as to say-- also very sweet. Those qualities alone were enough to make her stand out among 99 percent of the Law Professor faculty. In addition, she was very attractive, with very large and kind, brown eyes, accented by long and dainty lashes, which sometimes, when she turned her head suddenly, fluttered along with the sweep of the lovely curls of her chestnut hair.
She had a touch of sadness about her as well--hard to detect--but nonetheless there; and this vague and unique underlying sadness endeared her to me all the more. It sometimes manifested itself in her eyes, or in the way that her voice would sometimes trail away at the end of her sentences.
I could tell that she had a true appreciation and a love of Art, for its own sake, not only by the way she decorated her Legal Professor's office with a painting or two (perhaps a little inappropriately in the eyes of her colleagues) but also by the way she described those paintings to me on one of the two or three occasions I had stopped in her office to discuss a paper or project assigned for class. Her face showed a true delight and almost a yearning as she pointed to a feature of the landscape in the painting, and her finger would gracefully move towards, and trace the snowy mountains in the distance, dotted with spruce trees, dressed in their winter cloaks.
In later years, I have sometimes remembered, and reflected upon her passion for that Landscape, and how other people-- especially legal or business types--that I have subsequently met, with much larger and more expensive art collections, could not demonstrate, if they even felt it, the same or even any passion for what they had collected; just as those with the largest collections of books in their librarys are the least inclined to discuss them based upon their content, beauty and truth, as opposed to their expensive leather bindings, if they had indeed bothered to read them at all. But I digress, and say nothing really unique.
Now, for the uninititated. the moot court class is........(need a few sentences to describe it simply)
Anyway, back in the hallway bordered by the student mailboxes, my name, and the name of my opponent in debate, or "opposing counsel" were called. It was time to go to Moot Court.
"Good Luck!" The blue-eyed woman cried, with a thumbs-up.
The led us into a classroom that was down the hall. It was a fresh and new classroom. And clean, with new desks, fresh paint, and blackboards along two walls. A neatly buffed and new speckled linoleum floor.nd neatly buffed a
The eintirte building was like that. It ws not a new building-in fact it seemed to be at least a few decades old-but it was obvious that it had been completely rennovated fairly recently, and so it had all the freshness and newness that money could buy. In some locations the floors were of large, russet terra-cotta tiles, which gave the rooms a certain warmth.
My favorite Professor was waiting for us, along with another woman-a grad or MLA student-who was also extremely attractive, but in a much different way.The MLA student was seated alongside my Professor behind a large and elevated Bauhaus-style desk at the front of the room, and behind a pair of expensive looking designer glasses, which gave her a vaguely cold, analytical and intellectual aspect, and a facial expression that was nonexistant. In the words of Oscar Wilde: "beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."
Both were wearing long, black judges robes and, in the case of my Professor, I was very charmed. She seemed enthusiastic, if not a little exicted on this special night, and she even had, though she never needed it at all, a little extra make-up; and her lips were rendered all the more colorful and appealing agaist the crisp darkness of her judges robe, which was ornamented by her copious and long, unruly curls which descended upon it. She was a lovely sight, and I instantly felt much more at ease with one glance at her.
The MLA student, on the other hand, though attractive as I say, seemed much more serious, if not a little cross. I fancied that it the crossness might have had its genesisin the mere beholding, and/or the contemplation of the lowly 1L station occupied by myself and my partner in debate.
This partner in debate of which I speak, was an awfully nice, and always polite fellow. (Description here)
More tonight
(Meowwoofs--hope you like this thing. If I don't jot the notes down (in red), I forget this stuff pretty quickly. It's the exact same thing with a new thing stumbled on with the banjo--keep a tape recorder handy or you forget it-- forever sometimes)
