They Do Things Differently at Northeastern Law School

There are no wood-framed portraits of distinguished-looking alumni hanging from the narrow, low-ceilinged corridors of the Northeastern University School of Law. Reopened only six years ago after financial difficulties had forced it to close in 1953, the law school is engaged more in establishing its reputation throughout the country than it is in providing the traditional trappings of a legal education. And even if, in the future, the school does get around to decking its modest halls with the images of graduates-made-good, it is unlikely that the paintings will display bushy-eyebrowed judges in their robes, nor silver-haired, pipe-smoking scholars of the law. Instead, they will probably depict a long-haired man working in a tenants' organizing office, or a tee-shirted woman advising welfare mothers of their rights.

The curriculum of the Northeastern law school represents an experimental approach to legal education. Through its "cooperative plan," students, after an initial year of classroom study, divide their remaining two years between formal course instruction and clinical work in a variety of law-oriented jobs. By allowing students to gain practical law experience, NE provides them the opportunity both to obtain a well-rounded picture of law as it is actually applied in society, as well as to shop around among different types of employment so as better to enable the student to determine his career after graduation.

"Co-op is the only way to go," says an enthusiastic second-year student sitting in the small student lounge in the modest four-story building that houses the law school, located in the Northeastern campus. "The practical experience is invaluable. You really learn all the stuff you're taught in the first year. After working, listening to professors is tough." The range of co-op opportunities is broad: "Some like to work in legal-aid type of projects. Other, like me, who come from a poor background, want to see what a big firm is like." A first-year student planning to work with the Tenants' First Coalition in Cambridge this summer says that she came to Northeastern because "the co-op experience would enable me to shop around with different types of legal work. I didn't want to have to search around when I was out of law school."

The allure of the co-op program has enabled the school to attract a unique student body. In contrast to the rest of the university, which serves as a community college for students in the Boston area, the law school's standards for admission are rigorous. This year, from a pool of about 3100 applicants, NE will accept from 300 to 350 students to fill the 125 spots in its incoming class. The admissions committee, composed of three students, three faculty members and the director of admissions, uses the traditional criteria of grade-point average and LSAT scores, with one exception: any person without an acceptable academic background is considered if there are what one member of the admissions committee terms "mitigating factors--anything you find in their record that is interesting." Student and faculty differ occasionally over individual applications, but all agree on the importance of experience outside the usual academic channels.

The result is an incoming class whose average age is 26. Many people come to Northeastern only after becoming discouraged with the work a bachelor's degree makes available to them. The experience of a 1972 Haverford graduate is typical. After leaving college he went to California to live for a year. "I'd studied German in college, and I went to look for a job as a translator, but there was nothing," he says. "I tried selling encyclopedias, but that lasted only a week. Meanwhile, my expectations sank lower and lower. Then I got involved in two types of contradictory work that led me to law school. For 25 hours a week I worked to help set up the People's Translation Services in Berkeley, a collective gathering leftist material from Europe and putting out a news service for under-ground newspapers. That was without pay, so for ten to fifteen hours a week I worked with an urban planner whose specialty was commercial signs: billboards, neon signs, electric lights. I worked for him for nine months, helping him to write a book, but it was terrible. But it was PTS that drove me to law school. I felt it wasn't concrete contact with people, that it was no real part of the struggle. I had no skills, only a certain glibness. Law school gives me a whole range of skills. All left groups need legal advice. And I realize that without law school I'd be forced into a bullshit job for the rest of my life."

Many Northeastern students are similarly directed toward working for social change. "A large minority of the people here are anti-capitalist," says one of a group of students discussing the political orientation of the student body. "The rest are liberal-left. Maybe 10 percent are conservatives." "Do you really think there are conservatives here?" another asks. "How about Jim, isn't he interested in insurance?" "He came from that field originally, but I think he's out of it now."

Most agree that the student body is remarkably homogeneous, both in attitude and background. Almost all were educated at upper-echelon colleges (including a sizable number from the Ivy League) and, because scholarship funds are sparse, few students from economically-deprived families are able to attend. The school has a minority admissions committee, which aims at a 10-percent level of minority students per class, but many of these drop out during the first year for either financial or personal reasons. The admissions committee has, however, consistently attained one objective: a student body 50 percent female. To be more accurate, and as most women are quick to inform visitors, women constitute 51 percent of the first-year class.

The generally similar background of the students, combined with small classes and a lack of competition resulting from a pass-fail grading system, makes for an informality in classroom instruction that contrasts with the larger lecture halls, assigned seating arrangements, and distant faculty of more traditional law schools. The first-year class is divided into two sections with sixty students apiece; the second and third-year classes range anywhere from ten to thirty students. Professors are thus more accessible to students, and in the classroom there is ample opportunity to participate in discussions.

Even in the case of the only professor in the law school who insists on not being addressed by his first name, Thomas J. O'Toole '42, students are not reluctant to overstep rules of classroom decorum. One student describes O'Toole as a "Harvard professor type" and a "pretty straight lawyer." His formal style of instruction often clashes with the demands of students for more freedom. A few weeks ago, a group of women could no longer tolerate his invariable use of "he" to refer to the abstract parties of the contracts he was describing. When O'Toole said "he" in reference to the president of an insurance company, a chorus of ten women jumped up in the middle of the class and sang a jingle about how "she" is as appropriate as "he." O'Toole walked out of the class.

But even this "straight" member of the faculty (and the first dean of the law school) values the students' independence of mind. A graduate of Harvard Law School, O'Toole, talking in a quick, enthusiastic voice that betrays a little nervousness, says that "a lot of the students are free spirits." At Northeastern, he continues, "students can say anything on their mind," as happened in the episode of the female songsters. "I like that story," he says with a grin, "but I won't put up with nonsense. Classroom time is precious. Once they disrupt one class, they can do a lot." O'Toole says he regrets the "desire among faculty to court popularity. There's a tendency to be soft on students here. I'm the only one to enforce the smoking regulations and I won't let students eat in my class. One day I walked out of another class because a student refused to stop drinking from a mug."

But, as one student describes him, O'Toole is a "sheep in wolf's clothes." He takes evident pride in the school he helped set up in 1968, and he talks about the Northeastern students in an avuncular tone: "People come here with a strong commitment. They've tried a lot of other things, and they come to Northeastern knowing what they want. They bring a lot to the school." O'Toole says it is important that the faculty, in turn, be easily accessible to the students. "What Northeastern does for a student is incredible," he says. "In my day at Harvard Law School, a student had to have something pretty serious in mind to knock on a professor's door. Law school was the type of experience evoked by The Paper Chase. I imagine things have loosened up a little since I went there, but here things are really different. For instance, in my Torts class, I put up a list of people who've had trouble with their exams, and I'll go over it with them if they want. And for anyone else who wants to discuss their paper, they're free to walk in. With a class of only 125, you can do things like that. Because of money problems there's pressure to expand the school, but I feel obliged to resist it. If someone said we have to have more students, I'd say to close the place first. We're at our maximum size."

At the other end of the faculty spectrum is John G.S. Flym, whose shoulder-length black hair, denim overalls and work shoes corroborate his students' description of him as the "radical" of the faculty. Flym came to teach at Northeastern by way of Harvard Law School (a 1964 graduate) and the Law Commune, a Boston-based group of leftist lawyers through which Flym served as counsel for Harvard students brought to trial for their participation in the 1969 takeover of University Hall. Flym's class on Constitutional Issues studies the decisions of the three-year old Burger Court, and the analysis of cases often devolves into heated discussions incorporating recent political controversy. A discussion of Gravel v. U.S., the Pentagon Papers case, includes a debate on that decision's bearing on Nixon's claims of executive privilege with regard to the Watergate tapes. A box of cookies is passed from row to row and two women in the third row are knitting. There is a steady flow of whispering among students. Flym knows the first names of most of the 50 or so people in the class, and students call him John.

After the class Flym appears in a high, black-felt, Indian-style hat that accentuates his dark bushy eyebrows. He talks in a very calm, slow voice. "By concentrating on the Burger Court and trying to perceive the thought processes of the justices, we can show when they are consistent or not. We get an understanding of the conflict in values that pervades our society. We don't look in the judicial process as if it were a machine with individual views submerged. There's no need to pretend that there is clarity in the Court's decisions. To reach a principled decision, it must be part of a dialectical process, responsive to changing conditions."

Like O'Toole, Flym is at Northeastern because of its student body. He is attracted to a law school where half of the students are women. Also, he says, "because people are older and have been through a variety of occupations, they bring a reservoir of energy and resources that other law schools lack." Flym says the cooperative program is particularly valuable because it "equalizes the power of students and faculty. The co-op also means I need to work harder, because students demand more. With legal education based on actual experience, the student can judge for himself the value of the education he's receiving."

Flym has worked to establish what he calls a "sense of community" among Northeastern students. "A lot of the people here are like-minded, concerned with the same problems. Students participate in all types of legal projects, although traditional law doesn't draw a substantial number of students. Students come to Northeastern as a means of redefining law, in making it more meaningful for them and for serving the needs of the community."

Involvement in the law school takes other, less structured forms. Students are not hesitant to let their dissatisfaction with a professor be known. An instructor who had just joined the faculty this year was forced to leave because students felt he was incompetent. Only one-third of the people enrolled were attending his class, and there was talk of a strike. But before such drastic action could be taken, the professor was removed from the faculty and replaced by another instructor.

Some students, in fact, have found that Northeastern has not lived up to their expectations. They claim that the faculty is not as accessible as they were led to believe and that the law school has grown beyond a workable size. Others find the first-year program of intensive study, which the faculty claims is the most rigorous in the nation stifling. One student, who had travelled and worked as a mailman and substitute teacher before deciding to go to Northeastern, was attracted to the school because, he says, "I feared I wouldn't like studying, and even if I went through three years, I wouldn't know what the fuck to do. And now, the first year has been a drag. I fear making it through."

Perhaps the major ground for complaint lies in the ambivalence many students feel about being in law school in the first place. Many are unable to reconcile themselves to working in a formal profession based in the existent legal structure of society. "Northeastern claims to be an utterly new school," says one student during a break between classes. "But it's not an entirely new creature. It's counter-Harvard, but not totally different. It's radical in form, but its substance is law. Teachers teach what the law is. Many people come here without accepting principles about American society. Here, even with discussing the basic foundations of law, we have to accept certain principles."

It will be a generation, perhaps, before Northeastern's approach to legal education can be evaluated. Only by then will the school's graduates have had the opportunity to apply their skills to what they presently see as the major political and legal problems confronting the nation. "A graduate from Northeastern can do anything but go into a Wall Street firm or become a Supreme Court justice," says one first-year student. But even excluding those traditional channels, the glitter and gold of the bar offer many temptations threatening to lead a lawyer from the path toward social change. Whether or not the students from Northeastern can resist them remains to be seen.