Wednesday, October 13, 2004

What It Was Worth

During the last debates our President underscored emphatically the importance of having “facile” weapons systems.  That is, systems distinguished by fluency and ease, an effortlessness that actually implies lack of serious effort.  That should comfort all the serious, thoughtful terrorists who wouldn’t be targeted by such weapons.  I think Mr. Bush wants us to have “agile” weapons systems.  But now I don’t know if he knows the difference, and which one he’ll mention in those high level summits he is so fond of reminding us he attends.  Dude, I don’t care if you go if you’re just gonna mess things up.  I’d rather you stayed home rather than embarass us or dig us into a hole out in the big wide world.  Words matter. 

In illustration whereof:

Those first weeks, it was like everybody had a secret weapon, and you had to figure out what it was and how to beat it before it beat you.  The air was thick wth anxiety that congealed just beneath the collegiality like a cold current in warm waters.  I quickly established my possession of an identifiable skill - I could talk in class, think on the fly; I got that settled rather too early, to my chagrin, by scoring first-day debate-squad points off the crim law prof, a slight quick man whom I quickly came to view as the Ian Sholes of law school.* I forcibly acquired my classmates’ respect by sheer exercise of vocabularic might and mental focus. 

* I just googled Ian Sholes and came up with a scant squat.  Is this possible?  Doesn’t everybody reading this site alreadyknow who Ian Sholes is?  The fast-talking cynical commentator who always ended his screeds with “I gotta go?” Damn now that’s a national tragedy.  But waddayagonnadu.  I guess we all gotta go sometime.

I’d honed some of those improvosational intellectual capacities in a college prelaw class with Murray Dolfman.  He’d call on you when you most wished for invisibility and put you on the spot for ten minutes, grilling you, making you take a position and defend it, sticking and jabbing every angle of abstruse legal principals, actually shaping my thinking and orienting it more toward lawyerliness even as I frolicked as an undergrad.  I still look back on that class fondly and often.

And while this intellectual horticulture was ongoing in the background, we got a pretty damn good foundation in basic civil law, too.  From accession to zealous representation, with torts, contracts, and the UCC thrown in for good measure - he gave us a solid survery of a staggering load of legal history and theory.  By the time I snuck away with my B in his class, I had memorized complex legal definitions and action-packed latin phrases real live lawyers get to use like “res ipsa loquitor” and “semper ube sububes.” We learned new definitions for old worlds like “consideration” and “negligent.” It felt so good to have worked myself into a new cognitive realm in that class that all this extra vocabulary just seemed like icing.  But don’t get me wrong - I like icing. 

About a month into law school I discovered the power of icing.  My contracts prof was Sheila Kuehl, a powerful personality in anybody’s book.  She was a national television star in the early 60s, then went to Harvard Law and became a feminist groundbreaker there; today she’s one of the highest-profile and most important members of the state senate.  She was also funny, engaging, and scary smart. 

She taught socratically, as all my profs did, as Dolfman had, which still threw most of the other students off their game: she’d raise an issue, find a sucker to deal with it, and then interrogate the hell out of it till you don’t know where you started - yet, in the end, you’d review your notes and realize you’d learned something in a deep internal way, well enough to apply it on a test, or even in practice. 

I had no shame - I’d volunteer to answer almost anything.  So one day I would up raising my hand to talk about how to figure out what someone should be paid in case of a problem with a contract.  The contract price?  Consequential damages?  What he “deserves,” determined objectively?  She batted me from one to the other like a shuttlecock.  “What he deserves” is one of those legalisms that’s better recognized in latin: “quantum meruit.” That’s what they called it in the textbook.  It had been in my textbook in college, too; we’d dwelt on it extensively there, I think Dolfman actually fried my ass on that skillet once or twice.  I was comfortable with the phrase as I suggested it as an answer to the question Kuehl had posed.  “Quantum meruit?”

She snickered, shook her head.  “Try again.”

“Um, quantum valibat?” This is the legal latin for “what it’s worth.” It was on the same page as “quantum meruit” in my prelaw text.  It was not, however, anywhere in my contract law text.  It was just one of those amusing Dolfmanisms I had stored in a dusty corner of my brain.  I knew it wasn’t the right answer - I’d just proposed it to buy some time.  But as soon as the words left my mouth I realized they’d bought me a lot more than that.

The room went still.  Kuehl froze - just for an instant - before her familiar grin returned to her face.  “No,” she said thoughtfully, before leading me to the response she’d been seeking.  But the room remained subdued.  Some of the star students whispered to each other, “What did he say?  How’s that spelled?” Others sat very still, wondering what secret study guide I was using.  As my turn as interloquitee concluded, the prof chuckled and asked rhetorically, “Quantum valibat?  Where the hell did you pick that up?” Her repetition of the phrase sent a fresh ripple of disquietude through the lecture hall and my 99 classmates.

Class eventually ended and I started packing up my clumsy texts and notebooks.  Before I’d gotten very far, a face appeared at my shoulder.  He was one of the obvious stars, someone who read the assignments and retained them, a clean eager face under a short conservative haircut with a polo shirt and chinos, all worn utterly without irony.  “So, it’s Dan, right?,” he asked tentatively. 

“Yeah, Fred.” This was a game I could play, now that I knew it was on.  “How ya doing?”

“Yeah, good, yeah.  So, um, what was that “valibant” phrase?”

“Quantum valibat.  ‘What it’s worth.’ Valibat is like ‘value.’ Easy to remember.”

“Yeah, that’s easy.  Where did you learn it?”

“Undergrad.  I thought everybody got that one.”

He smiled tightly, leaned back on his heels.  “No, I didn’t learn it till today.”

“Well, there you go then.”

“There I go.  So long.” And with that, we both went. 

By the end of school I was clearly not the star pupil some of my colleagues were.  Regardless, I retained some vestige of their respect, and I attribute much of that to my once having pulled a latin rabbit out of my ass right in front of everybody.  I continue to think of that performance as more of a parlor game than as serious schoolwork, a Pictionary victory at the cocktail party that was law school - but I could even see at graduation, as we bade each other a berobed and final goodbye, that I’d caught them, that one time, back when it counted, and it would be a while yet before they forgot it.  And that’s what that thing was worth.