In A Writer's Capital , your autobiographical work, you compared appellate opinions and short stories, and that made me think you perceived an overlap between law and literature. I was relieved to find decisions seemed like short stories. But that was the reaching out of a frustrated writer who wanted to feel that even in law school he hadn't gone too far from his original course. One's perceptions change after one graduates and starts getting the work out on the long hour. Today I should very much doubt there is any significant interrelationship between law and literature.
Law school is a cloistered life.
You have no clients, no partners, no associates. I was quite happy there and have in many ways been happy practicing law, but the two experiences are quite different. It's a lot of rough stuff, and it just has to be gotten over. Well yes, there was a feeling that a lot of lawyers had been in- volved in Watergate, but those men would have been just as naughty regardless of how law school was taught. Mr. Nixon himself was barely a lawyer.