Room 200

Just came out of my last class, held on a sunny Saturday afternoon because the professor had to make up for one a few weeks back. I thought about not going; it was probably going to be taped, and it was a sunny Saturday afternoon. But I went, even woke up early to finish the reading. I have always made an effort to be at all my last classes, if only to be part of the applause for the professor at the end. I was so impressed the first time that happened in college, and I do believe I've been to every last class since.

But this wasn't just any last class. It had been twenty years coming. Forty semesters. If it's been about 150 days a year, 5 hours a day, for 20 years, that's 15,000 hours in class, and these were my last 2. Maybe I'll go back to school one day. Maybe. But for now, I am well educated enough.

I could tell you that my last class was criminal law, and the subject was insanity, and that might get some chuckles, the kind of thing that makes you want to say, "Isn't that ironic?" without actually wondering if indeed there is any irony involved. But I would rather tell you that we talked about the guy who the Supreme Court said could stay locked up in the criminal ward of a state hospital for 25 years because he was found not guilty for reason of insanity. For shoplifting. Or that we discussed whether Andrea Yates knew what she was doing when she drowned her kids, and whether she knew it was wrong because it was Satan telling her to do so.

There's a lot of interesting legal substance to these issues--I wouldn't have enjoyed law school at all if I didn't think so--but I've always wondered what happened beyond the pages of my casebooks. The opinions we read tend to end with an order to remand the case back to trial, and you rarely learn what actually happened to the person whose name you type over and over again throughout your notes, in your outlines, on your exams. They are almost always fascinating stories, the tough calls, because why else would they end up in a casebook? And when I hear a fascinating story, I want to know how it ended, not just (and often not at all) what the majority on the court thought about the legal issues.

Especially in criminal law, when we spent half the semester talking about murder and rape, it could get overwhelming for me to think about the scale of the drama that must have backdropped each case. We snicker in class about the ridiculous circumstances that lead to tricky legal issues--who's guilty when some kid dies playing Russian Roulette?--but can you even begin to imagine what that kid's mom went through? Or the friends who were playing with him? Whole lives upended by a fantastically stupid mistake, the memory of it producing who knows how many sleepless nights or disgruntled marriages. And a generation letter, a bunch of Georgetown law students sit in room 200 and laugh over whether the bullet was placed to the left or the right of the chamber.

Even the bad guys, the ones we read about not because there's any doubt that they did the deed, but because maybe they should only get rape instead of accomplice to murder. How did they live out the rest of their days, whether in a cell or not? So many of the cases we read are relatively recent; sometimes I just want to know what bars the guy is looking out from behind today and what he's thinking right now, at that same instant we sit in class and discuss what he was thinking then, the flash of time before his rival drag racer hit an oncoming car and killed everyone in it.

After twenty years of going to class, the rhythms of my life knowing precious little else besides going to class, I may never go to another class again. But I will always be looking for stories.