LEGES SINE MORIBUS VANAE: The debut novel by Kermit Roosevelt, In the Shadow of the Law, looks like a legal thriller from the face of it. To be sure, there are lawyers involved in all sorts of intrigue, from a death penalty appeal to a mass toxic tort -- and, yes, there is a sudden death in the book -- but this is not a Grisham book with dramatic twists and turns.
Instead, Roosevelt uses his skills to paint a compelling, depressing (because it's true) portrait of the large defense-side law firms to which elite law school graduates gravitate, and what such practice does to themselves, and to the law.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, but there is much to say about Roosevelt's theme: law without morality, as the Penn Law motto goes, is nothing. When lawyers lose their moral sense, it cripples both themselves and the law. This gets multiplied, sadly, by what law firms do to young attorneys. As one character says at one point, ''You give up half your life to get good grades so you can get that top-firm job, then as a reward you get to give up the other half.''
Law school -- well, at least mine -- does an awful job at preparing students for the reality of big firm practice -- the choices they will have to make, and, more fundamentally, that there are choices, both between legal careers and within them. And Roosevelt doesn't pretend that any of this is easy -- other than the former Supreme Court clerk, he prescribes no easy answers for any of the characters, no clear answers for what they ought to do once they understand what their careers have done to their lives.
This book hit home for me. As most of you know, I took over a year away from the practice of law starting in 2003, in part because of the concerns expressed in this book: when you're slaving away on document production for a large corporate client, you do wonder -- is this why I went to law school? I went into politics searching for a way to use my skills in a more meaningful way, and then returned to law when I could find a setting in which I could employ them on behalf of clients whose successes would be meaningful to me. (And the paying clients too.) Why? Because the pure practice of law -- when your mind is really engaged in what you're doing on behalf of good people -- is a hell of a lot of fun.
But it's easy to get sucked in. It's so easy to conflate a law firm's objectives with your own and assimilate yourself into the Borg. Roosevelt's book highlights what happens to those who follow that path, and it's not exactly thrilling.
This book should be required reading right next to Scott Turow's One-L, because it provides a necessary education that law students might not otherwise get until it's too late. Read it. Now.
Mr. Poon liked it too.
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