chapter 11 Langdell Hall

Harvard Law proved to be a life-altering experience. It is a very competitive place that accepts only the best students from across the nation. My classmates were very self-confident and let it be known that they were out to change the world. They were well-read and articulate and had an air of intimidation about them. Adding to the pressured environment, Dean Erwin Griswold told all first-year students at the very first assembly in Austin Hall’s Ames Moot Court Room: “Look to the left and to the right because, at the end of the year, a few of you will not be here.”

The first year of law school was stressful but fun. The pressure at Harvard never intimidated me. I had worked hard to get there, and I was not going to play the one-upmanship game. I have always possessed supreme confidence in my ability and had the fortitude to adapt to new situations.

The first year of law school was a brutal experience. We were overwhelmed with five year-long courses: contracts, torts, property, civil procedure, and criminal law; a one-semester course, development of legal institutions; and a legal writing and moot court requirement. The reading assignments were prodigious, and we attended Saturday classes. Saturday evening was the only time off because Sundays were spent preparing for Monday classes. All I can remember is the endless studying and the fear of being unprepared in class. The pedagogy used in most classes was the Socratic method, which entailed being called upon to recite the case under study and enduring the endless questions from the professor that would follow.

Page 143 →The content of law courses and pedagogy differed significantly from my college experience, but it was all very exciting. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell revolutionized the study of law at Harvard by introducing the case method. Students studied law cases that were decided by judges with the objective of learning the evolutionary development of legal principles. That method of study challenged the analytical faculties of students and taught them to understand and apply the logic of legal decisions, based on case precedents. This methodology enabled students to try to predict the future course of the law. This dialectical process was how the common law of England was developed. This process of lawmaking was transported to the United States. It was important for students to study the development of legal institutions and to read English common law cases. The Property Law course was especially steeped in the study of English case law.

When I visited home over the Christmas holidays, my books were in tow. A classmate, John Jay Osborne, wrote a popular novel, The Paper Chase, about the unpleasantness of the first-year law school experience. The novel is about the interaction between a first-year law student and the feared and intimidating professor of Contracts and master of the Socratic method, Professor Charles W. Kingsfield. Many Harvard Law graduates believe that Professor Kingsfield was a composite of Contracts Professor Byse and Property Professor A. James Casner.

Professor Byse taught me Contract Law and had a lasting impact upon me. I recall the fear of being called upon in class to analyze the case being studied. After a year of study with Professor Byse, I wrote him a tribute at the end of my exam paper quoting one of Dag Hammarskjöld’s reflections. Professor Byse was touched by that tribute and was moved to leave his office while correcting exams to seek me out and express appreciation for my thoughtfulness.

Page 144 →Many years later, I taught Contract Law at my undergraduate alma mater, USC, as the first full-time African American law professor in its history. I modelled my course after the Socratic teaching style of Professor Byse. I wrote him and told him about my accomplishment, and his response was “keep spreading the gospel.” Over the years, I maintained a relationship with him, touching base when I was in Cambridge. Knowing my interest in legal education, in 1986, he sent me a copy of an article he authored titled “Fifty Years of Legal Education.” At the top of the paper, he affectionately wrote: “For Jim Bowers, one of my all-time favorite students. Clark Byse.” I loved that man.

Professor Byse’s success as a teacher was honored at a dinner and tribute at Harvard Law School, October 21, 1999. His teaching style and philosophy were described in the program:

Year after year, Professor Byse has demonstrated a deep professional devotion and care for his students inside and outside the classroom. His taunting manner is aimed at forcing his beloved students to think more clearly and be more specific so that they can succeed in law practice—and in life. Professor Byse believes that analysis, synthesis and communication are the most valuable tools he can pass on to his students.

I attended the dinner and spoke about how Professor Byse inspired my career and life. I thanked him for treating African Americans the same in class as any other student. His response, in typical Byse fashion, was: “Thanks, Jim. I did treat all of my students the same. I treated them like shit, but I treated them all the same.”

Roderick “Rod” Hills was another favorite. He was a visiting professor on sabbatical from his law firm, Munger, Tolles, Hills & Rickershauser, in Los Angeles. He clerked for Justice Stanley Reed on the US Supreme Court and was a successful labor lawyer. Rod taught me Collective Bargaining, a great course to which he brought a lot of practical experience from his active law practice. That wonderful Page 145 →student–teacher experience blossomed into a close friendship after law school.

He invited me to join his law firm in Los Angeles after graduation. I turned down the offer because my life was rooted in the East Coast; I couldn’t see myself living happily on the West Coast. Instead, I joined a law firm in Boston. We kept in touch over the years, and our paths crossed again during my third year of law teaching at USC.

Rod was very active in Republican Party politics. When Gerald Ford became president, he asked Rod to join him at the White House as Counsel to the President. During the final year of the Ford administration, Rod was asked to become chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and he asked me to join him.

I arrived at the SEC in June 1977, after finishing the semester at USC. As fate would have it, Rod and I never got a chance to work together because President Ford lost reelection to Jimmy Carter in November 1976. Rod left the SEC on the inauguration of President Carter in January 1977.

I decided to pursue the opportunity at the SEC although I was disappointed not to work with Rod. I had a wonderful two-year stint in the General Counsel Office under the leadership of Harvey Pitt, a brilliant lawyer who many years later was appointed chairman of the SEC. I worked with him on a US Supreme Court brief, my first experience assisting the preparation of a case before the high court. Years later, I would appear before the Supreme Court to move the admission of a group of Harvard trained lawyers to the Supreme Court bar.

I was admitted to the Law School under the so-called Harvard Plan designed to increase diversity in the university’s student body. The Harvard Plan was based upon the eighteenth and nineteenth century ideas of academic freedom propounded by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Page 146 →the great German philosopher and educator, and John Stuart Mill, the father of traditional liberalism. They believed that only when people of diverse backgrounds brought their lived experiences to the discussion could their ideas grow as they learned from one another. Mill advocated for the admission of Catholics, Jews, and members of other minority religions to Oxford and Cambridge, which had for centuries been limited to members of the Anglican Church.

The racial environment at the Law School when I entered was tolerable but not great. Out of a total of 600 students in the class of 1970 (my class), twenty-nine were Black, two were women, and three were African. Black students constituted about 5 percent of the class. The Classes of 1969 and 1968 respectively had seventeen and fifteen Black students, half as many as my class. Overall, in 1967, Harvard Law School had just over 3 percent Black students.

While the number of Black law students admitted has steadily increased over the decades, that progress is now threatened by the US Supreme Court’s 2023 landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, where the court held that race-conscious admissions policies to achieve educational diversity are unconstitutional.⁸ Notably, Harvard only took account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity. However, that limited use was of no concern to the super-conservative majority of the Supreme Court who were determined to eliminate affirmation action in college and university admissions.

Only one year after the court rendered its decision, the impact was being felt among the nation’s elite colleges and universities, and it was dramatic. For the 2024 entering undergraduate class, Amherst College’s Black student population fell from 11 to 3 percent, 15 to 5 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 to 9 percent at Brown University, and 20 to 12 percent at Columbia University.

Shockingly, the Black student enrollment at Harvard Law School fell from 7.7 to 3.4 percent (from forty-three to nineteen students), the lowest figure since 1965. However, in the 2025 entering class, Page 147 →Harvard Law’s admissions rate for Black students rebounded with fifty individuals enrolling. This increase was achieved by aggressive recruiting of high performing Black college graduates by the Harvard Black Law School Association and the Black alumni network. Notwithstanding Harvard’s uptick in admissions, most of the nation’s elite law schools, including the law schools at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia, saw a decline. Overall, the court’s decision has upended four decades of admission practices.⁹

During my years at the Law School, the Black students were a talented group. They graduated from a diverse selection of colleges that included Ivy League universities and colleges, small private colleges, state universities, and historically Black colleges. Black graduates have gone on to assume prominent roles in law and business, as judges, partners at major law firms, law professors, general counsel of corporations, chief executive officers (CEOs), and social activists. A leading graduate and philanthropist, Reginald Lewis, skillfully engineered a corporate takeover of Beatrice International Foods and became its CEO. Reggie donated the largest gift to the Law School at the time, and the International Law Center at the Law School bears his name. Two other graduates, Kenneth Chenault and Kenneth Frazier, became CEOs of American Express Company and Merck. And my good friend and classmate, Randall Robinson, founded the TransAfrica Forum, the research, educational and organizing institution, which contributed to the successful pressure effort to free Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa.

The Black students were a politically active group. The crowning achievement of the group was the formation of the Harvard Black Law School Association in 1968. Its biggest success was advocating for the hiring of the first Black professor to the Law School faculty.

Before his appointment to the law faculty, Derrick Bell had been a successful civil rights advocate for the government and private organizations. He was a staff lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice. In addition, he tried civil rights cases Page 148 →at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund with Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, and Constance Baker Motley. Derrick joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1969 and taught a course titled Race, Racism & American Law, the namesake of a seminal casebook on civil-rights litigation he published in 1970. I was fortunate to have taken his inaugural course during my third year. He was an able and hard-working scholar.

Derrick was the only Black professor who taught me during my entire law school studies, and for that I am most appreciative. I understood the importance of that years later when I was the only Black professor on the faculty at the USC School of Law.

In 1980, Derrick left the Law School to become dean at the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned his position at Oregon after five years in a dispute over the school’s failure to hire an Asian American woman to the faculty. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 1986 but took a leave of absence shortly thereafter because of the school’s failure to hire an African American woman to the faculty. Derrick eventually cut all ties with Harvard and became visiting professor at the New York University School of Law until his death. The last time I talked to Derrick was in 2008 at the Booth Theatre on Broadway for the inaugural performance of “Thurgood” featuring Lawrence Fishburne.

About every five years, the Black graduates of Harvard Law School gather for a three-day conference at the law school, called Celebration of Black Alumni. The conference provides an opportunity to showcase and celebrate professional success and to ponder and discuss issues that continue to affect Black lawyers. In addition, the Black graduates gather on special occasions to celebrate significant achievement. When Barack Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was elected President of the United States, the Black graduates hosted a reception in Washington a day before his inauguration. This was a memorable occasion because it gave me an opportunity to interact with some of the leading graduates of the Law School, Page 149 →including William “Bill” Coleman, an original member of the team that argued the landmark Brown v Board of Education case before the US Supreme Court; Elana Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, who was later appointed by President Obama to the US Supreme Court; and Robert “Bob” Bell, chief judge of the Maryland Supreme Court.

During my first year at Harvard, I resided in Story Hall, one of the Law School dorms. The dorm was spartan; each room was the size of an oversized walk-in closet with just enough space for a single bed, desk, and small closet. My best friend lived across the hall from me. Robert Bell was a very able African American who was at the forefront of civil rights as a student at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case, Bell v. Maryland, resulting from his protest activities.¹⁰ Page 150 →Bob skillfully climbed the legal ladder in Baltimore and ultimately became the chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, the highest court in Maryland.

My social life during my first year was exciting. I made many friends in class, in the dormitory, and while playing touch football for the Cardozo Club moot court team. Many became close friends and have remained so to this day. In addition, I met many interesting people at coffeehouses, especially the Blue Parrot (located in the Brattle Theatre complex) and Discotheque Nicole (located in a basement below the restaurant Henri IV on Winthrop Street), and at mixers at the Law School that attracted students from other Boston colleges. On Saturday evenings, Bob Bell, Mack Faison (a fellow law student), and I often frequented a discotheque in Kenmore Square (home of the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park), located under the giant citgo sign, called Sonny’s, where the popular Procol Harum recording, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” was played incessantly. One New Year’s Eve, Bob and I were in search of a party on Commonwealth Avenue during a blizzard. We never found the party and had to run through knee-deep snow to catch the last Green Line train back to the Park Street station.

During my second and third years, I resided at 24 Agassiz Street, where I lived the summer of 1967. It was a convenient location just off Linnaean Street, which intersects with Massachusetts Avenue. The Law School was about a mile south down Massachusetts Avenue. Two of my favorite eating places were situated en route—Tony’s sandwich shop with excellent pepper steak subs and the Acropolis Greek restaurant with a specialty lamb shish kabob dinner. Additionally, Radcliffe College, where I studied most of the time, was about a half mile east down Linnaean Street. While studying at Hilles Library at Radcliffe, I met many Cliffies at the rooftop café. I especially enjoyed the company of Jody Ashenhurst from Chicago, who was a pre-med student but also studied ornithology. She could execute many birdcalls, which fascinated me. She is now a physician in Chicago.

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One evening while at Hilles, a woman approached me with a camera, said I looked interesting, and asked to take a photo of me. Yielding to my vanity, I said yes. Two weeks later she reappeared and presented me with a copy of the photo. I was clad in my normal attire: corduroys with boots, gold turtleneck sweater and green Air Force jacket, given to me by my brother, Wally, while he was in the Air Force. To this day, the photo provides fond memories of my years at Harvard Law.

Nancy Sweezy, an accomplished potter, owned the house on Agassiz Street. In 1969, she became director of the historic potter community, Jugtown Pottery, near Seagrove, North Carolina. As a master potter, she created many innovative glazing techniques, wrote several books on the subject, and set up an apprenticeship program for students. Her second husband was famed Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, whose unlawful conviction and jailing spawned the Page 152 →landmark US Supreme Court case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire,¹¹ upholding the First Amendment right of freedom of expression and academic freedom.

I shared the third floor of the stately Cambridge house with three unique people—an Ethiopian (believed to be a part of the opposition to Haile Selassie), a woman who wrote travel articles for the Boston Globe, and an Englishman named Nicholas “Nick” Wheeler-Robinson. Nick was a doctoral student in Education. He was educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and had taken time off from his headmaster duties to do the necessary doctoral course work. Nick and I became close friends, often sipping sherry at the end of the day to stimulate good conversation. During our many conversations, Nick often talked about the game of cricket, which was new to me. Our rooming arrangement turned out to have spawned a lifelong friendship.

Page 153 →Years later, Nick encouraged me to explore his alma mater, Trinity College. During the summer of 2001, he arranged for me and my family to lodge at Trinity for a couple of days. It was a memorable experience. Trinity is probably the most intellectually versatile of the colleges at Cambridge, boasting some thirty-four Nobel laureates over the years in virtually every field. Whether strolling contemplatively through the Great Court, staring at the dominating frame of Henry VIII in the Hall, or beholding the magnificence of Wren Library, one appreciates the influence the college had upon the likes of Newton, Dryden, Byron, Tennyson, Rutherford, Vaughan Williams, and other luminaries who matriculated inside these hallowed walls. I felt that I had entered the temple of learning.

Becky and I stayed in the Judges’ Lodge, the ground floor of the Master’s Lodge. The accommodations were well-appointed and befitting a dignitary. The living area was steeped in the trappings of the English judiciary, with portraits of distinguished jurists adorning the walls. Lord Denman and Judge Nacnaughton were familiar to me through my legal studies at Harvard. King Henry VIII founded Trinity in 1546 and proclaimed it to be the royal college. It remains so to this day in important respects: the Crown appoints Trinity’s Master, the College flag is the royal flag of Edward III, and the Master’s Lodge is the residence of the King’s circuit judges when they visit Cambridge. This ancient privilege, dating from the reign of James I, is enjoyed by the judges by willing agreement of the College and not by legal right.¹² Nick recalled that when he was a student at Trinity, there were processions across the Great Court in honor of the visiting judges.

Neville stayed on the ground floor in Newton’s Staircase (room E 3) near the Great Gate. The rooms where Isaac Newton worked out the proofs of his great scientific discoveries (which he published as Principia Mathematica in 1687) are on the first floor (E 4). Neville, who was studying physics and mathematics at Harvard at the time, was then pouring over the Principia, likely the most Page 154 →significant scientific work of all time. William Thackeray and Lord Macaulay also lodged in Newton’s Staircase during their time at Trinity.¹³

After leaving Cambridge, we visited Nick at Pigotts. Before we set voyage to England, Nick had invited me to join him at a cricket Test match between England and Australia at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. As is invariably the case, no visit to Pigotts is complete without an engaging discussion about cricket. In his youth, Nick had been an avid cricketer who played for the Free Foresters Cricket Club, an amateur cricket club established in 1856 for players from the Midland counties. Nick bowled for Free Foresters and later for the Great Hampden Cricket Club (a few kilometers from his residence at Pigotts), where he was referred to as a “demonic metronomic bowler.” He gave me access to his respectable library of cricket tomes to research the game.

During my final year at law school, I met Judy while working in the financial aid office at the Law School. We had a warm, lengthy, and interesting relationship. We enjoyed eating at restaurants, ice skating at the Prudential Center, listening to classical music at the Gardner Museum, playing silly games, and traveling. Our favorite restaurant was the Acropolis, a Greek eatery on Mass Avenue around the corner from Agassiz Street. Judy was a free spirit.

Her parents had a house in Wilmot, New Hampshire. We frequently traveled there to escape the hustle and bustle of Cambridge. We also took trips to Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, and Montreal. Judy’s parents owned a house on Chappy.

Judy’s father was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and worked at the Harvard Health Services. He was a lovely man with a gruff personality. He encouraged my brother, Wally, to attend medical school. His best friend was Dr. Winthrop Sands, a physician at the Dartmouth College Mary Hitchcock Health Service. They were neighbors at Wilmot and Chappy.

Page 155 →Winthrop Sands was a colorful person. His savoir faire exhibited itself in understated ways, whether speaking about wines or politics. He had a quiet demeanor, but when he expressed a point of view, he was emphatic in his delivery. I recall a conversation in which he berated a congressman he knew well with a put-down, comparing him to “a cigarette butt in a urinal in Grand Central Station.”

Winthrop Sands’s grandmother was Anne Harriman Vanderbilt. He obviously had wealth as measured by his houses and lifestyle. I got to know Dr. Sands and his wife well and was invited often with Judy to their Wilmot house. The Wilmot estate was generous with a large dining room, indoor swimming pool, sauna, outdoor swimming pond, and guest house. They held an annual New Year’s Eve black-tie party with dozens of guests. The one I attended in 1971 degenerated fast. After many drinks, the group shed their formal wear, baked themselves in the sauna, rolled in the snow outside, and then jumped into the heated pool. I don’t know when I’ve had such naughty fun.

One person stands out from that memorable New Year’s Eve weekend—Severn Duvall, head of the English Department at Washington and Lee University. Severn was a courtly gentleman with a pronounced mustache. He wore his spectacles below his eyes, resting them on the lower part of his nose. He taught Southern literature and poetry. He was educated at the University of Virginia and earned his PhD at Princeton. Before settling at Washington and Lee, Severn taught at Princeton and Dartmouth College, where he presumably met Dr. Sands.

Severn was a great recounter. He had star power and everyone in attendance at the New Year’s Eve gathering wanted to talk with him. He especially had a roving eye for the ladies. Severn pioneered the teaching of African American authors at Washington and Lee long before the university admitted Black students. He brought to the university a stellar lineup of prominent authors, including US Poet Page 156 →Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1972, Judy and I decided to get married. I gave her a beautiful engagement ring—a ruby surrounded by diamonds. But the marriage never happened; Judy called it off about three weeks before the wedding date. Wedding gifts were coming in and other preparations had already been made. I was crestfallen and my mother was really concerned about my emotional condition. Later I admired Judy for having the guts to call off the wedding; she recognized that she was getting married for the wrong reasons based upon, I supposed, some long-standing family issues. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure why I was getting married. The day we got the marriage license, I was so unhappy when I should have been joyful. Had we gone ahead with the marriage, I am convinced it would not have lasted.

My lasting memory of Judy is encapsulated in an inscription in the cookbook she gave me, With a Jug of Wine: “To James James on his 23d free and irresponsible birthday Sweet J.B.E.” Underneath the inscription she lifted a few paragraphs from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Paul’s mother implored him: “And you ought to be happy, you ought to try to be happy, to live and be happy. How could I bear to think your life wouldn’t be a happy one.” “James James” is taken from the poem “Disobedience” by A.A. Milne. Judy threw back at me my well-worn lament: “All I want is to be free and irresponsible.” I’m not sure what I was trying to communicate back then. Maybe I was looking for some form of happiness I could not find.