No discussion of Law School Life is complete without first confronting a small, aggressive subspecies of first-year law student affectionately referred to, the world over, as "the gunner." Their numbers are small but most everyone has their own gunner story to tell. Law school administrators, it seems, have become adept and spreading them across the sections of an incoming class like so many air marshals across an airline's fleet. Air marshals are equipped with handcuffs, handguns and a force continuum that permits the unannounced wielding of death. Gunners are armed with opinions, questions and, on the right day, the capacity to test even the most hopeful person's will to live.
At first glance, gunners are no different than any other breed of law student. They're generally personable, they drink coffee, they fret about exams. A closer look, however, reveals a pair of unique physical and environmental traits. First is an over-developed deltoid region, undoubtedly the product of extended periods with an arm raised anxiously skyward. Second is acrophobia. That is to say, gunners are afraid of heights. How else does one explain their insistence upon sitting in the first two rows of seats? I'm fairly certain enthusiasm is not inversely proportional to altitude.
Like most people I know, I'm conflicted about gunners. On one hand, we need them. They keep the professor distracted. The guy sitting to my left isn't going to beat his best time on the expert level of Minesweeper if he has to look up periodically in order to avoid the appearance of a complete lack of engagement. And you can be certain, with the intermittent connectivity of our wireless network, that the girl down and to the right won't be able to order that belted cardigan sweater before Nordstrom runs out if she has to put down her credit card and do the same.
More importantly, though, gunners keep class discussion moving; not moving forward, mind you, but moving nonetheless. The bane of many, they are a godsend for the few who managed to get through but half of the day's assigned reading because Thirsty Thursday somehow turned into Thirsty Early Friday Morning. They expertly retrace their steps with elaborate hypotheticals and reintroduce old concepts for the sake of their own personal clarification, seemingly unaware that each class meeting is a segment of a longer trajectory whose termination point is preparedness for the final exam.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes a gunner has something relevant or useful to contribute...even a broken clock is right twice a day. This fortuitous exception, however, doesn't necessarily invalidate the essential truth of the rule. The reality is a motivated gunner can keep an entire class in a holding pattern for upwards of 15 minutes with just one question. Their facility in this regard leaves no doubt in my mind that there is a position at Newark Air Traffic Control for each and every one of them. To the layperson, this probably sounds like hyperbole. To the now-wizened 1L, I assure you, this sounds like last Tuesday.
To be clear, this isn't an indictment of those students who participate regularly in class discussion and contribute analysis or fact-recitation that is consistently on point. Those students--of whom there are many--are the backbone of a vital, successful student body. Gunners are the pinky toe. Everyone accepts that we have them, but if they didn't exist shoes would fit A LOT better.
The conflict with respect to gunners arises, ultimately, when the utility (to the few) of their ambitious-yet-distracting tendencies is outweighed by mounting frustration (of the many). When that frustration reaches critical mass, groans cascade down from the back rows of the classroom and a flurry of typing builds across the ranks. A quick glance at their computer screens reveals phrases like "ENOUGH ALREADY!!1!" and "PLEASE SHOOT ME" flashing conspicuously in Instant Messenger dialog boxes in various colors of bolded, 26pt font.
Mark, 29, a graduate of Penn Law, still gets heated when he thinks about a gunner from his 1L year they took to calling 'Secretariat.' On the first day of Con Law, the professor asked the class what the Constitution meant to them. It was a fairly innocuous question meant, undoubtedly, to get a feel for the students' familiarity with the subject matter. Secretariat, seated in front of course, raised his hand eagerly and, in an attempt to enlighten his fellow law students, informed them that "the Constitution is...what constitutes us." His revelation was met with deafening silence. I asked Mark if anyone laughed and he said, "oddly, no. We were too stunned to laugh. We could tell by the sincerity in his voice that he was completely serious."
Mark had a seemingly endless supply of Secretariat stories. He admits that some of them are uproariously funny, but, for him, only retrospectively. I asked him why that was and he said, simply, "Secretariat was a Yes Butter." I hadn't the slightest clue what he was talking about. Mark took a deep breath and laid it out for me.
"You know how every case has a holding and an essential set of facts?" I nodded. "And you know how most of the time your professor has to kind of walk you through the court's reasoning and the implications of the holding? Well no matter which area of constitutional or property law was being covered during a given class, in the middle of the professor's explanation, Secretariat would interrupt with 'yes, but...'"
What followed, according to Mark, was always a rambling, long-winded misappropriation of the dissenting opinion or the basic principles of logic. Now, I'll admit, I haven't been in law school very long, but I'm pretty sure when the person at the front of the room in the business suit, with the alphabet soup after her name and the CV longer than a Faulkner sentence, tells you what the holding means, you can be sure she knows what she is talking about.
The coup de grace--and the incident from which he derived his nickname--came during a review session for the Property final. They were working through possessory estates, talking about equity, when Secretariat insisted to the professor that the word "equity" was actually derived from the Latin "equine"...as in the horse. The professor called his assertion an affront to common sense. The class snickered its collective disapproval, but Secretariat was undeterred. He persisted with his argument even going so far as to declare as dispositive of his claim the fact that the two words shared the same first four letters.
The entire class booed him. He kept talking, so they booed him louder. "It was the funniest and saddest thing I had ever seen," Mark sputtered out between gasps of breath and fits of laughter. Secretariat--his real name was Harold--managed to graduate and find a decent job, but not before spending 2 ½ years on the business-end of John Elway and Mr. Ed jokes
In the end, gunners are like anything else in life. They are what you make of them. You can let them compel you to commit battery. You can let their inane questions--'what if the Constitution never happened?'--drive you to distraction. You can ignore them. Or you can embrace them for those instances in which they fill the void created by the natural timidity of first year law students. After all, timid or not, when you have a fantasy football roster to tinker with, the only thing more dangerous than 90 minutes of Gunner Perspective is 90 minutes of tortured silence. That's when the cold calling starts, and no one wants that.
Posted by nils at 9:17 AM