In the Shadow of the Law

by Kermit Roosevelt

In the Shadow of the Law is an impressive first novel – with equal emphasis on both adjectives. Kermit Roosevelt’s legal coming of age story is quite impressive in its perceptive and witty insights into the post-law-school life of big firm associates. But it also suffers from the show-offyness of an aspiring artiste strutting his stuff. Roosevelt, who worked for several law firms before becoming an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, knows his subject, but he can’t seem to stop himself from using SAT words that few readers will understand without a dictionary (“lagniappe,” “susurrus,” “velleity”). He also loves metaphors and similes a bit too much, especially those involving the military. His characters don’t simply shave, they engage in “brutal hand-to-hand combat with the razor.” Their income is not merely subject to taxes; it passes through “the gauntlets of state and federal taxation like an infantry column through enfilading fire.” His character, “armored in righteousness” retreats to the “fortress of solitude” after completing “the job [which] was his armor.” He rarely misses an opportunity to dazzle with several pretentious words when one simple one will do. But the detours to Webster are well worth it, because Roosevelt understands the culture of the law firm and takes us inside its gilded cage in this well-crafted, character-driven novel.

Roosevelt’s fictional law firm is peopled by soulless suits struggling to outdo each other in racking up billable hours for heartless corporations. The partners, either unmarried or divorced, live alone and share a jealous mistress – that abstraction called “the law” and its corporeal embodiment, the institutional law firm that is fed by a parade of interchangeable associates who earn their inflated salaries by padding their time sheets. (The trick is that the smallest billable unit is the quarter hour, so an associate - - by working in 5 minute units -- can bill 12 clients per hour, each for a quarter of an hour). The immortal law firm endures by eating its young and adapting to the ever-shifting ethics and business practices of the second oldest profession.

The plot centers around several of these young associates, fresh out of elite law schools and prestigious clerkships, confronting their Faustian bargain: humongous salaries and the slim possibility of attaining partnership Nirvana in exchange for horrendous hours and the prospect of a mid-40’s coronary. The occasional excitement of a pro bono stint on behalf of a probably guilty killer on death row breaks the tedium of thousands of hours of pro-malo work on behalf of predatory corporate clients. Prohibited by sexual harassment policy from dating subordinates or supervisors within the firm, precluded by the 18 hour work-day from meeting anyone outside the firm, these legal eunuchs count as fun the occasional firm cocktail party or the early morning jog to work.

There are no heroes at Roosevelt’s firm, only compromisers trying to get by without completely selling out. Nor are any of the characters in the ensemble cast of this drama particularly loveable, though each has some admirable qualities that emerge at critical times in the story. The plot is somewhat trite. (One small plot point seems to borrow from - - or pay homage to - - Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent: “Turned out he’d smuggled out semen during a [prison] visit, had a female friend, you know, insert it and then claim to be raped.” Sound familiar?) The main plot line involves a terrible industrial accident which results in a class action lawsuit against one of the firm’s major clients. We’ve seen that before. Some of the associates gravitate toward the big-buck litigation growing out of the explosion, while others take on what appears to be a hopeless death penalty case. The denouement of both cases are clever, if somewhat contrived: a convoluted legal-financial scheme reveals a sordid conspiracy by corporate malfeasers, while a computer glitch exposes an equally sordid DNA cover-up by unscrupulous prosecutors. The associates may not be heroes, but compared to the corporate and prosecutorial types, they are St. Thomas More.

Why then do I recommend this book? -- and I do, with real enthusiasm. Precisely because it doesn’t glamorize its subject. Roosevelt’s gritty portrayal of the devolution of bright-eyed and colorful young associates to dim-eyed and grey middle-aged partners (no one seems to make it to their golden years) rings true of too many corporate law factories that have turned what used to be called a “learned profession” into a service industry that does little more than help the super rich get even richer. This is a writer who knows the world of which he writes. He has experienced the cynicism, careerism, and opportunism of the zero-sum pyramid scheme called “making partner,” though from the somewhat rarified prospective of a Supreme Court clerk who has become an associate only to gain experience for academia. (One of his best characters fits this apparently autobiographic profile.)

My favorite character in Roosevelt’s old-line waspy law firm, with its overtly “protestant ethics,” is the Jewish litigator (surprise! surprise!) Harold Fineman, who had “grown up in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn” as an orthodox Jew. (I wondered how a Roosevelt, presumably more familiar with Hyde Park than Borough Park, managed to capture the ambiance of this orthodox Jewish neighborhood in which I grew up, until I noticed in his acknowledgments that he had read and “found helpful” my autobiographical account of that neighborhood in Chutzpah.) Having first tried to rid himself of all traces of his Brooklyn accent and his Jewish folkways, Fineman comes to realize their tactical advantages: “Once again, Harold changed. He strapped a cheap plastic watch over the sleeve of his jacket and let his curls bloom. He abandoned the hard won precision of diction; he turned himself into one of the rude uncles he’d promised never to become. And it worked.” But it worked too well, robbing him of his past, his present and – as it turns out – his future. He dies trying to keep up with a beautiful young associate out on a jog. Fineman’s non-denominational, non-personal, and non-moving funeral – with no friends, no family, only associates, partners and a non-denominational minister who never met the dearly departed – illustrates what one of the associates had previously described: “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.”

The redeeming quality of Roosevelt’s utterly realistic characters is that they know exactly what they are doing. Unlike Faust, they are not tricked or even seduced by the princes of darkness in their gentlemanly garb and corner offices. They step on to the treadmill with their eyes wide open and their antennae firmly in place. They, like the author who created them, understand the world of back-stabbing and sucking up into which they are entering. I recognize these characters. They are my students, just a few years after graduation. Even while in law school these days, students know what awaits them in the big firms. (I can imagine them reading this novel and smiling as they wait to be interviewed by the hiring partner of one of these firms.) Why then do these very smart young men and women willingly, even eagerly, embark on this road to perdition? Even a novelist as shrewd and insightful as Kermit Roosevelt cannot answer that question. Or maybe he did answer it after all: he himself left the “excellent” law firms for whom he worked to become an assistant professor of law. I can’t wait for his next novel about the dog-eat-dog climb to tenure at an elite law school.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, Basic Books 2004