He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily.
“In this class, you will of course learn the mechanics of contracts—how one is created, how one is broken, how binding one is and how to unbind yourself from one—but you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair—and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing—than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”
He had been thrilled by Harold’s speech, and in the coming weeks, by how differently Harold thought, by how he would stand at the front of the room like a conductor, stretching out a student’s argument into strange and unimaginable formations. Once, a fairly benign discussion about the right to privacy—both the most cherished and the foggiest of constitutional rights, according to Harold, whose definition of contracts often ignored conventional boundaries and bounded happily into other fields of law—had led to an argument between the two of them about abortion, which he felt was indefensible on moral grounds but necessary on social ones. “Aha!” Harold had said; he was one of the few professors who would entertain not just legal arguments but moral ones. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality? Is there such a point? I’m not convinced there is.” But he had hung in, and the class had stilled around them, watching the two of them debate back and forth.
Harold was the author of three books, but it was his last, The American Handshake: The Promises and Failures of the Declaration of Independence, that had made him famous. The book, which he had read even before he met Harold, was a legal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence: Which of its promises had been kept and which had not, and were it written today, would it be able to withstand trends in contemporary jurisprudence? (“Short answer: No,” read the Times review.) Now he was researching his fourth book, a sequel of sorts to The American Handshake, about the Constitution, from a similar perspective.
“But only the Bill of Rights, and the sexier amendments,” Harold told him when he was interviewing him for the research assistant position.
“I didn’t know some were sexier than others,” he said.
“Of course some are sexier than others,” said Harold. “Only the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth are sexy. The rest are basically the dross of politics past.”
“The thirteenth is garbage?” he asked, enjoying himself.
“I didn’t say it was garbage,” Harold said, “just not sexy.”
“But I think that’s what dross means.”
Harold sighed dramatically, grabbed the dictionary off his desk, flipped it open, and studied it for a moment. “Okay, fine,” he said, tossing it back onto a heap of papers, which slid toward the edge of the surface. “The third definition. But I meant the first definition: the leftovers, the detritus—the remains of politics past. Happy?”
“Yes,” he said, trying not to smile.
He began working for Harold on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons and evenings, when his course load was lightest—on Tuedays and Thursdays he had afternoon seminars at MIT, where he was getting his master’s, and worked in the law library at night, and on Saturdays he worked in the library in the morning and in the afternoons at a bakery called Batter, which was near the medical college, where he had worked since he was an undergraduate and where he fulfilled specialty orders: decorating cookies and making hundreds of sugar-paste flower petals for cakes and experimenting with different recipes, one of which, a ten-nut cake, had become the bakery’s best seller. He worked at Batter on Sundays as well, and one day Allison, the bakery’s owner, who entrusted him with many of the more complicated projects, handed him an order form for three dozen sugar cookies decorated to look like various kinds of bacteria. “I thought you of all people might be able to figure this out,” she said. “The customer’s wife’s a microbiologist and he wants to surprise her and her lab.”