Brush With the Law
by Robert Byrnes and Jaime Marquart
Renaissance Books

Smoking crack, playing high-stakes poker and womanizing become as entertaining as an entire civil procedure course in the new Ivy League tell-all, "Brush With the Law."

Robert Byrnes and Jaime Marquart are two guys who feel that law school is but a joke. "Dumb people go to Harvard Law School" is the premise. After all, the authors say, just look at us. After learning everything they claim they need to learn in law school in just nine days, they spend their remaining years in laziness and debauchery.

Unfortunately, explaining this takes them 332 pages of sitting around getting high, all chronicled with the respectful detail of a presidential biography, and advertised on the blinding orange front cover as "The True Story of Law School Today at Harvard and Stanford." Yet everything you really need to learn from "A Brush With The Law" you can garner from reading the inside of the book jacket. Dumb people not only go to Havard Law School, but also get unedited Word documents published as exposés.

Byrnes and Marquart met at a law firm and decided to write a book together about their experiences. Marquart is a Texan who plays up the "rube goes to Harvard" shtick to mildly amusing effect in an early chapter, "Unsophisticated Parties." You would probably prefer his company to that of Byrnes, a tattooed Boston speechwriter, bike messenger and narcissist who heads to Stanford Law after running out of women to have sex with in Massachusetts. You've met people like this before, just as unimaginative as any conformist in an institution, but striking the pose of the sneering outsider.

So score one point against the admissions departments of Harvard and Stanford, but anyone expecting to find a dissection of hypocritical, dysfunctional or incompetent institutions will be let down by "A Brush With the Law," in which the authors are too strung-out to, say, sneak into a professor's study and get inside his mind (like in The Paper Chase), or attend office hours, or become familiar with the names of faculty members, or remain lucid and on campus long enough to take in much of anything.

Instead, what you get for your $24.95 is high-fiving composite character names like "Dirk Pussinger" for a law partner the two dislike, and lengthy tracts of print given over to what you wouldn't expect to find in a book Hunter S. Thompson calls "a classic of degenerate humor": schmaltz.

In addition to anthologizing about 20K of love e-mails between Byrnes and his future wife, the gist of it being that he's "a diamond in the canopy of stars" who awakens her soul, the book reprints advice verbatim from toked-out law student/prophets, who say things like:

What you do today is all about what happened yesterday ... That lost hope is the phantom — lost but still alive. You either go out and try to recover it or pack your life with distractions.

There is even a scene similar to one in Dave Eggers' memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," in which a woman Byrnes hoped to sleep with dies suddenly and he's plunged into, you guessed it, Realizations about Life. "I wasn't sold on a dull life of perfect caution where any untempted fate — pancreatic blob, cranial explosion — strikes you dead in your boredom," he ejaculates.

What you will remember from this book isn't the tiresome hijinks involving prostitutes, tuition lost in card games, crystal meth cooking sessions, bike riding as a metaphor for life or even the orgies during which Byrnes muses on gripping "the knob ... the grotesque ominousness" of another person's gonads. It is the poor quality of the writing, which has been compiled with a thoughtless kind of awfulness, as if you, the reader, don't exist. It is inconceivable that Hunter S. Thompson slogged through 29 chapters of this offal.

As for the book's claim to lay bare the "True Story of Law School Today" — by revealing that the stupid and amoral make it to the top in our society, or that the legal profession isn't as honorable or scholarly as it used to be, these boors are scooping nobody. But they will provide a good counterargument next time your parents tell you, "You'll meet such interesting people if you go to law school."

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)