We met her last Friday at a West Village coffee shop filled with well-heeled bohemians sipping mid-morning lattes. The wistful Southern brunette rested one elbow on the table, a delicate engagement ring catching the sunlight. "I thought that at least if I was going to be changing diapers at the age of 28, it would be my own kids'."

She graduated with a degree in history from a Virginia college and thought about becoming a teacher, but her dad pushed both of his daughters to get law degrees, advising them that a J.D. is always good to have.

Two generations of liberal arts majors have followed the same advice, pouring themselves by the thousands into the corporate-law grinder that began with admission to a three-year program, hopefully top-tier, and ended seven or eight years later with a partnership at a top New York firm or a soft landing as an in-house counsel.

Never mind the gargantuan law-school debt and the gruesome hours, the deadening due diligence and shameless rainmaking. You were in six-figure land from the word go, assured by your late 30s of a two-bedroom co-op, a summer share in the Hamptons and good private schools for the children. Pay your dues. Collect the hours. Wait your turn. It would come. It had for so many others for decades in New York.

Not so for the babies of the '80s, coming of legal age during the greatest upheaval of the profession in memory. The last predictable path to prosperity in New York City is gone, as dead as traditional investment banking.

When our young J.D. arrived here from the University of South Carolina law school during the brutal economic freeze, she found a job at "the sketchiest firm ever," made up of lawyers fired or left unemployed when their firms went under during the recession. She knew the end was coming because one week they told her: "We can't pay you anymore."

Her experience isn't typical, she noted, because she wasn't especially passionate about being a lawyer. Now she nannies part-time in Tribeca. Her fiancé, who went to a more highly regarded law school, found a job at a prestigious midtown firm and survived the most recent round of layoffs.

Like other bright young New Yorkers with two sets of letters after their names, they're getting by, just not in the ways they thought they would be. Our young J.D. sometimes walks by the cluster of downtown Manhattan courthouses on her nannying rounds. "I see the lawyers with their binders and I think, 'I could be doing that.'"

Lawyers in New York City are handmaidens to the masters of the universe. "We're just the minions who paper up the deals for the millionaire hedge fund people," said David Lat, a Yale Law School grad and founding editor of the Above the Law blog, describing the mentality. "You can be a partner at Skadden, and still be a piker in this town." 

But in the past 25 years, as investment banking became high-stakes gambling, law remained a civilized pursuit. By unspoken agreement, grads from good schools would make partner within seven or eight years, or the firm would make sure they landed a job at a midsize shop or as an in-house counsel for a respectable corporation.

"That social contract has changed," said Steven Molo, a former litigation partner at Wall Street firm Shearman & Sterling, who left to start a litigation boutique. Now, he said, the thinking of a young associate is to stay for a few years and "make as much money as you can in the short term."

The sacred apprenticeship model broke down in the past decade, as law firms swelled with dozens more associates. The average number of lawyers at a major New York firm nearly doubled, from 233 to 455, between 1984 and 2008, according to data provided by William Henderson, a professor of law at the University of Indiana. The number of equity partners, meanwhile, only creeped upward, from 72 to 99. Meanwhile, at the top 50 largest American law firms, average annual profits for partners grew five times between 1984 and 2006, from $309,000 per partner to $1.5 million. A very lucky few indeed make partner these days.

But the armies of young hopefuls were sustained by steadily rising six-figure salaries straight out of school, paid for by hours billed to the booming finance industry (starting salaries for first-year associates would reach $160,000 during the recent boom). As long as corporations and banks raked in billions, no one questioned legal bills in the millions. Now they're starting to ask: "Do I really need to pay an Ivy League grad in a prestigious midtown office to check my contract for commas?"

New York law firms are in a painful contraction, firing people in large numbers for the first time. More than 15,000 people, including nearly 6,000 attorneys, were laid off from major U.S. firms between January 2008 and November 2010, according to the grimly fascinating Web site Law Shucks.

Meanwhile, overall U.S. law schools have kept growing-at least until this year, when applications dropped by 11.5 percent, according the Law School Admission Council.

A 3L in the middle of his class at N.Y.U. said the career services office told him that more than 50 of the roughly 300 people in his year seeking private-firm jobs were still looking for work only months before graduation. "I think they have to look at themselves," he said of the school, "And say, 'We can't keep letting in this many people and charging them $50,000 a year when we can't guarantee them jobs anymore.'"

The school declined to comment, and it's worth noting that more students are likely to find jobs in the months leading up to and after graduation. "I don't think J. Edgar Hoover could nail down solid numbers on this," said another N.Y.U. law student, who graduated in 2010 and estimated that 20 of her friends didn't have secure jobs (though some have found work since).

She's bounced from working in a congressman's office to an internship at a nonprofit, with a stipend from the law school that expires next month. "I turned down a scholarship" at a less prestigious school, she said. "Everyone said, 'Don't worry; you'll pay it back in four years.'"

Stephen Younger, president of the New York State Bar Association, calls this crop of young associates "the lost generation."

The Observer got an early glimpse of the association's 112-page report on the future of the profession. "We are an advocate for the profession," Mr. Younger said, "but we have to sound a wake-up call for our members."

The report cites several cataclysmic shifts: swelling numbers of first-year associates; technology that can do what young lawyers once did; outsourcing of legal work (often to India); and clients' demand for more accountable billing.

Other senior lawyers blame it on the kids these days, who want cushy salaries but aren't willing to work 75-hour weeks. "So it failed their expectations of narcissism and entitlement," said Scott Greenfield, a local defense attorney, who has a blog called Simple Justice. "All these low-self-esteemed tea cups want $160,000 jobs laid at their feet and don't want to have to come into work. Now the promise of a wonderful life isn't being fulfilled."

When Mr. Greenfield graduated from New York Law School in 1982, he said the job market wasn't great, but he apprenticed himself to a senior attorney. In his field, criminal defense, he said there's still plenty of demand for young lawyers in small firms and solo practices. But: "They want the big-buck practice," he said. "They don't want to do what they call 'shit law.'"

For those who flee the city in search of better career prospects and maybe a few hours a week of free time, the path is hardly easier. "Typically, you got recruited; you were taken
care of," said a 27-year-old second-year associate at a firm in Stamford, Conn., who's already been sent out to networking events to pass around his business card to potential clients. "They wouldn't start pressuring you to get clients until your sixth or seventh year down the road. Now they're saying, 'Why aren't you getting clients?'"

Or as a 2008 N.Y.U. grad, who moved back to Alabama after he lost his job at a New York firm, said of the alternatives: "It's like telling someone to go be on an Arena Football League practice squad. You get beat up like a football player, but it's not the same job."

Experts, including the bar association in some cases, have called on firms to reevaluate hourly billing and reduce the number of first-year associates; meanwhile, law schools need to let in fewer students and give them a more honest picture of the job market.

But getting born winners to take stock of the losses isn't easy.

"I don't know that if we were to flick a switch and the economy were to pick up whether we would see any lessons applied there," said Mr. Molo, the former partner at a huge Wall Street firm. "People would still be hiring 140 associates."

He recently formed a boutique litigation firm, MoloLamken, which has grown to 13 lawyers and in 2010 argued three cases before the Supreme Court-and won each of them. With its model of flexible billing and significant mentoring, his firm could be a model, but he's not convinced others will follow.

"Many people would view what we did in the short term as an economically irrational act," he said. With partners at major law firms making in the seven figures, he said, "what holds a lot of people back is just inertia."

The army of young cannibals, raised on whole wheat bread and pop psychology, has other plans. "If I could work 60 hours a week and get weekends off, I never would have left," said a 28-year-old who spent a few years at one of the city's top handful of firms but recently left to work for a hedge fund. "I know people who have had three kids and have never been at the birthday of any of their kids." 

lkusisto@observer.com

But always walking one step behind Paterson now is his own éminence grise, Charles O'Byrne, an extremely intelligent, well-connected, tough and reclusive former Jesuit priest who as the governor's chief of staff will be one of the most powerful players in New York government. When the Spitzer governorship fell under the weight of the recent sensational sex scandal, Mr. O'Byrne became the gatekeeper of the new regime in Albany.

In a city of colorful resumes, Mr. O'Byrne's stands out. He abandoned a promising career in law to seek formation as a diocesan Catholic priest and, later, a Jesuit. At times, his chief parishioners seemed to be the Kennedy family, to whom he became a confidant after befriending Stephen Smith Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, in law school.

But within Jesuit circles, Mr. O'Byrne is the consummate "ambitioning prelate," who left the Order and the church and published a 4,000-word piece in a 2002 issue of Playboy in which he wrote about "the fundamental dishonesty of the church’s leadership."

"I became aware that there was sex all around me—including relationships between Jesuits," he wrote. "Seminary life was hypocritical."

That has earned him a good deal of resentment among Jesuits.

"His leaving was not good," one Jesuit priest, who would not allow his name to be used, said. "He left with a certain amount of contentiousness that left a lot of resentment on the part of Jesuits."

Pointing out that the three traditional vows of Jesuits are poverty, chastity and obedience, the priest said: "He was very ambitious, and that ambition sort of goes against our obedience."

And yet it served Cardinal Richelieu just fine.

Born in what is today St. Luke's Hospital in New York, to a father who taught in New York public schools and a mother who worked as a psychologist, Mr. O'Byrne, 48, spent his first years in Manhattan and Staten Island before moving to Oceanport in New Jersey at the age of five. He attended Red Bank high School, off the Navesink River on the Jersey Shore, and after graduating in 1977, he attended Columbia University, earning his degree in 1981.

During college, he took a summer job in the New Jersey Attorney General's office, and at 22, became acting superintendent of elections and acting commissioner of registration in Monmouth County. In 1984 he earned his law degree, also from Columbia, where he and Mr. Smith Jr. became good friends.

His first job out of law school was a corporate litigator for the white-shoe firm Rosenman & Colin, but after four years there, O'Byrne found a different vocation.

He briefly attended Saint John Neumann Residence and Hall, a sort of preparatory school for seminary under the Archdiocese of New York. The school usually acts as a training ground for potential seminarians who lack a college degree or enough philosophical or theological credits. Mr. O'Byrne, who majored in history with a concentration in the medieval and Renaissance periods at Columbia, and whom legislators have known to bring Aristotle into his political vernacular, seemed to have been ready.

Perhaps suspicious of his Ivy League pedigree, the school officials sent him to teach a year in the South Bronx. He did. He wrote about the experience in Playboy.

"During my training I taught at a Catholic girls' high school in the South Bronx," he wrote. "My students were streetwise. They were heroes to me, trying to make something of their lives against unbelievable odds. Most of them were sexually active, by their own accounts. At that time, the rate of HIV infection among babies born at Lincoln Hospital, a stone’s throw from the school, was increasing rapidly. I chose to do for my students what the nuns in my school had done for me. I told them that if they were going to have sex, to make sure they did it safely."

Despite, or maybe because of, his teaching in the South Bronx, Mr. O'Byrne was asked to leave the seminary.

In the article, he explained it this way: "I quickly learned some harsh truths. Many of my classmates in the New York archdiocesan system were exceptionally narrow-minded, and some were out-and-out bigots who made offensive remarks about Jews and Hispanics, among others, all the while offering pious phrases about Jesus. I protested, but nothing happened. I protested some more, and then told a friend what was going on. My friend wrote to John Cardinal O'Connor and urged him to investigate what sounded like officially approved hate crimes. With reason to fear a media scandal, the archdiocese pretended to discipline the seminary superior who had coddled the bigots, but in reality it merely shuffled him off to a cushy job. I was expelled from the seminary."

When asked for comment about Mr. O'Byrne's version of these events, Joseph Zwilling, the longtime spokesman for the New York Archdiocese, said: "His description of the people in the Neumann program and the program itself is certainly not consistent with the people I know in the program and the priests who emerged from it."

In any case, Mr. O'Byrne sought a different environment.

In 1989, he attended Saint Andrew Hall, the Jesuit Novitiate in Syracuse, for his primary formation as a Jesuit. Two years later, he followed the traditional path to formation by completing his "First Step" of studies at Loyola in Chicago, which he completed in just one year. For the Regency stage of his vocational education, which is essentially a break from studies to work in the field full time, Mr. O'Byrne accepted the invitation of the president of St. Peter's College to work as an assistant.

"Usually," said one Jesuit priest, "your regency work is teaching in a Catholic high school."

Rev. James Keenan, a pastor at the Nativity Parish on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, who used to serve on the college's board of trusteess, said he remembered Mr. O'Byrne.

"He was very easygoing," said Fr. Keenan, one of the few Jesuits to describe Mr. O'Byrne as anything other than driven and ambitious. "He was interested in helping kids, he was interested in administration."

Fr. Keenan also remembered his prestigious friends.

"His contacts with the Kennedys go back to his school days," he said.

On the day a jury acquitted Stephen Smith's brother, William Kennedy Smith, of rape in 1991, Mr. O'Byrne, then a seminarian, attended mass with the family and spent the day in the courtroom.

Mr. O'Byrne went on to seminary at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge in 1994, and some Jesuits remember his time there as somewhat confounding. He was clearly brilliant, several Jesuit priests said, and determined and a hard worker. But he seemed to some too eager to please.

"When he was up at Weston, he had the reputation of being part of the orthodoxy police, theologically, making sure the teachers were really teaching the party line and all that stuff," said the Jesuit priest who had characterized Mr. O'Byrne as ambitious. "Charles was seen on that part of the culture wars."

While Mr. O'Byrne seemed to take to the conservatism that swept American Catholicism under Pope John Paul II, he also kept one foot in the secular world. Even as he double-majored in two theological disciplines at Weston, he worked as a popular teaching fellow at Harvard University with Robert Coles, the Pulitzer-prize winning author and child psychiatrist of the series of books "Children of Crisis," and acted as Harvard Law School's chaplain.

After completing his studies, he returned to New York, where he served as a deacon at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan and worked towards a PhD at Columbia in American history. In 1996 he married JFK Jr. to Carolyn Bessette in South Carolina.

In 1996 he was ordained a priest. His supposed orthodoxy to the priesthood did not last long. After doing assorted parish work, and then, in 1999, leading mourners in a funeral mass for John F.Kennedy Jr. after he died in a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard, he left the order. He apparently investigated but ultimately decided not to apply for the process of incardination into the New York Archdiocese.

"We do not discuss or confirm or deny matters involving individuals and priests or personnel decisions," said Mr. Zwilling.

Within about five years of his ordination, he had removed his collar and left the priesthood.

"Charles O’Byrne entered the Society of Jesus as a novice in 1989 and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as a religious in the Society of Jesus in 1991," said Thomas R. Slon, a Jesuit priest with the New York Province of the Society of Jesus. "He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1996. Having declared his choice to leave active ministry, he received a Decree of Dismissal from the Society of Jesus in 2002.

But the door Mr. O'Byrne slammed behind him – in the form of a tell-all about sex and vice in the church for Playboy magazine -- rattled the Jesuit community.

In the Fall of 2002, O'Byrne worked on his memoir, never published and apparently a longer version of the piece that ran in Playboy. A year after leaving the Jesuits, he became an Episcopalian.

After a long hiatus, he returned to politics, joining the Howard Dean campaign in the summer of 2003 as a researcher, policy director and speechwriter.

"There is not a pressure cooker in any walk of life like working on a presidential campaign," said Ethan Geto, who ran Dean's campaign in New York and hired Mr. O'Byrne. "He was extraordinary."

"He was one of the few naturals in politics I have ever met," said Mr. Geto. "That was his first real job in politics. I think his background prepared him in one critical way: Charles is extremely empathetic. He can really put himself in the shoes of another human being, he is very comforting, centered and spiritual. I'm sure that had a lot to do with him having been a priest."

It turned out that not even a former priest could save the Dean campaign, and Mr. O'Byrne was forced to look for work again. He volunteered his time for adult educational programs at St. Bart's in Midtown, and St. Luke's in the West Village. Eventually, he caught wind that Paterson, then in his second year as Senate minority leader, was looking for hires. He joined as a speech writer, and climbed the ranks to become communications director and then deputy chief of staff.

On November 14, 2006, Paterson appointed Mr. O'Byrne his chief of staff in the Lieutenant Governor's office.

And on Monday March 17, when Paterson is sworn in, the new chief of staff to the governor of New York will be close at hand.

If the number seemed exhausting to the Harvard Law School professor, it may not be George W. Bush that’s to blame.

“Keeping up with Hillary’s machine is not easy,” he said.

Mr. Tribe’s former research assistant, Barack Obama, is now the leading contender against Senator Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, and Mr. Tribe is working furiously on behalf of his favorite alumnus.

“Although I know and admire Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and have worked with both of them and would be happy to support each of them if they won the nomination,” Mr. Tribe said, “ … I’ve never been as enthusiastic about a politician as I am about Barack.”

And so, on March 20, Mr. Tribe will finally get to co-host a party for more than 150 guests, at the Cambridge home of his law-school colleague David Wilkins, that was originally scheduled for this past weekend—before what the tabloids have dubbed the Battle of Selma.

Several of Mr. Obama’s former professors are expected to welcome their prodigal son back to Cambridge for the event, an intimate, $2,300-a-head affair.

“He was not just another extremely bright student,” Mr. Tribe said. “He made a really major impact when he was here. He was charismatic, he was thoughtful, he was mature.”

Several Harvard Law School faculty members who got to know Mr. Obama before he graduated in 1991 have spent the last 20 years eagerly watching his star rise. The Presidential campaign has become a culmination of the old New England bastion’s affection for a favorite son.

And at this early date in the campaign, their favors are about more than Mr. Obama’s image, as they and their cohort scramble to meet the maximum donations to his war chest before a March 31 deadline, when all agree that the viability of his candidacy will really be determined.

His closest friends are reaching out to prominent alumni to get them to donate money and join the pro-Obama group of Harvard Law School graduates they are forming. Their stated goal is to create a base of fund-raisers, policy advisors, and—should the need arise—sharp-eyed poll-watchers well versed in the law.

“Barack is not the product of any political machine—he’s not a traditional establishment candidate by any means—so he doesn’t necessarily have those networks to draw on,” said Andrew Schapiro, one of the nascent effort’s masterminds. “But Harvard Law School is a pre-existing network that is in many ways an establishment structure, and one that can provide a lot of enthusiasm and assistance for his candidacy.”

Working the Ivy network has become an important part of Presidential campaign politics in recent years. The first time that Bill Clinton ran for office, he was buoyed by support from a similar group of more than 200 alumni of Yale Law School, including the school’s then dean, Guido Calabresi, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, and dining-guide moguls Tim and Nina Zagat.

Mr. Obama’s fellow graduates, like Mr. Clinton’s, aren’t just at corporate law firms, but big shots in the worlds of business, entertainment, finance, education and, obviously, politics. Still, it’s a tight field to beat Hillary Clinton, who has connections with many deep-pocketed donors, especially along the East Coast. But so far, Mr. Obama seems to be making inroads with the donor class closest to his age bracket: hedge-fund, private-equity and venture-capital investors in their 30’s and 40’s.

Mr. Obama’s closest circle of law-school friends has also produced some of his most committed fund-raisers. Citigroup executive Michael Froman and hedge-fund manager Brian Mathis, both Harvard Law School friends, are chairs of the March 9 gala being held at the Grand Hyatt. A Harvard Law Review colleague, law professor Jonathan Molot, hosted 180 people for a fund-raising event at his home in Washington, D.C., last week. At it, Mr. Obama surveyed the crowd. “Geez, I feel like I’m at a law-school reunion,” he joked.

Last month, classmate Julius Genachowski, a private-equity advisor based in Washington, D.C., arranged a meeting between Mr. Obama and about 50 new-media and technology executives at an office in midtown. It was co-hosted by former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller and technology venture-capitalist Deven Parekh.

“I’ve gotten e-mails from people I haven’t talked to in 15 years [saying], ‘Hey, I hear you’re still friends with Barack—what can I do?’” said Thomas Perrelli, a Washington lawyer and managing editor of the law review under Mr. Obama.

Several law-school friends have emerged as informal advisors as well. Cassandra Butts, a domestic-policy expert at the Center for American Progress, met Mr. Obama in the financial-aid office in their first days on campus. She helped Mr. Obama establish his Senate office, and she has been advising his campaign on policy and outreach to Harvard Law School alumni. Mr. Genachowski, who worked for the F.C.C. and for IAC/InterActiveCorp, chairs an advisory committee on technology and the Internet.

Many of them talk with or e-mail the Senator and his staff on a weekly basis, and the conversations can range from the personal (car seats) to the practical (advice on where to find a chief technology officer for the Web site). Some spend several hours a day working the phones to garner contributions.

“Candidates tend to get forced into living in a bubble. It’s difficult to receive direct and candid feedback,” said one former classmate and close advisor. “So I and some others have really tried to be that kind of resource to him … to give it to him straight, no chaser—not what Maureen Dowd and other reporters or pundits are saying, but what the people who are really supporting him, be it with their votes or financially, are thinking and saying.”

“Certain of Obama’s classmates from Harvard and Columbia have been important supporters in many ways—not just financially but strategically,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for the campaign. “They’re important members of the circle of people who are important in the campaign.”

Mr. Schapiro, a lawyer based in New York and Chicago, as well as Mr. Genachowski and two other Harvard Law School friends from Los Angeles, Crystal Nix Hines and Nancy McCullough, all traveled to Springfield, Ill., in February to attend Mr. Obama’s announcement of his Presidential campaign. They huddled in the front row.

“One of the great things about this campaign is that it’s allowed a bunch of us to reconnect,” said Ms. Nix Hines, a television writer who will be organizing a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama in the spring.

He’s Not Haughty, He’s My Brother!

Because so many of the law school’s graduates enter politics, it’s not uncommon to hear alumni talk about the classmate they knew would be governor of South Carolina, or professors reminisce about the student they expected would be President.

In fact, however, the White House has been attained only once by a graduate of Harvard Law School, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

And while the political careers of Harvard Law graduates are always a going concern in Cambridge, Mr. Obama’s Presidential race presents its own enticements.

Many of Clinton’s Ivy supporters some were appointed to important positions in the administration, including Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. (Mr. Clinton withdrew the nomination of his law-school friend Lani Guinier after an uproar over some of her articles on voting rights.)

Mr. Wilkins, the co-host of the March 20 fund-raiser, said that he always sends a small check to every student of his running for office, but that only with Mr. Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has he felt inspired to assume more responsibility.

Of course, Mr. Obama isn’t the only Harvard Law School alum to announce his candidacy this year. Republican candidate Mitt Romney graduated in 1975 (half a dozen students in the law school are working in his Boston campaign office), and now-withdrawn Democratic candidate Mark Warner, who sought advice from professors at the law school in the spring of last year, graduated in 1980.

But Mr. Obama’s supporters say that it’s not just the arguably liberal politics of the school that make the Illinois Senator the focus of their efforts instead of Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama’s connection to the school today is deeper.

“It’s a testament to the kind of people that we admit to law school,” said Mr. Wilkins, the professor hosting the March 20 fund-raiser. “There is something special about Barack and his connection to the law school …. It’s a lot easier for our students to imagine themselves as Barack, because, not so long ago, he was like them.”

“There’s a mystique about him,” said Michael Negron, a third-year student who is on the steering committee of a just-formed group of Harvard Law students supporting Mr. Obama.

On its newly launched Web site, the students often refer to the Senator in reverential terms. “Harvard Law School was an important part of Barack Obama’s life, so we’re going to make sure it’s an important part of his campaign for President,” reads one section. Another adds: “He may be a Harvard lawyer, but Barack does not have a haughty New England background.”

That very defensiveness, however, seems to point up something about how Mr. Obama’s Harvard pedigree is being integrated into his life story. After a weekend in Selma, Ala., in which he had to compete with a white woman with a degree from Yale Law School for credibility among black voters, it’s worth asking whether Mr. Obama, the first black candidate for President not to have started his political career in the civil-rights movement, gains from his attachment to an establishment bastion like Harvard. Does Harvard do as much for Mr. Obama’s candidacy as his candidacy does for Harvard?

Arguably, Mr. Obama settled that question quite nicely in Selma.

“It’s because they marched that we elected councilmen, Congressmen,” he told the crowd gathered at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church during his trip to Selma. “It is because they marched that we have Artur Davis and Keith Ellison. It is because they marched that I got the kind of education I got, a law degree, a seat in the Illinois Senate and ultimately in the United States Senate.”

(Incidentally, it was Mr. Davis, a friend of Mr. Obama’s from Harvard Law, who invited him to Selma.)

In fact, the dazzling scholastic careers of candidates like Mr. Obama are becoming a big part of their personal narratives. Early newspaper reports breathlessly chronicled his rise to the presidency of Harvard’s über-prestigious law review, dissecting his leadership style for signs of the kind of chief executive he might be. Professors have talked admiringly of his willingness to turn down federal clerkships and corporate law jobs in order to return to Chicago and work for community organizations—indications of how he resisted allowing the law school to corrupt his personal ideals. His election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review landed him coverage in The New York Times and his first book deal.

While working on the law review provides a student with plenty of opportunities to make enemies, Mr. Obama seems to have made some very good friends. That credibility is what they offer when they call prospective donors. They talk about meeting him on the basketball court, as well as the assistance he offered them with law-review articles.

“You’re taking about people who have known him for 18, 19 years. There’s a history there,” said Ms. Nix Hines, who spends “a couple hours a day” talking with people who are on the fence, telling them “what I know about Barack.”

The novel—no surprise—grew out of the blog (www.anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com), which Mr. Blachman started while he was still a student at Harvard Law School. Anonymous and fictional (it was written from the perspective of a hiring partner at a top law firm), his blog nonetheless became a must-read among disgruntled law-firm associates around the country, who identified with its unsparing portrait of the white-collar salt mines that are America’s largest law firms (a.k.a. “Biglaw”). After Mr. Blachman publicly revealed himself as the blog’s author in a New York Times interview, he landed a book deal; Anonymous Lawyer is the result. A television pilot is also in the works. (These successes have allowed Mr. Blachman—whose only direct exposure to Biglaw life was a stint as a summer associate at the New York firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher—to escape the fate he so ably chronicles.)

So yes, Anonymous Lawyer is yet another blog-turned-book. But unlike many other blog-based novels, in which anonymous blogging is merely a plot element (Ana Marie Cox’s Dog Days, say, or Jessica Cutler’s Washingtonienne), blogging here provides both form and content. The narrative unfolds in eight weeks’ worth of posts penned by the protagonist, along with related e-mail exchanges—most notably between Anonymous Lawyer and Anonymous Niece, an incoming Yale Law School student who serves as Anonymous’ confidante during his foray into the blogosphere. The prose is not finely wrought, in the manner of Kermit Roosevelt’s recent legal novel In the Shadow of the Law; instead, Anonymous Lawyer partakes of the breezy, casual style of cyber-communication.

The novel, luckily, has more of a plot than the blog, with the chairmanship of the law firm serving as the MacGuffin: Anonymous is after the top job, and to get it he must outmaneuver his archrival, “The Jerk.” Inevitably, predictably, the secret blog that Anonymous has been maintaining complicates matters.

The obvious objection to all this is that a Biglaw hiring partner would never maintain a blog in which he mercilessly mocks his colleagues (with monikers such as “The Guy With the Giant Mole,” “Lives With His Mom” and “Closet Lesbian”), dishes out office gossip and discusses his strategic jockeying for the chairmanship (which a true Machiavellian would never do). When Mr. Blachman explains how his protagonist got into blogging in the first place, the motivations offered are not entirely convincing. If Anonymous had wanted a literary outlet, “a place to write about life,” he could have just written novels on the side (à la Scott Turow or Louis Begley). If he’d wanted to vent about work or to achieve greater self-awareness, therapy would have been more effective—and less risky.

But enough quibbling. After you buckle the seatbelt of suspended disbelief, you can sit back and enjoy the ride. Anonymous Lawyer is a quick, fun read—you could finish it in a single afternoon at the beach—and it offers occasional moments of genuine humor. Consider this riff on the film clips that Anonymous screens for incoming summer associates: “I showed a clip from Brokeback Mountain, which I think was done a tremendous disservice when they pitched it as a gay cowboy movie …. [I]t was fairly clear from the trailer that the point of the movie is that it’s great to have a job that consumes most of your day …. I [also] showed a clip from March of the Penguins for an example of mindless work performed without complaint. The penguins march back and forth to and from the ocean, a long and arduous march in the cold on which many perish, yet none ever bitch and moan. They just do it.”

Although generally enjoyable, Mr. Blachman’s satire is not unerring; some of it could have been more finely calibrated. Or, anyway, less broad: Refugees from large-firm practice will read about an associate missing her own child’s funeral and think that firm life was bad, but never that bad.

The book is briskly plotted. The blog and e-mail format, surprisingly, offers the satisfactions of good old-fashioned storytelling: Events reach a climactic state fairly early, about halfway through the novel, and the balance of the story is a fast-paced unraveling of the different threads. The suspense keeps you turning pages even after the novel’s other main draw—the narrator’s wicked wit—begins to overstay its welcome.

David Lat founded the judicial-gossip blog Underneath Their Robes (underneaththeirrobes.blogs.com) and will launch a new legal blog, Above the Law (www.abovethelaw.com), later this summer. He has worked as a federal prosecutor, law-firm associate and federal law clerk.

I asked Weld about this yesterday, and he suggested ground rules:

"The format is Lincoln-Douglas -- candidates addressing questions directly to each other. And I would say a good number would be six."

"If Attorney General Spitzer is game for anything like that scale of enterprise," he said. "Que la fete commence."

Which is French for "let’s get this party started."

He added that Spitzer shouldn’t have anything to fear.

"He should want to debate me. He was on Harvard Law Review, and I was not, and I almost made John Kerry the President of the United States by serving as his punching bag for eight televised debates."

The 40-year-old partner at Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood in Washington, D.C., who served in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003 and has chaired committees for the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian lawyers’ group, entered the program in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the Reagan-era culture wars.

Back then, he said, it was not unheard of for a student pressing a conservative line in a class discussion to get hisses and boos from classmates. He said that a single professor among the 60 or so full-time faculty actively propounded conservative jurisprudence and politics from the lectern.

“It wasn’t that uncommon or unusual to hear the word ‘fascist’ associated with a mainstream conservative,” Mr. Berenson said.

Then, last year, the law school surprised him with a barrage of additions to the faculty—among them prominent conservative scholars. This year, Mr. Berenson is “significantly increasing” the amount he is giving to the law school (though he, like most others interviewed by The Observer, declined to specify by how much).

“It’s hard to say whether I’m trying to send a message, whether I’m applauding what I see as a worthwhile effort by the law school, or whether it’s just the more straightforward feeling that as a place that seems to welcome and value the contributions of people with different points of view, that the law school deserves more support,” he said.

He, like others, had little difficulty offering much of the credit for the phenomenon to Elena Kagan, the 45-year-old dean of Harvard Law.

“In Dean Kagan, Harvard has found somebody who genuinely values intellectual and viewpoint diversity,” said Mr. Berenson. “[Conservatives have] gone from feeling excluded to included.”

Ms. Kagan herself is reluctant to characterize her deanship as a break from Harvard’s past.

“My view of Harvard is that because we are a place that is larger in scale than a lot of other schools, we’ve never been a niche place,” Ms. Kagan told The Observer. “We sort of have everything, and that continues to be true in our current hiring. Our current hiring is all across the board from a political-slash-ideological perspective, and that’s exactly what it should be.”

But among current students, alumni and faculty, the difference between Harvard Law School today and in 1988 is palpable, even if among the school’s officials, the change is unspoken.

“Once you start hiring a lot of people, you can no longer allow any group or faction to put in a political veto, and you’ve just got to hire the best people,” said professor Charles Fried, the law school’s most outspoken conservative. “That’s what happened …. People aren’t stupid: All she said was that we have to do some hiring. That means we’ve got to stop blocking …. She did not mention politics; she’s too smart.”

“It’s news that we’re normal,” Mr. Fried also said. “It’s the opposite of strange. What was happening before is strange.”

President Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees have brought a lot attention to the Harvard and the Yale law schools, the equivalent of the spotlight placed on Miami and U.S.C. around the time of the N.F.L. draft.

According to professors and students, Harvard Law alum Chief Justice John Roberts’ nomination found little visible opposition at his law school. He had the perfect Harvard résumé: graduating summa as an undergrad, then serving as managing editor of the Law Review and clerking with Henry Friendly, the né plus ultra of Appeals Court judges. Minutes after the President announced his selection of Mr. Roberts, the Harvard Law School Web site crowed about the accomplished alum, complete with a beatific A.P. photo.

Yale Law graduate Samuel Alito received similar treatment on the Yale Law School Web site, but the tenor of his support has been overshadowed by the widespread dissemination of a recent New York Times article describing the active opposition to his nomination among students and faculty.

There have always been substantial differences, both real and perceived, between Yale (the perennially top-ranked law school) and Harvard (No. 2). Yale is known as an intellectual seminary, where the professors are the priests. Yale has about a third of the number of students in each class, and they receive grades of honors, pass, low pass, and fail. Harvard has one of the largest student bodies of any law school in the country, is credited with pioneering the “Socratic method,” and historically has prepared its students for establishment corporate and private-sector careers as well as government and academic ones.

But as the Bush administration succeeds in dramatically changing the political configuration of the Supreme Court, and as the conservative legal network grooms impeccably qualified scholars, both Harvard and Yale are seeing increased pressure to admit conservatives into the academic fold. But it’s at the larger school, Harvard ,that conservatives are taking notice of the shift.

There’s a small but highly visible coterie of conservative Harvard Law School alums currently serving in the Bush administration: including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, deputy White House counsel William Kelly, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and Solicitor General Paul Clement.

According to Mr. Berenson, the Harvard Law Review has invited Mr. Clement to speak at its spring banquet. What’s more, nowadays it’s hard to see him refusing. But Law Review president Brian Fletcher declined to comment, and Mr. Clement didn’t return calls.

Culture Wars

For a seemingly interminable stretch from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Harvard Law was emblematic of academic ideological warfare, its infighting aired like dirty laundry in Eleanor Kerlow’s 1994 book, Poisoned Ivy, its campus derided in a 1993 article in GQ as “Beirut on the Charles.”

Members of Harvard’s Critical Legal Studies school attacked the traditionalists, arguing that their approach perpetuated a ruling class in America. The traditionalists struck back, led by Ms. Kagan’s predecessor, Robert Clark. In 1985, at a debate before alumni in New York, Mr. Clark charged that the C.L.S. adherents were engaging in “a ritual slaying of the elders.” (Every alumnus in the country reportedly received a transcript of his talk, courtesy of the Federalist Society.)

Among faculty members, lateral hiring and tenure decisions became more charged—and less conclusive—than confirmation hearings. Mr. Clark was ultimately compelled to bring in a retired law professor, Roger Fisher, to keep the peace among the warring factions.

His previous work included negotiating between rebels and the government in El Salvador and South Africa.

In the early 1990s, the school’s most senior black professor, Derrick Bell Jr., took a leave of absence to protest the fact that no minority women had been given tenure. He ultimately quit. In 1998, Lani Guinier was the first African-American woman to be given tenure.

As John Sedgwick wrote in the GQ article, “politics are like a too-heavy oil that, instead of lubricating, has gummed up the works at the school—slowing everything down and heating everything up.”

Students eagerly joined the front lines. There were sit-ins to protest faculty diversity and an investigation into charges of racism at the Harvard Law Review.

Tensions exploded when students released a parody of feminist law professor Mary Joe Frug’s writings—on the anniversary of her still-unsolved murder. Ms. Frug, who taught at the New England School of Law, was married to C.L.S. advocate Gerald Frug, a Harvard Law professor, and had founded a spin-off of the movement, “the FemCrits.”

Finally, in the late 1990’s, McKinsey and Company was retained to study why students at Harvard Law were so unhappy. In December of 2000, the faculty adopted a strategic plan based on the results of that research, which had been expanded to review faculty concerns as well. It called for reducing first-year class size, expanding the loan-forgiveness programs and beefing up the international-studies curriculum, among other objectives.

The following year, Harvard got a new president in Larry Summers. In 2003, shortly after appointing Ms. Kagan as dean of the law school, Mr. Summers gave The New York Times Magazine a sense of his view of Harvard Law’s recent history.

He said that the law school had made a series of “idiosyncratic choices” in the awarding of tenure. He further criticized the school, citing “some of the concerns about inbredness, political correctness, lack of intellectual energy that were seen on the outside.”

To show how serious he was about reform, he announced that he would be extending his presidential powers to include the right to veto proposed tenure offers. (He has not exercised that option.)

The year that Ms. Kagan started, the law school officially kicked off its $400 million fund-raising campaign (with its oddly conservative-sounding moniker, “Setting the Standard”) in order to fund some of the initiatives outlined in the strategic plan, including adding 15 professors to help lower student-faculty ratios.

“In its search for new professors, the Law School will maintain its commitment to scholarship at the highest levels, and the need to offer an increasingly diverse student body the opportunity to be taught by an increasingly diverse faculty,” notes a thumbnail description of the plan on the law school’s Web site.

While no overt reference to the school’s notoriety in the 80’s and 90’s was made, one line—which could have been borrowed from the liberal agitators’ phrasebook but appeared to have a very different political valence—described the plan’s loftiest goal.

“Above all, the School must continue to be a metropolis, rather than a village,” reads the brochure describing the campaign.

Mr. Summers—recent controversy notwithstanding—is himself seen as a liberal, and so is Ms. Kagan. Mr. Summers had worked with her on occasion when they were both officials in the Clinton administration. So conservatives saw little to be enthusiastic about in the appointment. Ms. Kagan was a former domestic-policy and legal advisor to the President, and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

President Clinton even nominated her to serve on the influential D.C. Circuit bench, only to see the Republicans in the Senate dawdle over bringing her candidacy to a committee vote. (Ms. Kagan is the first woman to serve as dean in the school’s 188 years.)

She inherited the law school from Mr. Clark, a philosopher and scholar of corporate law who was also a prolific fund-raiser.

What has followed is a hiring spree: 20 offers to full-time professors have been extended—with nine acceptances so far, according to Michael Armini, the school’s director of communications. There are currently 81 full-time professors at the school, the same number as when Ms. Kagan joined, mostly because of retirements.

According to John Coates, a corporate-law professor, the hiring logjam has been lifted because the “false sense of scarcity has been eliminated.”

“I think, in the past, there was this dynamic where people were sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing for reasons that didn’t have as much to do with the merits, but had to do with the sense of limited budget,” said Mr. Coates, who joined the faculty in 1997.

Of the nine new professors, six have been appointed with tenure. To the left of center are environmental-law expert Jody Freeman, from UCLA, and Daryl Levinson, a constitutional-law theorist.

But recent hires have also added to the conservatives’ ranks. There is John Manning, 44, an expert on the separation of powers and the structure of government, who advocates for a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution, and 43-year-old Jack Goldsmith, an international-law expert known for questioning the efficacy of the International Criminal Court.

Both are highly regarded scholars and former Republican administration officials (Bush I for Manning, Bush II for Goldsmith). They declined to comment.

In addition to Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith, joining next year is Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional, statutory-interpretation and administrative-law specialist who takes a social-science approach, reading empirical research and looking for counterintuitive solutions. Mr. Vermeule is currently at the University of Chicago, where he has won various teaching awards. He has written about constitutional issues in the context of national security, arguing that restricting some liberties isn’t at odds with the freedoms Americans enjoy, that people overreact in what he calls “libertarian panics.” He has also argued for the death penalty on “pro-life grounds,” citing studies that show it deters would-be killers. Yet he has also criticized some of what others see as the court’s conservative activism.

To be sure, new appointments have gone to scholars with approaches and fields of study all over the map, and about half of the 20 recent offers have been to people on the liberal-to-left spectrum. Like Mr. Vermeule, the rest are hard to classify.

Four junior professors—election-law expert Heather Gerken and local-democracy specialist David Barron, who worked in the Clinton administration, as well as corporate-law scholars Guhan Subramanian and Allen Ferrell—have also received tenure since Ms. Kagan took over.

But even this ratio is newsworthy. A much-talked-about study in The Georgetown Law Journal analyzed 11 years of federal-election campaign contributions and found that of those faculty members who gave more than $200, 91 percent and 92 percent at Harvard and Yale, respectively, gave to Democrats. The average for 21 top law schools was 81 percent for Democrats.

What might have once been seen as an assault on the school’s values has been turned into a point of pride, according one Harvard Law School source, with professors heralding their willingness to make the recent hires—especially Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith—as proof of their liberal, tolerant mindset.

Which is precisely the point on which Ms. Kagan has successfully lobbied: It would be anti-intellectual to shut down the candidacy of a qualified conservative.

“We don’t look at politics,” Ms. Kagan insisted. “We figure that if we really go for the people who are doing the most interesting scholarship and who are the best teachers, we’ll get a pretty wide political cross-section—and indeed we have. We’re just looking for the best people, the best scholars, the best teachers.”

The effort has not been without its small struggles. There was a political flare-up when Mr. Goldsmith joined the faculty last fall, with faculty members airing their concerns about his alleged involvement with the infamous “torture memos” in The Boston Globe.

And when it later emerged that Ms. Goldsmith had, in fact, resigned because he objected to the administration’s permissive lines on torture, not all of his critics were placated. They saw echoes of the administration’s position in his scholarship, which argues that that the United States isn’t always bound by international law.

It was Ms. Kagan’s public support of Mr. Goldsmith that effectively quelled the outcry.

In Mr. Manning’s case, it emerged that the changes at Harvard Law are hardly happening fast enough for some students.

When Mr. Manning joined the campus, the student-run Harvard Law School Record ran an editorial in support of his hiring: “At HLS, you can count the number of actively, politically conservatives [sic] on one hand and still have enough fingers left to flash a peace sign. On a campus filled by hundreds of instructors, is this really sufficient diversity?”

Sufficient or no, Harvard Law has changed since the days when, as Mr. Berenson put it, “[Reagan Solicitor General] Charles Fried was the only game in town.”

Students and faculty point to professors who have tipped their hats to conservative causes: Mary Ann Glendon, an anti-abortion feminist; law and economics scholars like Steven Shavell and J. Mark Ramseyer, on the basis that they’re believers in free-market economic concepts. Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert who litigated on behalf of the Republican-dominated Florida legislature alongside Mr. Fried in Bush v. Gore.

‘We Don’t Recruit’

When the Harvard Law chapter of the Federalist Society hosted the organization’s annual student symposium in February, hundreds of law students, academics and lawyers filled the chandeliered Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., to hear a talk by Judge David Sentelle, a conservative member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Dean Kagan introduced the judge.

“I love the Federalist Society,” she announced, “but you are not my people.”

The crowd laughed. It came as no surprise that Ms. Kagan wouldn’t feel kinship with the Feddies. (Moreover, Judge Sentelle headed the panel that appointed Ken Starr as independent counsel.)

And yet there she was, supporting the society. It was a powerful symbolic gesture, one that conservative students still cite when they gush about the dean.

“I just thought it would be funny to a little bit note what everybody knew, which is that”—and here Ms. Kagan allowed herself a chortle— “this was not the student group I was involved in. But at the same time, to express my appreciation for what they do— for what they do in the law-school community and otherwise. These are highly committed, intelligent, hard-working, active students who make the Harvard community better, just like the American Constitution Society makes the Harvard community better. I don’t have to share your politics to understand that Harvard Law School is a better place because you do the things you do here.”

Ms. Kagan’s quip may have been a backhanded compliment. But it says a lot about the political temperature of the campus that, later, the Federalists were so heartened by her one-liner that they emblazoned the quip on the back of their chapter’s T-shirts. Her jokey but eminently cool embrace felt like a big bear hug. Or at least they wanted to spread that impression. (Said Jeffrey Jamison, president of the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society’s liberal counterpart: “They celebrate their victories every time they can get them, because they feel that they’re oppressed.”)

“She’s been very, very friendly to our chapter—a great friend,” explained Matt Cooper, a third-year student and Federalist Society chapter president. “What I would say is that Harvard Law School has traditionally been an unfriendly place for conservatives. It’s changed. I wouldn’t say it’s friendly and welcoming, but it’s certainly not hostile to the extent that it once was.”

Yet Mr. Cooper added that, as part of the admissions office’s outreach to most of the student groups, he was asked if conservatives had an accurate picture of the community at Harvard before they enrolled. He answered no, that most conservatives had an impression they would be in a very small minority, and that most were surprised to discover such an active conservative student movement. Mr. Cooper sensed that the official wanted to pass that information along to applicants.

That wrong impression is “something they want to remedy,” he said.

In a promotional brochure that Harvard distributed to accepted students this past spring, one of six students featured in a full-page spread was Lawrence VanDyke, class of 2005. A quote accompanied his picture: “The size of this place means that you’re going to find your niche, and you’re not going to be the only person in that niche. I’m involved with the Federalist Society here and while it may be considered a minority group on campus, it’s a minority group of 200-plus people.”

(In fact, according to Mr. Cooper, the Federalists are 350 strong, the largest branch in the country.)

The pamphlet was written by Mr. Armini, the law school’s director of communications. He interviewed a bunch of Law Review members who were around in the summer of 2003. “I remember that his quote worked because it stressed the ‘bigger is better’ theme,” Mr. Armini wrote in an e-mail.

The dean disputed the notion that they were trying to recruit conservatives. “We pay zero attention to this in the admissions process. Zero. There’s just nothing going on like that,” she said.

Indeed, Ms. Kagan and other faculty members, at Harvard and elsewhere, said they doubted that students used ideological litmus tests to determine where they should attend law school.

But the perceived liberal bent at Harvard does get raised as a concern for entering students, conservatives said. “As a student here talking with admitted students, that is a question I’m asked a lot: ‘How will we feel as conservatives?’” said Soraya Freed, an officer with the Federalist Society.

Ms. Freed said she was encouraging. “I don’t think there’s a better school for conservatives right now,” she asserted.

As with the hires, Ms. Kagan said there has been no favoritism to any particular group of applicants—that, if anything, what students have responded to is her effort to make the campus more collegial and student-friendly.

This year, her office is sponsoring a debate between the Federalists and the A.C.S. (in the past, the groups held separate events). She’s improved amenities to make the austere campus more like an upscale office complex. The gym and other student spaces were renovated; there’s free coffee in one of the main buildings and complimentary tampons in the bathrooms; and she even established an outdoor ice-skating rink on one of the main quads.

There are practical effects to having more conservatives on campus. They serve as mentors, helping to shuttle students into jobs; they also serve as public intellectuals, emissaries and recruiting directors.

They also help to attract continued interest from the increasing number of the school’s prominent conservative alumni.

Finn M.W. Caspersen, class of 1966 and a fund-raiser éminence grise for Harvard Law, is the chair of the school’s current $400 million fund-raising campaign.

That Mr. Caspersen, the former head of one of the largest consumer-lending companies, has endowed two professorships at the law school and considers himself a small-government conservative would seem to be evidence enough of the school’s interest in its relationship with conservative alumni.

But Mr. Caspersen said he hadn’t found that politics was a factor in alumni giving.

“That’s not a decisive reason in most people’s minds about whether they want to give,” he said. “Of course I’ve talked to the people who give money—people don’t volunteer funds.”

Still, he acknowledged that changes at the school—especially the hires led by Ms. Kagan—broadened the school’s appeal as a charity to its alumni.

“I think it’s a healthy thing. Whether it’s going to open a nirvana for fund-raisers—that’s a whole different thing,” he said. “It can’t hurt, let me put it that way.”

Off the record and outside of the school’s official development circles, things are put a little more bluntly.

“I’ve had zillions of conservatives alums saying to me how great they think Elena is for doing this,” said one professor.

“There has been a lot of talk about it, because it’s such a dramatic break,” said Douglas Cox, H.L.S. class of 1980, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in D.C. who worked in the Justice Department during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“I think Dean Kagan’s hiring positions … are a little bit like the ‘Nixon in China’ phenomenon,” said Mr. Berenson. “The reaction has really been electric.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that the key to success in life is practice, as in "practice, practice, practice." However, the true secret to getting what you want may actually lie in preparation a subtle distinction, as was made clear by the profitable visit one bank robber paid to the Greenpoint Savings Bank at 1010 Third Avenue on Feb. 28.

The robber obviously couldn't drop by the bank and pretend he was holding it up a few times until he got his moves down, so he did the next best thing: He arrived at the institution approximately an hour before he pulled his heist, took a chair, got comfortable and chatted on his cell phone. All that time, he was actually casing the joint, bank officials realized in retrospect.

The thief left and then returned a short time later, waited in line and, when his turn came, presented a teller with a deposit slip on which were written what the police described as "robbery instructions."

The teller handed over $4,040 in $20 and $50 denominations along with a bank dye pack, which is designed to explode after the perp departs and make him readily identifiable to the police. The bandit fled the premises in an unknown direction. It wasn't known whether the dye pack exploded.

A description of the thief, a 6-foot-1, 200-pound white male with blond hair, was broadcast over the police radio. The cops canvassed the nearest subway station but didn't find him. The countertops at the bank and the perp's note were secured for fingerprint analysis. And the NYPD's Major Case Squad responded to the scene and took the note and the bank's security video for further investigation.

The crook didn't display a weapon at any point during the incident when you're that well prepared, you don't need to and there were no injuries.

Tipping Not Optional

How much to tip service providers is a perennial, almost philosophical question confronted by New Yorkers. Those whose compensation gives us the most angst include bartenders, takeout delivery men (do they really deserve the 15 to 20 percent we normally tip waiters at restaurants?), sales clerks at places like Starbucks (who apparently expect a gratuity merely for doing their jobs) and, of course, cabbies.

One driver apparently offered a female passenger guidelines for what he considered an appropriate tip when he dropped her off at 72nd Street and First Avenue around 1 p.m. on March 4. She didn't appreciate his suggestion, and an argument ensued. It ended not in happy compromise but in him exiting the vehicle, opening the passenger's door and dragging her out of his cab by her neck and hair. The passenger later said her head had hit the door frame, though there were no signs of physical injury when the police and Emergency Medical Service technicians arrived.

By that time, the perp had apparently fled the scene but not before his victim got his name and hack license number. She told the cops she felt threatened by the cabby's actions and filed a harassment complaint against him with the 19th Precinct.

The S&M Life

Artists, writers and poets employ a multitude of metaphors for death. But Amy Gutman, the author of Equivocal Death (Little, Brown), may be the first author to employ a white-shoe law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore as the Grim Reaper's handmaiden.

Of course, Ms. Gutman doesn't identify her old employer, where she labored as an associate for a couple of years after graduating from Harvard and Harvard Law School, by name in her book People magazine's "Page-Turner of the Week" for March 5. She wisely changed it to Samson & Mills ("S&M" for short), but she says that former colleagues at the firm weren't fooled. In fact, they rather enjoyed the send-up of their workplace.

"My friends have all been really excited about it and love it," said Ms. Gutman, who received a six-figure advance for this, her first novel. "It's hard for me to say what the partners think."

Equivocal Death is the story of Kate Paine, a 26-year-old (you guessed it) Harvard Law graduate who lands an assignment working with the firm's top partners on a sexual harassment case, defending the publisher of a snarky men's magazine called Catch.

Kate seems to be on the fast track to making partner herself until the senior female partner on the case turns up dead giving Kate, who fears she may be next, severe doubts about her chosen career path. The suspects include Catch's lascivious editor; the firm's senior partner, who was rumored to have had an affair with the victim, Madeleine Waters; and Madeleine's former hair- dresser, who now insists on giving all her former colleagues the same bob he gave her.

To Ms. Gutman, the scariest parts of her book don't involve the hushed violence that treads Samson & Mills' thick-carpeted hallways, but simply being forced to work at a place you really don't like. "The term 'equivocal death' has two meanings," the author explained. "It's a term used by homicide detectives when a crime scene is ambiguous, when they're not sure whether it was a homicide or suicide. But it also goes to the idea of the firm being a false life, and what happens to people when they're working in this all-consuming environment."

Ms. Gutman concedes there are those though she doesn't count herself among them who revel in the practice of the law. "In litigation, it's this very high-stakes sport, and if that's what you're drawn to and what makes you feel energized and alive, then it's a good choice for you," she said.

For her part, Ms. Gutman discovered that researching case law held less allure than viewing pictures of corpses, which is how she spent part of last summer, at a forensics convention in Maine.

"I watched these incredibly grisly slides of violent deaths with all these forensic pathologists who were very blasé about everything," she recalled. "You find certain images are really haunting. It's interesting to think why a certain image among all the different kinds of violent deaths is particularly arresting."

She politely declined to describe the image that most disturbed her. "I'm probably using it in my next book," she explained.

I also know some women who tell you all the wondrous accomplishments of their offspring and omit from their conversation the anxieties, the less-than-perfect reports, the blemishes on records, the common wounds of parenting that wear away the heart muscle and turn brain cells to milk curd. This puffing up makes other women sorry, wince, turn green at the gills and is one of our petty social sins that must lie somewhere in the footnotes of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not bruit about the accomplishments of thy children." Nevertheless, I can't contain myself. Last week I attended the Harvard Law School graduation of one of my daughters.

The sheriff of Cambridge called the meeting to order. We were sitting in the hot sun and had been waiting for an hour and a half as the graduates filed into the yard-so many black robes, bag pipes and English hymns; mothers in African dresses with reds and greens and silver stripes; a Japanese woman in the row ahead of ours with a flowered robe and a belt with a flap of folding fabric at the spine that prevented her from leaning back in her chair; a few rows forward another mom and dad, she with spiky purple hair and he in a black T-shirt with a biker tattoo on his arm; preppie dads in bow ties; and mothers like me, smiling shyly at one another, holding our cameras on our laps. In our section (Section 8!), we were all parents of any-minute-to-be lawyers. There was the usual speech in Latin. There were the expected Anglican hymns. There was the presentation of the graduates of one school after another by the deans. There was a proper way this thing was done and the very properness, the force of tradition, the might of the buildings around us, the power of the words and the huge numbers of souls gathered there moved me like a storm over the ocean. I admit, behind my sunglasses, there were tears in my eyes. When the dean said that he was presenting the lawyers for their degrees in "the favoring presence" of the gathering, I assented. I was the very essence of a favoring presence.

When their turn came to cheer themselves the divinity school graduates raised little halos, the business school graduates raised hundred-dollar bills, the law school students waved silver plastic sharks by their tails. My heart beat so fast I searched the corners of the crowd for a waiting ambulance. Sighting none, I ordered my offending organ to slow down. A graduate of the School of Public Health gave a speech. She was from Nigeria. She had survived a war. Her father had told her always to defend the defenseless, and she had dedicated her life to doing just that. I was moved by her words. Actually I was moved by just about everything, so tender was my state. I was restored to my normal critical stance when a graduate male talked about giving up the Harvard handshake for embracing friends and learning to hug one another. Ah, what have we feminists wrought? The graduate address is no longer about conquering the world or changing it but about human touching-E.S.T. victorious, pop visions floating like sugar plums in the hallways of the academy. Ugh. At least this particular young man is unlikely to drop the H-bomb on civilian populations.

Then we had lunch at tables in the law school yard in front of the library. I took picture after picture of my graduate with her flowers, with her father, with her friends. The dean of Harvard Law School, Robert Clark, spoke of "the wise restraints that make us free." Whoever said that lawyers were not poets? There was some talk of Justice, of democracy depending on the rule of law, and I believe that. I know that lawyers are not heroes in our culture. Still, I am a believer. We attempt the rule of reason, creating a society that can protect its citizens in all their dealings (even their wheelings and dealings). Reason-as it dances, as it swings, as it turns inside out-is as beautiful a phenomenon as rainbows and snowfalls and birds in flight. Reason is power, and I am delighted my child has it in her grasp, and I am delighted that the education she received has shaped that power into a useful tool. What exactly she does with it is her own business. I am the admirer, the home country from which this explorer set out. I am content. I am proud to have known this Harvard Law School graduate when she was just a newborn with a tuft of black hair on her small, not yet bone-hard head.

Added to my pleasure was the constant spinning, throughout the ceremony, of my father in his grave. He was a lawyer who had said only ugly women wanted to be lawyers. He had said that we didn't have the mind for it, that it was unnatural. The gold tassel on my daughter's cap waved like a thumb in his eye. Spin on, Daddy, the deed is done. I know this is not nice of me. I should let bygones be bygones and be more gracious in this vicarious victory. But if I were that nice I would have to let go of all the grudges, the malicious thoughts they give rise to, forget the pinpricks of a lifetime-and what then? I would be a lump of sugar to feed to the horses. I would be a pancake on the table of life. Pass the syrup.

I told my daughter that she had made me happy. She said, "No, I didn't. I just mitigated your sense of tragedy." Oh. Now this is true enough. I am one of those who habitually anticipate the worst, who live with other sorrows that should be pushed aside but can't always. I am one of those who are more blue than rosy. I am of the immediate post-Holocaust, A-bomb-in-my-sky generation. I do not believe in the goodness of man or the salvation of the soul. Somewhere in my head Albert Camus is always crashing into a tree and someone with a machete is ever lurking in my garden. My daughter has observed me fairly. I cannot say that fairness is what one wants in one's daughter's observations, but there it is. And the truth is, her graduation mitigates-oh how much it mitigates, how very mitigated I feel.

Oh, Evil Eye, blink just this once.