Uncle Ken's law career

I had a brief fling with the legal profession.  When I was tending bar at the House of Chin one of the regulars, Harry, was a dean who had the niche of guiding students into law school.  I had just been turned down for graduate school at Carbondale and Harry suggested that I look into law school.  As the Dawgs can testify I am an argumentative fellow, so why not put that to use?

The first hurdle is the LSAT which is like those college entrance exams, except geared to law.  It consisted of a lot of different kinds of questions.  The ones to do with abstract reasoning I did pretty well on, but there was another part where they began by giving you a little principle of law and then they gave you a case study and you were supposed to apply that principle to decide on the case.  I didn't do so well on that..I tended to ignore the principle and just go with what I thought was right, which was not the point.  Even after I read the answer and how that was guided by the principle I still tended to disagree, 

I still did well enough overall to have some hope of doing well enough to get into law school and I paid some kind of fee and was all set to take the exam one September morning.  As I recall when I woke up that morning I learned that Ford had pardoned Nixon.  Anymore I think that was probably the right thing to do, but at the time I was outraged.  Kind of soured me on law, and then it turned out that it was high school marching band day in Champaign.  I loved watching those high school girls march by in their short skirts and boots and wooden guns, and that, along with how would I be able to pay for law school led me not to take the exam.

I ran into the dean that afternoon and he asked how I thought I did and I explained that what with the Nixon pardon and those marching high school girls and how was I going to pay for it I didn't take the exam.  We were standing in front of the House of Chin and there was a waitress with us and Harry said, "Maggie, could you go inside and get a bowl of water and a towel?"  Why did he want her to do that she asked, and he replied, "Because I am washing my hands of this fellow."  And that was the entirety of my law career.

I later became a devotee of the people's court, and I still catch the occasional Judge Judy, and what struck me about the show was there would be plaintiffs who were sure they were right, but the judgement would go against them and the judge would explain that it didn't matter whether they were in the right or not, what mattered was what the law said.  This would seldom assuage them, because isn't what is right more important than what the law says?  And the simple answer is no..