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selective review is made of appellate decisions. Typically, a supreme court will hear only cases of broad significance or ones in which the law on point is especially murky.
    Henley told us that almost every appellate and supreme court decision made in the United States, whether in state or federal courts, is published, and he showed us the various shorthand citations used to indicate where each case can be found in the endless series of report volumes issued by the states and by private publishers. By the time Henley had finished those explanations, and had gone briefly over the Monge opinion itself, he had made things clear enough for me to feel some real pleasure in recognizing how much order had followed on what had previously seemed befuddling and complex.
    And yet the experience of having been so confounded the night before had a definite effect on me. The first year of law school was no longer something I’d heard tales about and was trying to imagine. I knew for myself now how frustrated, how sheerly incapable of doing what I was supposed to, I was liable to feel. I tried to take it with good humor but that realization also touched me with the first genuine wisps of fear.
    At one o’clock, the Methods group met with our BSA advisor, Peter Geocaris, to hear his suggestions on what we should expect in the next few days. Peter attempted to lay things out fairly, advantages and drawbacks, and in light of my experience the night before, I tried to pay some attention to his occasional warnings. Regarding classmates, for instance, he reminded us of our mutual talents and the amount we could learn from each other. But he also described the peer pressures which would soon develop, to perform well in class, and the race which he said would begin in each section to make the Law Review.
    Among our teachers, too, Peter indicated that we would find both dark spots and bright. The overall quality of teaching was high, Peter said, but certain individuals were more agreeable than others. On the more positive side seemed to be Nicky Morris.
    â€œHe’s thirty-one and he’s easygoing,” Peter said, “and he is very, very smart.” Morris, Geocaris told us, had graduated from the Harvard Law School when he was twenty-three years old. He had been first in his class, president of the Law Review, and had attained the highest academic average since Felix Frankfurter was a law student. After that, he had been a clerk to one of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court for a year, then counsel to United Farm Workers, before he’d begun teaching. “Nobody has ever called him a slow learner,” Peter added.
    About our Torts professor, William Zechman, Peter knew almost nothing, except that he was returning to teaching after a long absence. But Peter had had a class the year before with our Criminal Law teacher, Bertram Mann, and he was not enthusiastic. Mann was the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was well-informed, Peter said, yet often confusing in class.
    But the direst warning of all was reserved for Perini.
    â€œHe’s a great teacher,” Peter told us, “but not an easy one. When I was a 1L, the first person he called on was a national champion debater and Perini had him on his back in forty seconds.”
    Always be prepared for that class, Geocaris advised. Know what every word in a case means; and if your study has been shoddy, don’t bother to show up: it would be a long time before you forgot the humiliation of being caught unready.
    The lecture on the library which we heard next was full of the same mixture of good news and bad omens. The librarian nimbly described where the important books were located and when and why we would want to use them—the sets of state laws, the volumes of case reports, the treatises and encyclopedias and journals, the gargantuan indices which could help you sort your way through all of that. If you knew what