Harvard Law is the setting for the opening stage of Bryan Stevenson’s professional formation: an intimidating school whose abstract coursework first deepened his doubts about becoming a lawyer, but whose race-and-poverty litigation course connected legal study to social justice work. The contrast between classroom learning and field placement made the school both a source of disillusionment and the route to his first assignment with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee.

Studies and Uncertainty

Stevenson came to law after studying philosophy and realizing, late in college, that he had no clear career plan. He was drawn to law partly because it seemed possible to enter without already knowing a specialized field. At Harvard Law, he could study law while also pursuing a graduate degree in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. His interests were already oriented toward the lives of poor people, racial inequality, and fairness, but he had not yet found a way to turn those concerns into a career.

The transition from a small college in Pennsylvania to Harvard Law left him feeling fortunate to have been admitted but unsure that he belonged. By the end of his first year, at twenty-one, he had grown disillusioned. The Socratic method used by many professors meant direct, repetitive, adversarial questioning; for students who were unprepared, it could have the incidental effect of humiliation. The courses seemed esoteric and distant from the questions of race and poverty that had initially drawn him to law.

A Formidable Institutional Culture

Stevenson felt less experienced than classmates who already held advanced degrees or had worked as paralegals at prestigious firms. He had never met a lawyer before beginning law school. A month into classes, law firms arrived to interview students, many of whom prepared in expensive suits and sought trips to offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. The professional destination toward which his classmates appeared to be moving was, to him, a mystery.

His concurrent public-policy studies did not immediately resolve that estrangement. After spending the summer working with a juvenile justice project in Philadelphia and taking advanced calculus at night to prepare for the Kennedy School, he began a curriculum focused on quantitative methods such as decision theory and econometrics. It stimulated him intellectually, but its emphasis on maximizing benefits and minimizing costs seemed to give little attention to what those benefits achieved or what the costs created. The problem was not a lack of rigor; it was the distance he felt between institutional analysis and the human concerns that had motivated him.

The Course That Opened a Path

A practical alternative appeared in an unusual, intensive month-long course on race and poverty litigation taught by Betsy Bartholet, a professor who had worked as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Unlike most courses, it took students off campus and required them to spend the month with an organization doing social justice work. Stevenson eagerly enrolled. In December 1983, the course brought him to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to spend several weeks working with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee.

That placement carried him from the law school’s classroom into death-penalty work. On the flight to Atlanta, he met the committee’s director, Steve Bright, whose conviction about the work contrasted with Stevenson’s ambivalence. The course did not erase the gap between legal education and the realities Stevenson hoped to address; it gave him a way to cross it. Harvard Law thus marks the point where his study of law first became an encounter with the people and institutions that would shape his career.