Memphis State Law School

Memphis State Law School is where Rudy Baylor approaches graduation believing that his legal education has left him poorly prepared for the work of law. Its courses promise exposure to real clients and public service, but his first encounters with people in need reveal how wide the gap can be between classroom learning and the responsibility clients place in a future lawyer.

Courses and Ideals

Rudy is a third-year student with graduation thirty-eight days away when he takes Professor Howard L. Smoot’s elective on legal problems affecting older people. The course is not required, counts for only two hours, and has dwindled from eleven students to four after a month of lectures and appeals to work for free. Smoot also teaches subjects such as Children’s Rights, Law of the Disabled, Seminar on Domestic Violence, and Problems of the Mentally Ill—courses that, in his view, serve people whose legal needs are often neglected.

Smoot presents the class as a corrective to the professional habits law school can cultivate. He believes students arrive with idealism and a wish to serve the public, then emerge focused on landing the right job, making partner, and earning well. Rudy thinks Smoot is right, even as he admits that he chose the course partly because it required little work. By this point, he hates law school and has serious doubts about practicing law.

First Contact with Clients

The course puts Rudy and his law-school friend Booker Kane in front of older clients with actual legal problems. Rudy is terrified by the contrast between his status as a student and the confidence the clients seem to place in him: a dark suit, a legal pad, and the appearance of concentration can make him look capable when he does not feel capable. He is confronted with the practical and ethical weight of client work before he feels ready for it.

Among the problems he encounters is Dot Black’s claim against Great Benefit Life Insurance Company, which has refused to pay for treatment for her son Donny Ray Black’s leukemia. Rudy initially plans to review the documents, consult Professor Howard L. Smoot, and send the family to an experienced insurance lawyer. After researching the matter, he advises Dot to sue, but he remains a student who has not yet been admitted to practice. Their encounter makes the school’s promise of real-world exposure consequential: the client’s need is urgent, while the student’s authority and experience are limited.

Library and the Approach of Practice

The school’s library is both a refuge and a workplace for Rudy. After a night without sleep, he slips into the building after his scheduled classes have ended and hides in a remote corner of the basement. He plans to wait until the school empties before going to the Placement Office to ask for help finding legal work. The scene places the library between his student routine and an uncertain professional future: he is still using the institution’s resources, but already trying to work out what comes next.

Rudy’s earlier research for Dot’s case also depends on the library. He spends hours reviewing her records and days studying the law before recommending suit. At Dot’s home, he explains that he cannot yet sign an agreement to represent her because he has not passed the bar and received a license. The distinction between knowing enough to offer advice and having legal authority to act becomes a practical boundary, not an abstract lesson.

Limits of Legal Education

Rudy’s judgment of the school is shaped by the demands he faces outside its curriculum. He believes that three years of lectures, cases, and statutes have not prepared him as effectively as sustained training under a good lawyer would have. He is nervous about basic legal problems and frightened of the bar exam, which he associates with the possibility of unemployment and financial ruin.

The school is therefore not simply a place Rudy leaves behind: its elective course brings him face to face with people who need help, and its library gives him a place to research and regroup. But the same experiences sharpen his sense of what education has not supplied. For Rudy, the distance between learning law and being able to practice it is measured in the trust of clients such as Dot, the limits on what an unlicensed student may do, and the uncertainty waiting beyond graduation.