A Law School Story of Love and Laughter

Back-to-school time and the law blogs are full of stories from the greatest back-to-school sale of all time (the entire inaugural class at the new UC Irvine law school has a three-year free ride through a program that looks to balance thinking with doing) to whether a bright 19-year-old should be going to law school (her statement “I don’t consider my academic situation to be a defining point of my life” tells me she has more emotional intelligence than many folks she will encounter in law school).

This is a good time to drop in a post about the beginning of my law journey at the University of Texas School of Law. The most important thing you need to know about my time at UT Law is that I fell in love with the blonde who sat in the row behind me throughout our rigidly structured first year. I was a T, she was a W.

You can see her picture here. There is no hyperlink--I really mean here. Look at the top the page. That’s Candace. We married a week after graduating law school and four days later we moved to Colorado. Candace is my partner in everything other than the practice of law and in that she is my ground. She helps me keep it all in perspective. I love you CW.

Eyebeam is another fact of my legal education I would like to share with you.

Decades before suffering law students would use the internet for sharing anxieties and anger, the highs, lows and lowers of my law school experience were played out daily in four black and white newsprint panels. Candace and I were classmates with Sam Hurt. Sam, as an undergrad, created the cartoon Eyebeam and The Daily Texan, the UT newspaper, published it. When Sam was admitted to the law school, Eyebeam went with him.

Several years would pass before I would fully understand the great gift of having a comic chronicler in our midst. Seeing our angst, our foibles, our parties through Eyebeam's lens gave us reason to laugh at ourselves, an invaluable lesson for lawyers-to-be.

So for my guest contributor Red, for 19-year-old Kate McLaughlin, and for everyone starting law school, here are some of my favorite Eyebeams from 1980-1983--click on the strips to enlarge them. They are as relevant today as they were then. Good luck in law school. Just remember to laugh.

Thank you, Sam, for the laughter--the greatest death-ray of them all. You can learn more about Sam Hurt here and see more new and old Eyebeams on this site and in the weekly Austin Chronicle.

And thank you, Candace, for everything.