Confessions of an Economist Killer: A Reply to Kronman's Lost Lawyer
![handle is hein.journals/illlr89 and id is 1612 raw text is: Copyright 1995 by Northwestern University, School of Law Printed in U.S.A.
Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 89, No. 4
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIST KILLER: A REPLY TO KRONMAN'S
LOST LAWYER
THE LOST LAWYER: FAILING IDEALS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION. By
Anthony T. Kronman.t Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap
Press, 1993. Pp. 422. $35.00.
Reviewed by Michael Livingston*
In my middle year of law school, I gathered with fellow students
for the annual Christmas show-the so-called law revue-at which
students poked fun at faculty, administrators, and themselves. It was
the holiday season and there was a festive mood in the air. The
master of ceremonies, a popular third year student, approached the
microphone and asked that the crowd settle down. Before the show
began, she wanted to sing a song to put us in the appropriate mood.
When the audience fell quiet, she sang it: Suicide is Painless, the
theme song from the TV show M*A*S*H, a nihilistic dirge that serves
as background music as helicopters ferry wounded soldiers back to a
Korean War base:
The game of life is hard to play
Gonna lose it anyway...
[But] suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please...'
I have thought about this choice many times in the intervening
years. Why would a student introduce a festive occasion with such a
morbid, defeatist song? Was the life that awaited a Yale Law graduate
in the early 1980s truly that depressing? Or was the student merely
posturing, adopting a tone of false sophistication that teachers (and
fellow students) had taught her was appropriate? Why did no one,
including myself, consider the song inappropriate at the time?
t Professor Kromnan is the Dean and Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law, Yale Law School.
* Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers-Camden School of Law. A.B., 1977, Cornell; J.D.,
1981, Yale. The author would like to thank Joan Arnold, Bill Blatt, Carl Bogus, Linda Bosniak,
Perry Dane, Roger Dennis, Jay Feinman, David Frankford, Harold Hirsch, Nancy Moore, Dan
Shaviro, and Anne Weiss for helpful comments on a previous draft of this essay. Special thanks
to Barbara Brigham and Laura Daria for their inspired research assistance. The author served
as a Legislation Attorney with the Joint Committee on Taxation from 1983 to 1987.
1 MKE ALTMAN & JOHNNY MANDEL, SUICIDE is PAINLESs (WB Music Corp. 1970).
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Confessions of an Economist Killer: A Reply to Kronman's Lost Lawyer
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