The “book” would have been me, on my first day of law school in 1978.

My hair had not been cut since 1969 when I started high school. By late 1978 I had a long, full beard that rivaled the guys from ZZ Top. My wardrobe consisted of brightly-colored African-style dashikis with jeans, or else black T-shirts and a leather jacket.

Unfortunately, a few days before law school started I was smoking a cigarette outdoors and the wind blew a bit of the lit end into my eye. I went off to the doctor, who treated the minor corneal burn with some orange-colored solution which leaked around the edges, staining the skin, and did not wash off in the shower, and he gave me a large black eyepatch to wear for 10 days. Top this off with the fact that I’ve always been a pretty big guy.

So perhaps you can image what the faculty and students must have thought of me when I showed up for first-year orientation. Yes, I looked pretty much like the King of the Wild Man Outlaw Bikers, and nobody wanted to sit near me. I didn’t know anyone in the class (although I had two friends in second and third year, but our schedules did not overlap) so nobody talked to me, either.

It took several weeks (at least) for people’s initial assessment to be overcome. I was the most talkative student in Contracts and Evidence, and held my own in Property and Criminal Law. At the end of the year I won the Contracts prize for best final exam paper, as well as the participation award, and was ranked in the top 10% in the class of several hundred.

At the end of first year, I was offered the chance to transfer to a much better-known and high ranking law school, but each of my teachers, as well as the Dean and several students convinced me to stay, which I did, out of loyalty and friendship. It’s true that I was pretty far from the cultural median of the class: this was a commuter school with many students who were in law enforcement or accounting; some were married and had children, whereas I had just spent the last 4 years at Berkeley, where I still lived. (If you remember the 1970s, that should be self-explanatory.)