When I was a little girl, my parents watched this series on Showtime called “The Paper Chase” (based on a movie of the same name), which was about a group of first year law students at Harvard studying (in highly dramatized fashion, of course, because watching people study is generally quite snooze-inducing) and otherwise trying their best to survive law school life.   John Houseman, who won an Oscar for the movie, played the brilliant contracts professor who wielded the Socratic Method like a knife (think those dancing fighters at the end of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video … menacing but choreographed to make the point (and, I note, parodied to excellent effect in the movie Undercover Brother)):

“The Paper Chase” was my first exposure to law school, and while I didn’t fully understand everything that was going on, I thought going head-to-head in a battle of wits with a stodgy‎ but incredibly clever professor and then cramming all night to ace an exam seemed super-cool and grown-up (yeah, I was a total nerd).

Fast-forward 14 years, and after being put on the path with those early episodes of “The Paper Chase,” which path became even clearer to me after I spent almost every weekend of high school at a debate tournament, I finally ended up in law school.  I’ve been thinking a lot about law school this week because of post-election discussions about a myriad of legal-related topics … for example, what’s going to happen to the Supreme Court and whether some key decisions can be reversed, whether certain recent legislation can be repealed, and even the fate of the Electoral College.

So with law school going through my head, I had to wear what I call my “Paper Chase” outfit … an Altuzarra suede skirt with gold-tone buttons that I got from Net-a-Porter (http://www.net-a-porter.com), a striped Equipment blouse I got from Neiman Marcus (http://www.neimanmarcus.com), and camel-colored Christian Louboutin knee boots I got from Saks Fifth Avenue (http://www.saks.com).  I feel like I should grab my outlines and head to study group whenever I wear this.

And that brings me to my final observation … my favorite subject in law school was First Amendment law (in fact, I even have a t-shirt with the First Amendment written on it, which I plan on featuring one day in a blog post called “My Favorite T-Shirts,” which will also include my periodic table of the elements t-shirt and my David Bowie/Labyrinth t-shirt).  One thing that has stuck with me throughout all these years is Justice Brandeis’s observation from Whitney v. California that the “remedy to be applied [to speech we do not agree with] is more speech, not enforced silence.”  A lot was said during this election that shocked and surprised people, and issues that seem to have festered unspoken just below the surface are now out there.  The conversation needs to be civil, of course, but there should be conversation.  Let’s use this as an opportunity to keep talking …