Hillbilly Elegy

“Yeah, he speaks at Yale all the time,” a
friend told me. “His son is an
undergraduate.” A few days after that, I
nearly bumped into a man as I turned a
corner to walk into the law school’s
main entrance. I said, “Excuse me,”
looked up, and realized the man was
New York governor George Pataki.
These sorts of things happened at least
once a week. Yale Law School was like
nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped
feeling like an awestruck tourist.
The first semester was structured in
a way to make life easy on students.
While my friends in other law schools
were overwhelmed with work and
worrying about strict grading curves that