The most important lesson I've learned over the course of the past three weeks is the power of the personal--the personal story, the personal connection, the personal reaction. What's most interesting, and most frightening, to me is that this isn't a new lesson. It's something I knew when I was younger--something I'd lost sight of over the course of my three years at Harvard Law.

When did I lose touch with reality? When did we buy into the mantra of this institution--that the key to success in the law lies solely in the mind, and not in the heart? We can answer your "plug-and-chug" evidence questions with ease. Did you notice how class flew by when you stood before us, your textbook in hand, asking rapid-fire questions about hearsay? You were the Socratic professor, and we your obliging students. We were in a rhythm.

But then you asked us why we weren't bothered by Vinnie's deception of the court with regard to his identity. You asked us why the judge's bifurcation of the Woburn trial, which excluded the narrative of the families, was the death knell of the plaintiffs' case. You told us, with uncanny accuracy, what we were thinking when we saw the first close-up photos of the bullet-ridden corpses. You asked us what your obligation was, as a professor and as a human being, when your own emotions became so overwhelming that to teach in a manner detached from these emotions would be to lie. You tried to link the tension in your own life with the tension between law and science.

We answered you tentatively. Or not at all.

We stared, awkward and embarrassed, at this heretic before us. How dare you upset the apple cart! We're 2-Ls and 3-Ls now, learned in the ways of smiling without joy, of repeating without conviction. We know the system, know how to play the game, and we want to get on with it.

Except.

Except we knew that we were failing you. We knew that you were offering us something else. Something intimate. You opened yourself to us, and we responded with silence, with resentment and with a few awkward references to your heresy in our skits. We're so very clever and witty, you see. We can't accept your intimacy for what it is, so please observe as your poems and confessions become a joke for us to titter over on the last day of class.

Be grateful. At least your name isn't Cheeseman.

So let me tell you now what lesson one might have re-discovered in your class. Let me answer your questions.

We weren't bothered by Vinnie's deception because we liked him, and we related to him. The movie is his story. We didn't really know the judge, and didn't care for what we did see, so we subverted the objective, legal "right" to conform with our innate sense of what we wanted to be right. Our answer preceded our analysis.

The judge's bifurcation of the Woburn trial robbed the victims of their faces. It was Richard Aufiero's deposition, in which he detailed his son Jarrod's death, that convinced Facher that Anderson v. Grace was a case he likely couldn't win before a jury. Not the TCE levels, the hydrological evidence, or the medical reports, but the story of a little boy who died in his father's car on the way to the hospital. To have previously studied this case without discussing the importance of the families' stories is madness!

The admissibility of the murder-scene photographs in the film you produced cannot be severed from our personal reactions to them. Reasonable people can argue over their probative and prejudicial qualities, but the emotions I felt running through our classroom when the second picture hit the screen were powerful and frightening. As the relative of a victim, I would cry out for my loved one's story to be told in whatever way might make each juror feel the depth of my loss. As a defendant, I would literally tremble at the thought of such pictures and the emotions they inflame. How to answer the silent accusation of the dead?

I thought of this again when I heard the stories of those who had been tortured in Argentina and Chile. I am still haunted by the image of a faceless young girl, and her "memorable way of howling" during torture. The story had a power over me that I cannot explain. That night, I was afraid to tell my wife the details and so I responded to her questions regarding my demeanor with, "I just heard a terrible story today." She understood.

Your last question, about the line between your personal life and your teaching, I answered more fully in my note to you that day than I can do here. I think that there is a value all its own in a strong man admitting his vulnerability. I wish we had been more gracious.

I leave the class with what I came for. The rules and methods of evidence are tools, and can be learned by rote and practice. But the blueprint, the evolving design of the story, is all too often overlooked by those cobbling and hammering away at an argument. I will not lose sight of the blueprint.