Jack Brown ‘23
Staff Editor
We all have made our share of gunner accusations in our time in Law School. From mocking the person doing the reading with their firm offer in hand, to impersonating 1L study groups working through doctrinal classes together, we’ve all had a laugh at what we think gunning is.
But none of that is real gunning. Sure, at a lowly T-8 school, memorizing your professor’s hornbook before the start of 1L might be seen as out of the ordinary, but it pales in comparison to the true gunners that have left their mark on the legal profession. This article will take you through some true examples of excellence that we should all aspire to live up to.
Louis Brandeis
To start, yes, by default, anyone who reaches the Supreme Court qualifies as a gunner. No matter how often they talk about not being the smartest person in their class, how many social events they were involved in Law School, or how suspect their understanding of legal issues seem to be, they are, as a rule, gunners. But not all Supreme Court gunning is made equal.
Enter Louis Brandeis, the only Supreme Court Justice your NLG friend says wasn’t a spawn of Satan.[1] After spending his teenage years traveling Europe, he decided that the law was calling to him. To say he became a little unhinged is an understatement; at one point he referred to the law as his "mistress," holding a grip on him that he could not break.[2]
His obsession with reading law books got so intense that it began to have physical consequences. Worn out from overuse, his eyes began to deteriorate to the point that doctors suggested that Brandeis give up school to preserve what little vision he had left.[3] Unable to imagine a world where he didn’t spend countless hours reading about how judges solved simple scenarios, Louis instead paid other students to read out legal principles to him which he then memorized.[4]
This expensive form of outlining paid off, as Brandeis graduated first in his class at Harvard with a record-setting GPA that remained unmatched for almost eighty years. Brandeis said of that period: "Those years were among the happiest of my life. I worked! For me, the world's center was Cambridge."[5] The kid in your class who spends twenty minutes asking the professor bombastic questions after each lecture has nothing on Gunner Brandeis.
Gregory Watson
While Mr. Watson never was on the Supreme Court, at the top of his class, or even in law school, no one can deny his gunner credentials because to win an argument, he changed the Constitution of the United States. That’s right, the kid who brings up the comments when the professor says they’re wrong isn’t even in the same dimension as the great Gregory Watson.
His story begins in 1982. Gregory was a student at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote a paper for a political science course that argued an amendment proposed along with the Bill of Rights was still “live” and could be ratified by the states at any time. This amendment prevented Congress from enacting pay raises that would take effect before the next election. The professor gave this paper a C, which inspired Gregory to begin a letter writer campaign to state legislators.[6]
Over the next decade, one by one state legislatures began to ratify the amendment. Although he had already graduated and changing the grade wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, Gregory continued relentlessly lobbying for this amendment’s passage. His goal wasn’t just to get the Amendment passed; he wanted all fifty states to spend time ratifying it even though he just needed thirty eight states to prove his paper right.
Roughly a decade after getting his paper back, Gregory had actually done it. He had permanently changed possibly the most important legal document in human history to show the professor that he was right, and they were wrong. And you think someone visiting a professor's office hours three times to argue they deserve an A-triple plus is over the top?
While outside of this one obsession, Gregory Watson’s life lacked the consistent gunnerness of many famous judges, lawyers, professors, and crossword puzzle editors that come out of law school, it is the absurd scale of the one moment that earns him a spot in this article. One moment of sufficient exception from norms of humility can forever label you a blue-blooded gunner.
The Person Reading This Article
Ya, that’s right, you, the person reading this, you’re a gunner too. We all are here in a million different ways. Some of us really take well to the exam system and to the production of legal papers as a whole and channel our energy into developing that skill. Others gun by staying healthy, by staying present in their friend’s lives, by just getting through the day even when it's really hard to even get out of bed.
Every one of us works really hard every day, and it’s okay to be tired sometimes. Always remember that and never lose sight of how amazing you are.
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jwb4bb@virginia.edu
[1] This may change if there is a group of NLG students who might compete to see who can be the most woke; in that situation, Brandeis might be labeled as no better than Scalia.
[2] Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (1984).
[3] John R. Vile, Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia (2003).
[4] Diana Klebanow, & Franklin L. Jonas, People's Lawyers: Crusaders for Justice in American History (2003).
[5] Thomas A. Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946).
[6] John W. Dean, The Telling Tale of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. FindLaw, (Sept. 27, 2002), https://supreme.findlaw.com/legal-commentary/the-telling-tale-of-the-twenty-seventh-amendment.html.