This draft is puzzling, oddly argued and wildly vehement in the wrong places. Why bother arguing that the (essentially irrelevant) federal loan guarantee is the source of an obligation to teach well placed on law schools? If teachers can't find any other obligation to teach their students than the presence of government regulations reducing friction in the lending market, it should be apparent that there will be much social stress on other problems before one comes to the psychological discomfort produced in grade-grubbing Harvard, Yale or Columbia law students.

The wildness of the panic about debt, moreover, seems to me equally strained and unbelievable. If one didn't want to contract so much debt straight out of college, one could attend a cheaper law school, or work and save in order to pay more of one's own way. Once could, as I have suggested, work more effectively and profitably while in law school. Law school debt is smaller than most lawyers' home mortgages. If one were worrying about household debt levels in America—and one should—the debt levels of young lawyers would not be anywhere near the most worrisome.

But the essay's position isn't even that the debt is the problem. The problem is that the debt prevents the student from learning because the student is too worried about getting good grades. This, again, presents a tangle of confusions. Don't students who don't owe money worry about grades? Don't students who have no debt neglect the long-term educational benefit of mastering material in order to cram for the exam?

So it begins to appear as if the point about social responsibility and the point about the debt are both diversions, and that the real issue is about how learning is prevented by the exam. But isn't the point of the "issue spotter" that lawyers need to know the law comprehensively, so that they can translate what they are told by clients, witnesses and others into the physiology of claims and defenses: rights, duties, liabilities, immunities and privileges? The exam, in that sense, is a simulation of lawyers' experience, testing the budding lawyer's ability to translate from the factual language of life into the concepts and vocabulary of law, seeing what's relevant, discarding what is not, capturing a snapshot of the process from which all counseling, advising, litigating and legislating springs. The way to prepare for the exam is to learn the law, to read cases and see how facts are translated into the concepts of law, and to learn all the hallmarks of the issues that will arise in the analysis of situations presenting the fundamental forms of civil liability.

Which makes it appear that the point about the exam interfering with learning is also, partially, insubstantial. The essay, in short, reproduces its real subject, which is the paralysis of thought induced by panic. For myself, the real subject seems to be the unavailability of counseling and advising to help the student understand both her intellectual situation at the outset of law school and his material professional prospects in a changing society.

I don't know what to do with this draft in order to make it better. It seems to me to want fairly severe editing, to isolate the argument that really matters to you from the surrounding arguments pointed in other directions, and to present that argument coolly, without overstress, in its own social and intellectual context.