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My favorite professor at Boston University Law School was Clark Byse, my contract law professor.

Professor Byse was ancient even when I was a student. He was one of President Roosevelt's New Dealers and worked as a staff attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Fifties. He had some small involvement in the congressional investigations of the game show scandals and shows up as a very minor character in the movie Quiz Show. He was also rumored to be the inspiration for Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase.

Professor Byse used an elaborate procedure to call on students in class. He would begin by squinting through his glasses in your general direction. He would then point a finger at you, moving his finger in a circle around your face to focus on your features. Looking down at his seating chart, which had a picture of each of us, he would compare your features with his picture, grimacing slightly if they didn't agree. He would look up at you, down at the picture, back and forth, until he was assured that you were actually the person pictured in his chart. Finally, after inflicting this pure torture for a couple of minutes, he called out your name and asked you a question that you had no hope of answering correctly.

I don't remember much of what I learned in Contracts, but I do remember one lesson. As first-year law students, we naively believed that courts impartially applied The Law to the facts of each case and that the facts compelled each decision. The court seemed to reach into an imaginary top hat like a magician and pull out whatever was inside. Professor Byse suggested that appellate decision-making was nothing more than an act. Like the magician, the appellate court put the rabbit into the hat to begin with by choosing facts from the case that allowed it to come to a desired result. For me, this was a revelation.

Without being too cynical, I note that this week's episode of The Practice was the same type of magic act.

The attorneys of Donnell, Young, Frutt & Dole are working furiously to defend Dennis Mills from a charge of first-degree murder. The evidence seems overwhelming: the victim, Stacy Kingman, was found in the trunk of Mills's car; the murder weapon was found in Mills's house; Mills admits to e-mailing the victim particularly dark and perverted pornographic message that contained veiled references to murder; a photograph suggests that Mills met the victim days before the murder; and the victim's eyeglasses have Mills's fingerprints on them. Lindsay ("I need more SEX") Dole and crew have blunted each piece of evidence except the last. They cannot explain Mills's fingerprints on the eyeglasses, which were found in a locked drawer.

In the last scene, a la Perry Mason, Dole pulls the rabbit from the hat when she realizes that Mills's wife has the same type of eyeglasses as those worn by the victim. You can virtually see the light bulb go on over Dole's head as the wife, on the stand, is reading one of the e-mail messages. Dole realizes that Mills and the victim did not have an affair. Rather, Mills's wife was having an affair with the victim's husband, Zachary Kingman. When Mills's wife learned that her husband Dennis had a predilection for writing nasty e-mails, she had Zachary correspond with Dennis while pretending to be Stacy (Zachary's wife, the victim), and had Dennis handle Stacy's eyeglasses. She and Zachary then murdered Stacy and framed Dennis. Got that?

I thought that this episode was somewhat unfair, like many whodunits and magic acts, since the viewer is not given enough facts to solve the mystery. I had other complaints about the show, too. For instance, when Dole confronts the wife, the wife refuses to testify on the grounds that she might incriminate herself. The wife is willing to have an affair, murder her lover's wife, and set up her husband on a first-degree murder charge-but she has qualms about lying under oath? With so much focus on the victim's eyeglasses, the husband never noticed that they look like his wife's?

I had fewer quibbles with the trial scenes. The openings, the direct and cross-examinations, and the evidentiary rulings were all fairly accurate. The scene where Dole picks up all her marbles and threatens to go home is a stretch--but possible, I suppose. It is much less likely that the trial judge would have taken the case away from the jury before the jury reached a verdict. Although a judge is empowered to find reasonable doubt as a matter of law-as Judge Zobel did in the Louise Woodward case here in Boston-the judge would almost always do so after the jury had completed its deliberations.

What has always struck me about the California court system is its love of procedure. Like the attorneys at Donnell, Young, Frutt & Dole, I worked on a case filed in Los Angeles County. In response to one of our requests, the opposing party produced a gazillion pages of documents for us to review. Five of us packed our bags and headed west to sift through the piles. We stayed at a downtown hotel, played tennis in the afternoons, went out to Mexican restaurants for dinner. We also looked at some documents.

Here's what I noticed about people on the West Coast. They have a reverence for rules and procedures that Bostonians don't share. While I was walking around downtown L.A. to take in a little color (and waste copious amounts of time), I noticed that everyone crossed streets at corners and waited for lights to change. Once, five of us hailed a cab and piled in. The driver informed us that the limit was four passengers. We assured him that we were lawyers and that it was okay, but, nope, everyone out of the cab. The driver would not break the rule. Not so here in Boston, where people pay no mind to such things.

The L.A. courts were also obsessed with rules and procedures. There are rules for the size of the margins, the placement of the caption, the font that can be used, the page length of your brief. Breach any of these rules and your complaint, brief, or other document gets returned to you.

In Boston, we have rules, but they do not rule our practice. Try writing an episode of The Practice around that sometime.

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