BOOK REVIEW : A Reporter’s Undercover Look at Rigors of 1st-Year Law School : ANARCHY AND ELEGANCE <i> by Chris Goodrich</i> . Little, Brown; $18.95, 288 pages

In 1986, Chris Goodrich, a free-lance reporter in California, returned to his alma mater, Yale College, on a one-year fellowship to study law. Much like an undercover investigative reporter, he has fashioned his odyssey through first-year legal training at one of America’s most prestigious institutions as a scathing expose intended “to probe law with its own tools and see how it measured up to the standards it set for everybody else.”

Goodrich divides “Anarchy and Elegance” into three acts because he believes the experience of law school resembles “a staged event” or bad theater.

In the first act, “Disorientation,” the deans at America’s most selective and “philosophical” law school inform incoming students that Yale discourages divisive competition and emphasizes caring and cooperation. One even remarks: “You don’t have to get a notch ahead of anyone else.” But what Goodrich discovered in his first class on Procedure, he says, was a bullying professor--”an equal opportunity offender”--who practiced a subtle form of “brainwashing” aimed at breaking down students’ confidence. “There are plays within plays within plays,” this professor tells his charges. “If you’re lucky, the substance of the case might come through.”

That substance, which Goodrich refers to as “anarchy” (life in all its glorious confusion) consists of “facts--messy, inconsistent, often downright ugly,” that in the hyper-intellectual, unemotional atmosphere at Yale “were trimmed, highlighted, or ignored in order to make law work smoothly” as a self-contained “elegant” system.

Although he benefited from long hours devoted to case studies, a class in Torts taught by one of Yale’s more compassionate professors, an assignment in library research and moot court, Goodrich believes that, “our professors wanted us to get lost in the legal wasteland, apparently, so we would treasure lawyerly skills when mastery finally came . . . law school was intended to confuse, to intimidate, ultimately to indoctrinate.”

For Goodrich this indoctrination into “law-think,” a discipline that “sharpens the mind by narrowing it,” is insidious for two reasons, one personal, the other in respect to the integrity of the legal system itself. “Two months of law school had helped me speak better, analyze more deeply, think more logically,” he says, but “law had made me less human . . . I was more assertive and skeptical in my daily doings.”

When he is in the company of his old friends he discovers that “I found myself attempting to establish a pecking order right off the bat . . . I didn’t want to share a moment of friendship; I wanted to lock horns, to show my stuff, even to intimidate.”

If law training alienates the lawyer from his “inner self,” says Goodrich, it does a worse disservice to the public because “it encouraged people to be morally lazy, to hand over their social responsibilities to the legal class, who then reshaped society, to a large extent, in their image and interests. . . . Do we really want the United States to be run, in effect, by a group of people trained to think quite differently from the rest of us, especially when that training entails the inculcation of (in Tocqueville’s words) a ‘secret contempt of the government of the people’?”

During this 288-page tirade against the legal profession, Goodrich does admit that “law did a creditable job of guiding society into the future. . . . Though the legal system worked slowly and obliquely, it did tend to be self-correcting; and with the Constitution to rely on, law couldn’t stray too far from its founding principles.”

He is even willing to wonder if the specialized focus of law is shared by other disciplines: “Wasn’t every professional school--medicine, architecture, business, journalism, you name it--in many ways designed to teach students how to empower themselves, to master at least some portion of the world,” through a rigor that separates them from those who have not studied that particular trade?

For readers predisposed to see lawyers as an elitist class unable to “distinguish truth from self-interest,” “Anarchy and Elegance” will probably confirm their suspicions about the law. But for those who teach, unfortunately, Goodrich’s report on his time in law school will sound a bit like the perennial, sour-grapes complaint of students whose expectations are frustrated by their first year of study, and who, in order to save face, must portray themselves as wiser than their professors and peers who push on in the field.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia” by Stephen J. Pyne (Henry Holt).