COLUMN ONE : ‘O.J. 101’ Enlivens Law School : Campuses across U.S. are using the famous case to teach basic principles. Judge Ito even asked to see Harvard students’ opinions on whether to ban the TV camera.

When Harvard professors Charles Nesson and Peter Murray were asked to overhaul “Introduction to Lawyering” for incoming students, their first decision was to put the 540 newcomers on-line, so they could punch up Supreme Court opinions and communicate by E-mail.

The class thus got its first subtitle: “Cyberlaw: A Course of Skills in Mind and Practice.”

But that still left the professors with case material that had been used by Harvard’s first-year, or “1L,” law students for ages to learn such basics as how to write a legal brief: A woman stumbles in front of a drunk driver--can her heirs sue the bar that tanked him up? That sort of thing.

The canned cases had Nesson shaking his head.

“All I can think of,” he confided to Murray, “is O.J.”

Bingo. Harvard’s introductory class got a second subtitle: “The Law and O.J. Simpson.”

From the start of the fall semester, the 1Ls have been taught the fundamentals through the legal machinations taking place 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles Superior Court. They were given a reading list that included “Juice: The O.J. Simpson Tragedy” by the Globe supermarket tabloid. And they are tapped into “O.J. Info-bases” as well as Supreme Court rulings.

It was hardly what the lawyers-to-be expected in the ivy-covered halls of Harvard. But as computer bulletin boards put them in touch with students elsewhere, they found that their professors were not the only ones who had decided that a case often derided for its sensationalism might be a godsend for the serious study of law.

Indeed, it has become an instant ingredient in the curriculum from Yale to UCLA. The trial is being offered up as Exhibit A to spur discussions of relevance, hearsay, weight of evidence, search-and-seizure, expert testimony, impeachment of witnesses, media access . . . the list goes on.

As Robert L. Shapiro and Marcia Clark quizzed prospective jurors on the ninth floor of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building, students at the University of San Francisco were conducting their own voir dire in a moot court. Some took the roles of defense lawyers and prosecutors while others were potential jurors being probed on their attitudes toward DNA evidence.

Nowhere has the case played such a central role, however, as at Harvard, alma mater of four of the nine Supreme Court justices. Last month the trial became more than an academic exercise here when Judge Lance A. Ito got word of the 1L course and had a clerk call Nesson.

The next day, Oct. 12, the professor rushed out a notice reporting that Ito “would like to receive copies of our best student memoranda on the questions the judge now faces in determining whether to ban cameras from the courtroom.”

With Ito having already scheduled a hearing on the issue for today, 150 students were mobilized, in 59 small groups, to write memos.

“When we started,” says Murray, “no one would have guessed that we would not only study the case, but become part of the case.”

*

A videotape plays on a screen in front of the Austin North lecture hall as 135 students filter into the amphitheater that has hosted Harvard law classes for a century.

The video shows law school alumni at a reunion seminar. “What were they talking about?” Murray asks. “O.J.!”

The old graduates’ interest is reassuring to Nesson and Murray. They had felt some trepidation about using a sexy, media-darling case of the moment in a school known for its stern traditionalism--exemplified by the mythical Prof. Kingsfield of “The Paper Chase.”

Nesson, 55, has been a professor here for nearly three decades, though hardly in the Kingsfield mold--he eschews coats and ties for turtlenecks and uses the computer sign-on “Eon.” He tells the students that one 79-year-old alumnus, Harold Brown, had written a memo to provoke debate at his 55th reunion--and picked the very “Ito issue” they were tackling.

Brown reviewed sensational trials in the past 100 years (Scopes and Lizzie Borden, among others) and concluded that the Simpson case highlighted a disturbing new development, “the entertainment defense,” marked by “dramatic manipulation of the public.”

But today’s class hardly centers on such a broad question. Facing the students is the nitty-gritty of law: the writing of a brief.

A “Power Points” slide pops on the screen, and Murray tells how even the smallest feature of a brief--section headings, say--must advance the “core theory.”

So what pops on the screen next? An actual heading from the district attorney’s brief defending the search of Simpson’s home after the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

The heading begins, “Exigent Circumstances Justified the Warrantless Search Onto the Premises at 360 Rockingham. . . .”

The professors become legal sharpshooters. Murray praises how the language “depersonalized” Simpson’s home into a “premises.” But, as he sees it, the prosecutors otherwise blew a chance to underscore the need to immediately get into the estate because of “concern over the safety of the occupants.”

And the defense? Talk of wasted opportunities! The same section of its brief was headed: “Exigent Circumstances.” That’s it. Two words.

“An argument without an argument!” Murray laments--when the defense could have pointed out how there was “no emergency” compelling police to leap into Simpson’s home (not an anonymous premises) and how it was “a whole lot of detectives going in to get the goods on somebody.”

Soon the class is examining other headings in the briefs and asking, “How can we try to rewrite it?”

The bottom line is a process more brutal than any media grilling. Virtually every word written by the legal teams in L.A., in the heat of battle, is going to be torn apart and second-guessed by two Harvard professors and 540 students--many of whom next semester will themselves face the critical eye of one of Simpson’s attorneys, criminal law professor Alan Dershowitz.

*

For decades, American law schools have used a top-down approach, one that focuses on the cases that generated key Supreme Court rulings over the years.

But the era of Court TV has provided raw material hard to ignore. What better way is there to illustrate how two sides in a case portray the same facts differently than showing the Rodney G. King videotape? To the prosecution, it’s clear brutality. To the defense, “textbook” police work.

USC professor Charles Whitebread, who is using the Simpson case in a criminal procedure class, sees trade-offs in de-emphasizing the “canned cases in the textbook.”

Textbook cases “are useful for clearing away facts” and focusing on legal principles, he says. Live cases, though, remind students how “factual issues may often be muddy in a real case”--and how results turn on quirks of the facts as often as on abstract principles.

“It makes the class more relevant,” says USC law student Tara Kelly. “It’s not like something that happened 100 years ago.”

Yale professor Kate Stith starts her criminal law course by writing well-known defendants’ names on a blackboard. Last year, they included Lorena Bobbitt, the Menendez brothers and Bernard Goetz.

Stith reminds her students that none were convicted of the worst charges they faced--and asks why.

Though the students inevitably “have some notions that are too facile,” Stith says, “the truth is (they) already know a lot about criminal law when they walk in the classroom. Discussing these cases . . . makes them feel they belong there from the first day.”

Her students will find a new name on the blackboard this year.

UCLA’s Peter Arenella has used Simpson proceedings to illustrate “the importance of strategic decisions by a lawyer,” such as whether to contest the search of Simpson’s home at the preliminary hearing or wait to do it in Superior Court, when the defense has more evidence to challenge police actions.

Arenella, who has served as a TV legal analyst on the Simpson trial, is nevertheless wary of overusing a case that, because of the resources, “does not provide an accurate window into how our criminal justice system usually operates. Students need to be reminded that, in the typical criminal prosecution, there is far less litigation in the pretrial process and (it) does not end with a trial--but with a plea bargain in 90% of the cases.”

Of course, the fact that Simpson lawyers can afford battles on every constitutional and evidentiary issue is exactly what generates fodder for the classroom.

At the University of San Francisco, Robert E. Talbot has used the case in an orientation program for minority students--to introduce concepts such as mens rea , mental state--and in the moot court for his “Science and Litigation” seminar.

“Let’s face it, murder is interesting,” Talbot says. “They don’t have a TV show called, ‘Civil Procedure, She Wrote.’ ”

But most legal issues have dissenters, and Loyola Law School’s Sam Pillsbury remains skeptical of the pedagogical value of the Simpson case; he’s not convinced it has captured students’ imagination.

Why not? Pillsbury says his students generally look forward to careers in civil law, meaning “it’s not the kind of law most of them see themselves practicing. Most law students, especially with the loans they have now, are expecting to go out and make more money than you do as a criminal lawyer.”

*

Harvard student teacher Greg Duhl, a 3L, is planning a career in “exciting tax law,” but that hasn’t kept him from getting swept up in O.J. mania. When he was a 1L, his class was given the drunk driving material based on a settled New York case. He envies the current 1Ls who have material so fresh “it’s like they’re the lawyers in the case.”

On this afternoon, Duhl, in blue jeans and a baseball cap, leads a workshop for a dozen 1Ls. He begins with a rumor--that the professors are “sending all 59 Ito memos to Ito.”

A week earlier, the 1Ls had been asked to research issues such as: What are the limits of a judge’s power to ban TV coverage in court? Can he control media activity outside court? Is there a constitutional “right to know” that affects his rulings?

Now, one 1L seems nervous that all the memos, including hers, may be read by Ito. “Did someone, like, look over them?” she asks.

Duhl nods. “Some were really good,” he says. “And some. . . . “

Well, one memo had a footnote that went a page and a half, listing every case affirming judges’ discretion to ban cameras. Another had a novel idea, Duhl says: that rather than have TV crews tape the trial, Ito “puts his own camera in the court, then he sells the tape.”

The students laugh, until he cuts them off with, “Let’s start!”

The seminar is designed to help the 1Ls while they write briefs on issues such as the admissibility of 911 tapes that apparently capture Simpson yelling at his ex-wife.

The 1Ls are told they must learn to present facts “from a particular point of view.” To show that some Harvard traditions refuse to die, they try it first not with O.J. material, but “mythological cases.”

They will argue the facts of Goldilocks vs. The Three Bears. The bears are suing for trespass.

The future legal leaders break into groups, then begin the argument:

“We the bears came home to find that our house had been broken into, that our porridge had been eaten, our beds had been slept in, our prized baby chair had been broken,” says Nalini Pande of McLean, Va., speaking for the plaintiffs. She also claims that Mama Bear had suffered emotional distress.

But Rachel Blum of Philadelphia dismisses the incident as “simple error” by Goldilocks, a poor housekeeper who accidentally wandered into the wrong home and only fell asleep in the bears’ bed because “she has narcolepsy.”

“I assume you have medical proof?” the other side calls out.

“Oh sure. If you have proof of trauma.”

Both sides laugh and go back into groups--to hash out competing portrayals of the 911 tape.

*

A week later, the 1Ls are back in the lecture hall.

In the rear are boxes of reprints of the memos just sent to Ito. And the rumor was wrong--the professors shipped only a dozen to the judge.

They also included--in the prized top spot--the memo by the 79-year-old alumnus.

The memo with the big footnote didn’t make the cut. Nor the one urging Ito to film the trial himself.

Nesson doesn’t make it easier for those whose memos were not sent. He explains, “This is a kind of grade, a first event, where people were distinguished. . . . I selected strictly because of . . . which ideas stayed with me.”

Soon afterward, the screen is alive with a “Nightline” debate. It features Leslie Abramson, the in-your-face Menendez lawyer, and the Harvard faculty’s star, Laurence Tribe.

Abramson is defending Ito’s decision--later eased a bit--to bar reporters from jury selection because of a “runaway circus-performing media.”

But Tribe lambastes the judge, suggesting that he went against a 1984 ruling in another California case, in which “the Supreme Court made absolutely clear, 9-0, that judges can’t just intuit these things.”

The class is off and running. Because Tribe has not named the case he used to “deck Judge Ito,” Nesson tells the students, “We’ve got to find Larry’s case.”

A legal computer is activated in the lecture hall, and a search launched--projected on the screen. Key words are punched in: 1984. California. Jury. Media.

“This looks like the one!” someone says as a Supreme Court opinion pops up, Press Enterprise vs. Riverside County, stemming from a murder trial in which a judge not only barred the media from court during jury selection, but refused to release a transcript of most of the proceedings.

To the surprise of the class, Nesson declares the facts “very different” than those in Los Angeles, because Ito was not calling for such a complete blackout.

In other words, Nesson is siding with Abramson over his distinguished Harvard colleague!

So go the twists in “Cyberlaw meets O.J. Simpson,” a course where no one asks any longer how the classroom relates to the real world. By now, they have been intertwined beyond distinction.

If that wasn’t clear before, it certainly was when word of the Harvard course spread and TV crews began knocking on the classroom door.

The professors said the students should vote on it, and so they did, those fledgling Judge Itos--and banned the cameras.

* KEY HEARING TODAY: Judge Lance A. Ito hears arguments on possible TV ban. B1