Standard Of Review: The Novel 'Personal Jurisdiction' Updates The Law School Story For The 21st Century

When reading this book, lawyers that are tired of their soul-sucking firm jobs will be able to fondly reminisce about the days of yore when they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 1Ls.

As I wrote a few months ago in my review of the film The Paper Chase, we are long overdue for a 21st century version of the law school story. While The Paper Chase still holds up, the world is ready for a tale in which the characters do not regularly smoke tobacco out of pipes. Amazingly, the most definitive work of law school fiction in the last 30 years is probably Legally Blonde. Lawyer-turned-novelist Diana Minot attempts such an update to the law school story in her 2014 novel Personal Jurisdiction.

Personal Jurisdiction tells the story of Whitney Morris, a 1L at Northwestern University School of Law. Whitney does not have the Ivy League or Wall Street background of some of her peers; instead, she graduated from the University of Texas and worked for a few years after college at a call center. As a result, she constantly believes that she is inferior to her classmates. Nevertheless, she quickly makes two good friends in fellow 1Ls Elise and Jamie, despite the fact that both are from more affluent backgrounds. She also competes with fellow 1L Kate for the romantic affections of classmate Ben, who Whitney quickly falls in love with. Whitney also has to fend off the advances of Alex, who she relegates to the “friend zone.”

The strongest parts of the novel are unquestionably those involving Whitney experiencing law school. I fondly remembered my 1L year as Minot describes Whitney’s day-to-day life in school, particularly Whitney’s deep anxiety at being cold-called by her domineering torts professor and her shock that some fellow students could actually go toe to toe with him. I also appreciated some of the little classroom-related details, such as the fact that certain characters took notes by hand instead of on laptops and some of Whitney’s classmates attempted to transcribe every word that their professor uttered, no matter how unimportant. Even though the book is not very long, Minot hits nearly every important event in a 1L’s year in some detail. My one qualm with these portions of the novel is that Minot barely attempts to depict a classroom cold-calling scene through actual dialogue. While I understand that the thought of re-reading some of these staple 1L cases sounds about as appealing as signing up to be a War Boy in Mad Max: Fury Road, some actual back-and-forth between the students and the professors would have given the novel some added verisimilitude.

Moreover, even though I did not go to Northwestern (and I have never even been to Chicago, so my knowledge of Chicago solely comes from repeated viewings of The Fugitive), even I could tell that Personal Jurisdiction had a real sense of place. Minot’s knowledge of the area around the law school is readily apparent, and she she expands her universe by depicting the characters exploring different areas around Chicago (at least as it appeared to me, with the caveat that I know more about the various fictional lands on Game of Thrones than I do about Chicago neighborhoods).

Whitney is a well-drawn character, suffering from a deep inferiority complex stemming from the fact that she did not attend an Ivy League school for undergrad (though, at one point, Minot mistakenly describes Stanford as an Ivy League school. Repeat after me:  the Ivy League is an eight-school athletic league, while Stanford is in a different athletic league — the Pac-12. I have seen enough Ivy League football and basketball games to know that Stanford would wipe the floor with Ivy League schools) and did not have a prestigious job before law school. This aspect of Whitney’s character rang true for me because, no matter what college one attends, feelings of inferiority are (mostly) ubiquitous upon entering law school and encountering the intelligence of one’s peers. Whitney definitely complains too much about her non-prestigious résumé, but Minot seems to recognize this, since the other characters repeatedly criticize Whitney for her incessant whining.

Of the two main female supporting characters, Elise, is more fleshed-out. Despite her affluent background, Elise is grounded and frequently offers support for Whitney. Elise seems like a real person, as she has numerous quirks, including an ardent belief that every law student should get nine hours of sleep (a belief that I wholeheartedly agree with). Jamie does not have much personality; aside from previously having a job in an orphanage in Africa, I don’t think I could elucidate another trait about her.

On the other hand, I was not as enamored with the trials and tribulations of Whitney’s dating life. A large percentage of the book consists of Whitney describing her love for Ben, her frustration in the mixed messages that he is sending her, and her relationship with her friend Alex. I have no problem with an author depicting a character’s personal life, but I found these aspects of the novel to be much less interesting than Whitney’s schooling. They were also very repetitive; I could only stomach so many instances in which Whitney stated how much she was infatuated with Ben. At certain points, the book veered closer to a tween’s diary than an exploration of a 1L.

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Despite these qualms, I mostly enjoyed Personal Jurisdiction. Through Whitney’s story, lawyers that are tired of their soul-sucking firm jobs will be able to fondly reminisce about the days of yore when they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 1Ls. Future law students will see a more accurate picture of law school in the 21st century than a film like The Paper Chase. And non-Chicagoans like me will learn more about Chicago-area geography than we did from Tommy Lee Jones’s famous “warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse” speech from The Fugitive.


Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

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