In my time writing for Above the Law, I have reviewed a number of works of entertainment about the first year of law school. It is not surprising that this is such a frequent topic; 1L year is an experience shared by every single lawyer, with built-in villains and the cathartic climax of final exams. But I have definitely never read a 1L story quite like Alexander Boldizar’s new novel The Ugly, a challenging yet insightful look at the first year.
The Ugly centers around Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth (a name that I am almost certainly going to misspell at some point during this review), a 300-pound behemoth of Slovak descent who hails from a small, isolated village in Siberia and is known for his boulder-throwing prowess. But after “John the Attorney” attempts to steal Muzhduk’s homeland in order to build a hotel for butterfly enthusiasts, Muzhduk travels (by foot) to Harvard Law School in order to learn how to “throw words” instead of throwing boulders. It turns out that Muzhduk is a genius and attains a perfect LSAT score, and thus the Harvard bigwigs pull some mischief in order to admit Muzhduk despite his lack of an undergraduate degree.
Muzdhuk is unsurprisingly a fish out of water at Harvard. He is not used to being in a classroom (let alone one that employs the Socratic method), and so his crass manners turn off his elitist classmates. He gets into frequent arguments in class with his professors, especially Sclera, a domineering Civil Procedure professor hellbent on upending the law school status quo. He romances Oedda, a visiting professor whose personality is reminiscent of Maude Lebowski. The narrative alternates back and forth between Muzhduk’s first year at Harvard and his time in Africa the following year as he attempts to rescue Peggy, a woman with whom he falls in love, in the middle of the Tuareg rebellion.
How AI Is Transforming The Legal Profession (2025)
A survey of professionals reveals the impact of legal work, clients, concerns, and future roles.
As a lawyer, I preferred the half of the novel that takes place at Harvard. Muzhduk’s classmates consider him to be uncivilized, but those ostensibly civilized classmates frequently act in equally barbaric ways. They shun Muzhduk and send him a series of letters saying that he does not belong at Harvard. They laugh at Muzhduk’s naivete when he walks around the dorm bathroom without a towel. Muzhduk also attends Harvard at the same time as now-Senator Ted Cruz, and Boldizar describes the now-infamous incident in which Cruz solicits only students that attended undergrad at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to join his study group, specifically rejecting anyone from the “minor” Ivies.
Boldizar uses Muzhduk’s outsider status to highlight some of the absurdities of law school life. For example, Muzhduk is perplexed by the process of highlighting cases in his casebook, leading to the amusing moment where he realizes that he can focus only on the non-highlighted text. Boldizar also critiques the unhealthy focus on grades, which causes students to lose all perspective. Muzhduk’s only male friend is one of the only genuinely good characters in the novel but struggles to persist in Harvard’s cesspool of competitiveness. Indeed, one of the book’s most comically sad moments is Boldizar’s description of the upbringing of Clive, Muzhduk’s snobbish classmate. When Clive was growing up, his father turned every request – such as asking to host a sleepover – into a moot court competition. Boldizar thus analogizes Muzhduk’s off-putting nature to some of the off-putting characteristics of law school at Harvard.
Moreover, The Ugly is often laugh-out-loud funny. When one of his section-mates offers money to the student who can say the word “Bangkok” the most times in class, Muzhduk takes it as a personal challenge. And after being frustrated in his romantic life, he laments that his father had told him that sex was complicated in Afghanistan but “not nearly as bad as Boston.”
I am not going to sugarcoat it; this is not an easy read. In the half of the novel that takes place at Harvard, most of the characters speak to each other in highfalutin prose, peppering in Latin phrases at every opportunity. The Ugly sometimes even veers into the surreal; one professor is named Pooh and, yes, is a bear that lives in a tree. And the half of the novel that takes place in Africa is considerably difficult to follow. To make things more confusing, the Africa portion is written in the first person and the Harvard portion is written in the third person. Further, at almost 400 pages, The Ugly is a little bloated (though, on the other hand, apparently Boldizar’s originally draft was 800 pages).
How Strong Is Your Firm’s Financial Visibility?
Discover how to gain more control over your firm’s finances and unlock smarter growth strategies—take a quick financial visibility quiz designed for law firms.
I definitely recommend The Ugly for fans of insightful law school satire. But if you prefer more garden-variety depictions of life as a 1L, the novel is definitely not for you. And if (for some reason) you are a fan of Senator Ted Cruz, you will definitely not enjoy The Ugly.
(Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book.)
The Ugly [Amazon (affiliate link)]
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 [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.