The Best Yale Law School Class Ever

I went to law school to escape from Utah. Killing myself was Plan A. I ended up going with Plan B instead.

I’ve endured anxiety all my life. But on two occasions I also faced suicidal depression. The first time was when I was twenty-two years old and finishing up my English degree at Brigham Young University. I’d entered college in 1981 as a Spencer W. Kimball Scholar, BYU’s most prestigious scholarship. I graduated as the university’s valedictorian. By the summer of 1986, I was worn out from years on the treadmill as the Best Little Mormon Boy in the World. So of course I committed to another crazy year in Utah. I taught freshman English at BYU; performed in multiple shows at the Hale Center Theatre; finished the coursework for a graduate degree in linguistics; and was the founding editor of Student Review, BYU’s longest-running student newspaper. At night I would run for miles, hang with queer street kids, and resist the temptation to drive off an overpass.

I also signed up for the LSAT. I scored in the 99.9th percentile. For no extra fee you could send your score to five schools. I picked Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Washington.

Midway through the year I hit rock bottom. Fortunately, I got help. I had support from friends, family, and sympathetic local Mormon church leaders. Unlike many suicidal queer youth, I found a way out of the darkness.

I needed to leave Utah so I could continue making progress on my mental health. Without suicide as an option, law school was the only escape I could think of. So I compared my acceptance letters.

The University of Washington was my safety school. I enjoyed classes in UW’s English grad program when I moved to Seattle a few years later. But I needed to see more of the world before settling down in the Pacific Northwest.

Stanford looks like a golf course, and triggered my anti-California prejudices. It’s the best law school in the West, but it was time for me to head back East.

Harvard is a great university, and Boston offers more than New Haven. But Harvard Law School was too big, with over 400 students in each entering class rather than 165 students like each of the other schools on my list.

The University of Chicago has a lot of conservative Mormon connections. I had a wonderful experience living in Chicago when I became an LGBT rights lawyer with the ACLU of Illinois several years later. Nevertheless, law school at U of C would have been a grind, and terrible for my mental health. Interesting, my financial aid package at every other school involved graduating with the same $35,000 in student loans. In contrast, the University of Chicago offered me a “merit” scholarship and a full ride. I’m glad I didn’t make a bad decision based on money.

Instead, I ended up choosing Yale Law School. I had pretty good reasons.

First, if you must go to law school, you should go to the best law school you can. Yale has been recognized as the top law school for generations. Privilege has its privileges.

Second, I needed to experience the East Coast. New Haven is a 90 minute train ride away from New York City, which gave me access to Broadway shows, gay bars, and great museums.

Third, Yale Law School doesn’t have grades. Dean Guido Calabresi gave our class a welcoming speech with the title “You’re Off the Treadmill!” The Dean told us “Our goal at Yale is to get 90% of you into the Top 10% of the class.” You can’t tell 165 overachieving nerds to turn off their competitive brains. But you can encourage them to define 165 individual paths to success.

Fourth, in preparing to leave behind the Mormons and Utah, I was looking for a new community that shared my values. Professors like Guido Calibresi inspired me to embrace the legal profession as an instrument of truth and justice. Guido offered an enchanting vision for the law school and its graduates: Excellence and Humanity. Without humanity, a highly skilled lawyer is a menace to society.

Finally, although I was clueless about lawyers and law school, I knew several earnest pre-law students at BYU. My friend Greg was a smart political science major. After touring each Top 20 law school campus, he insisted on wearing his Yale Law School sweatshirt everywhere. Greg said I’d be an idiot to go anywhere else.

Greg didn’t get into Yale. He ended up at University of Chicago instead. When we left BYU, he insisted on giving me his sweatshirt: my first Yale Law School swag.

I bought my son the same classic grey Yale Law School sweatshirt last week at our 35th year reunion.

It was only my second time returning to New Haven. Ten years ago I attended our 25^th year reunion, where I heard about the prior reunions. Two stories stood out, both involving the special class-specific slots in the Alumni Weekend schedule. On Saturday evening, members of each reunion class gather for a private cocktail hour and posh dinner. The women and the East Coast men dress up. (Northwestern guys wear jeans.) The Alumni Office staff choose various local restaurants based on anticipated turnout. That year our class dinner was held in a terrible restaurant in the suburbs. My classmates still complain about being stuck on a bus to Hamden. The Class of 1990’s response? Two of our class members infiltrated the Alumni Weekend organizing committee. Last Saturday we dined at New Haven’s finest restaurant.

The Alumni Weekend schedule always includes another class-specific slot, on Saturday afternoon. Most classes meet in an Ivy League courtyard with an open bar, fancy nibbles, and cater-waiters. Some classes plan a group tour to a museum. Others gather for a commemorative photo. This year I saw many alumni on the New Haven Green, which happened to be the location of the local No Kings protest march.

The Class of 1990’s bonding time is identified in the printed schedule as “Two Minute Memoirs.” The venue is always an out-of-the-way classroom in the law school. Several of my classmates told me versions of the same story. It was their first time at Alumni Weekend. They saw the schedule and took a pass. (“Sounded like a tedious corporate ice-breaker.” “I’d never been to the Yale Center for British Art.” “I thought it would just be guys bragging about their careers.” “Who needs a roomful of lawyers?”).

Each truant class member confessed they’d made a terrible mistake and vowed never to repeat it. Hearing my classmates’ memoirs was indeed the highlight of my 25th year reunion weekend. No one wasted their two minutes on resumes. Instead, we heard deeply personal stories about excellence, humanity, and family.

Everyone who ever attends our class reunion raves about the life-altering experience of hearing these extraordinary stories. Like the time in law school when the Rolling Stones secretly played Toad’s, the small nightclub across the street from my dorm room.

This year more than sixty members of our class reunited in New Haven. Other than pathetic outliers like myself, the Class of 1990 is a privileged cohort at the peak of professional success. Yet we convened during a time of existential threat to the rule of law, even as many class members face major life transitions. Everyone talked about what really matters.

The last time I visited Yale was a few weeks before I received my PTSD diagnosis. A decade later, I told my classmates why I’d disappeared.

· The most important thing that happened to me since our last reunion was my ex disappeared and I became a full-time single dad with three teenagers and two dogs. Becoming a father twenty years ago was the best thing that ever happened to me. But becoming a single father thirteen years later gave me the experiences of a lifetime, and left me with the kind of shared memories and relationships with each child that few parents will ever know.

· The second most important thing that happened was getting the right diagnosis, which put me on the path to recovery. I live with complex PTSD symptoms every day. But I am in the best mental and physical health of my life.

· If I had been blessed with supportive co-workers at the State, I could have recovered from complex PTSD in six months. Instead it took more than six years – because my former employer and the state’s lawyers publicly accused me of faking a disability. Gaslighting abuse reinforced the traumatic impact of the Mormon’s refusal to acknowledge LGBT people exist, and triggered my second suicidal episode. Their attacks made me an unemployable pariah in the legal community where I used to be a distinguished bar leader.

· As 2025 began, I still was an unemployed disabled gay single dad, raising three teenagers and living on food stamps. Fortunately, in February I found a position with an online family law firm that has been a good fit for my legal and life experience.

I’m grateful that I can finally support my family while helping ordinary people solve their legal problems. I could also afford to get on a plane for the first time in ten years. Joining the Yale Law School Class of 1990 for our 35th year reunion was an important part of my healing. It reminded me the legal profession can demonstrate both Excellence and Humanity.

Each year the admissions office and the faculty select an extraordinary entering class. Yale Law School cohorts have become increasingly diverse. Many students come from lower socio-economic brackets, but will have their tuition and costs paid in full by generous donors. The law school leadership and the alumni community have invested immense energy and financial resources to ensure that no one misses out on the Yale Law School experience because of money. The largest donation in the history of the law school came from one of my classmates.

Three decades ago, the Class of 1990 was just as diverse as any of the law school’s carefully curated recent classes. Part of that achievement was a fluke of timing and demographics. But the diversity of our class is amplified because everyone is some kind of two-fer or triple threat. For example, it’s no surprise that I got the “Earnest-Mormon-BYU-Valedictorian” slot that’s available most years. But I also ended up contributing to Yale’s diversity as a mental illness survivor, LGBT advocate, showtune enthusiast, Trailer Park Single Dad, and Canadian.

Reconnecting with my classmates reminded me that our time together in New Haven was a transformational opportunity. I lived in the law school all three years. The first year I was a liberal Mormon, and my dormmate was a bright conservative from Texas. He grew up in the same Houston neighborhood as the Bushes, and spent a weekend in New Hampshire volunteering on George H.W. Bush’s primary campaign. The other two years I was a liberal ex-Mormon who had recently tasted coffee and alcohol for the first time. My new roommate was a J.D./English PhD candidate and Martin Luther King’s nephew. He had a vast collection of video-taped movies. There was always a crowd in our living room. Like everywhere else in the law school, the conversation never ended.

The Yale Law conversations continued beyond the walls of the law school. Many of our classmates found housing off-campus. Several groups shared houses near the beach. A posse of bros known as the “Tall Boys” hosted notorious parties – including the first time I tasted tequila, which led to the first time I threw up out of a moving car.

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, I kept seeing the same photo of our classmate Brett Kavanaugh that appears in the law school facebook. Brett wasn’t at the reunions. As I wrote in my essay “About My Yale Law School Classmate Brett Kavanaugh,” I realized “he may be the only member of our law school class I never met or interacted with.” Despite his prominence on the Supreme Court, in many ways Justice Kavanaugh is even more of an outlier than me as an exemplar of the Class of 1990.

My previous essay also recognized the diversity of our law school:

Despite its decidedly liberal overall bent, Yale Law School is extraordinarily diverse. (Although there may be an excessive number of Yale College graduates who linger in New Haven, including Brett Kavanaugh, Yale ’87, Law ’90). The rest of my classmates hailed from all over the country and the world, bringing their varied backgrounds and interests to the melting pot. In addition to the occasional pesky law class, you could spend your time with student legal clinics, cutting-edge academic journals, and endless philosophical arguments. My closest friends at law school included evangelical Christians, unreconstructed libertarians, prep-school Republicans, and even bros.

On paper, the diversity of Yale Law School’s carefully groomed recent classes may rival the Class of 1990. But folks who have observed the new Yale students in action say they prefer to talk to their own kind. In contrast, our class’s “endless philosophical arguments” have always been open to everyone. All weekend long at the reunion, I would sit down at a table with classmates I hadn’t seen or thought about in years. We would dive into fascinating conversations with the same old Excellence and Humanity.

At Yale Law School, the Class of 1990 learned to talk with attention and empathy to people who are different from ourselves – an essential gift that is increasingly rare.

My suicidal breakdown at BYU didn’t happen because I was beginning to figure out that I was gay. I hit rock bottom because my disability made me believe I was unworthy of anyone’s respect or love. Despite escaping to Yale Law School, I still had a long way to go.

Now that I’ve made more progress toward mental health, I realize I contributed to the disconnect with Brett Kavanaugh. I probably avoided him in law school. I know I avoided the Tall Boys. They look like the kind of bros I expect to toss me in a garbage can. During the cocktail hour before our fancy dinner, I found myself avoiding the Tall Boys once again, as well as everyone else. The acoustics in the reception room were deafening and triggered my disability. 

Fortunately, listening became easier once we sat down at the dinner tables. The four of us sitting together probably hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Hiram spent the decade since our last reunion as a college president. David, an orthodox Jew, moved his family to Israel fifteen years ago. Paulene never practiced law, instead getting a Ph.D. in Asian literature from Princeton. But she still took the bar exam to please her Chinese mother. As usual with the Class of 1990, the conversation was fascinating, witty, and kind.

When Paulene stepped away from the table, one of the Tall Boys took her chair. He thanked me for sharing my experiences as a disabled single father. During our Two Minute Memoirs that afternoon, this Tall Boy disclosed the most devastating loss in the room: the death of a child. And yet he reached down from the heights to make me feel welcome. Even in a fractured world, it is possible to sustain community by listening to other people with radical empathy.

In former dean Harold Koh’s toast to our class before our delicious dinner, he described some of my classmates’ extraordinary achievements and outsized personalities, including the Tall Boys. After forty years on the faculty, he confessed that he remembers us as his favorite class. But he’s not allowed to admit that the Class of 1990 is the Best Yale Law School Class Ever.