The Frost Street Dining Club has returned after a long hiatus. Since it hasn't been discussed on this blog before, a brief history is in order.

The third year of law school is a kind of limbo. In your first year, you're run through the gauntlet of the socratic method in the primal disciplines of Anglo-American law: contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and civil procedure. This is the process that supposedly teaches you to "think like a lawyer." Then in your second year, you take your grades from those classes and show them to potential employers, one or more of which will hopefully offer you a summer job on the basis therof. This happens in the fall. Unless you royally screw up your summer (or, in the case of public-sector jobs, unless adequate funding isn't available), this is probably the job you will take after graduating law school and taking the bar exam. Meanwhile, you are supposed to take courses that will introduce you to other substantive areas of the law, such as constitutional law, the law of corporations, tax law, antidiscrimination law, international law, administrative law, etc.

Of course, a couple of weeks actually practicing in these areas will teach you more than you'd ever learn in a semester of cold study. But we continue to hang around law school for a third year, because that's the way it's been since American universities foisted on us the peculiar notion that the study of law should be treated not as an undergraduate discipline to be followed by an apprenticeship, but as a post-graduate degree program. It is, of course, mere coincidence that this innovation allowed those very universities to squeeze an extra three years of tuition and fees from a segment of society particularly likely to be able to afford it. In short, the third year of law school is utterly superfluous as an academic matter. As a social/professional/extracurricular matter, it may not be, but the typical 3L will usually have a lot of free time on his or her hands.

By the middle of our interminable third year, my roommate Tony and I had spent a lot of this time cooking. We grew increasingly ambitious, until we got to the point where the dishes we wanted to make were too expensive for us to pay for ourselves. Rather than foot the bill for, say, a $100 whole foie gras of which we could only eat about 20%, we got the idea to spread the cost around by cooking for our friends, and asking them to chip in for the ingredients. We figured this was a win-win situation: we'd get to try our hands at cooking things we'd never be able to prepare just for ourselves, and our friends could enjoy an extravagant meal at a fraction of the price they would pay at a restaurant. Thus, the dining club was born.

We came up with this plan in February of our 3L year; by graduation we'd had three dinners in the living room of our apartment at 1 Frost Street in Cambridge. We brought the concept with us to New York, but work got in the way frequently and at inopportune times. In the past year and a half, we've held only one dinner and been forced to cancel another. But today we're back with a new menu. I just hope we can find all the ingredients we need. Anybody know where in the city a guy can find raw pig's feet?