Word: osborne
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...John Jay Osborn...
...with a firm like the fictional Bass and Marshall is the reward for successful grade grubbing at a good law school, which John Jay Osborn Jr. wrote about with wit and feeling in his first novel, The Paper Chase. Hart, the hero of that book, "learned to love the law," an ironic expression of Harvard Law School students. He also learned to hate the way law students stabbed each other to succeed at it. In Osborn's new expose. The Associates, Samuel Weston, fresh from Harvard Law School, shares those passions. In Weston's lofty view, work...
...isolated passages of The Associates, Osborn conveys a familiarity with soft-carpeted power and a fascination with contract law, the translation of human reliance into legal principles. But the officers of Bass and Marshall are little more than caricatures. Their eyeballs are forever bulging, and they communicate with associates chiefly by hissing. One partner fancies himself as a sea captain, and enters securities litigation with commands like "Blast them. Send them down in an instant with all hands on board." Cosmo Bass, the formidable autocrat who runs the firm, could have been another Kingsfield, the Paper Chase professor. Unfortunately, Weston...
...Osborn's real strength is not that of a novelist, but as an entertainer. In one very funny set piece. Littlefield, an associate fond of drugs and arcane legal philosophy, writes a brief for a crucial case that cites Cicero instead of legal precedents. He is fired by Lynch, a partner driven mad by the weight of his famous legal ancestors. The next morning, it is Lynch's turn to perform. In court to argue the case, he opens his mouth, but no words come out, leaving Weston to wonder if the poor wretch is going to make...
...proliferation of less ambitious studies and surveys, some of them amounting to market research, has occurred in the past few years. The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research conducted a nationwide study of income and education as determinants of happiness. The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn carried out a similar but broader survey to find out whether their clients' potential consumers "were happier ... than other segments of the population." Scientific studies of worker "contentment" have been going on for years, to be sure, but are not quite the same as the new wave of investigations into...