Professor Charles Kingsfield

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Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. was one of the key characters in the John Jay Osborn, Jr. novel, The Paper Chase, and in the subsequent film and television versions of that story. Portrayed by John Houseman, Kingsfield was an imperious professor of contracts at Harvard Law School, known for his unrelenting use of the Socratic method on his students. The harshness of his methods is encapsulated in a scene where he calls the protagonist to the front of the class and gives him a dime, telling him to call his mother and tell her there is little chance of him becoming a lawyer. However, he was also noted for his own scrupulous work ethic, laboring from early in the morning into the late hours of the night to perfect his knowledge of contract law, that he might better teach his students. His most famous line from the film exemplified his own view of his role as a law professor:

“

You teach yourselves the law. I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you'll leave thinking like a lawyer.

”

The phrase "think like a lawyer" has since become a cliché among law professors and students.

Kingsfield himself was a law student at Harvard, as shown by the presence of his own class notes - doodles and all - in the institution's archives. Kingsfield had a daughter with a fiercely independent personality, although she is shown to love her father very much. Kingsfield's daughter also discloses that her father has insisted on personally handling legal matters pertaining to her ongoing divorce proceedings.

In modern parlance, law students are quick to compare their most challenging professors to Kingsfield.

[edit] Inspiration

There are several possible inspirations for the character. Retired Harvard Law professor Clark Byse is said to have been the inspiration for the character's position at Harvard Law School, though not the character's personality. [1] According to John Houseman, in a lecture he gave at Molloy College in 1984, the inspiration for Kingsfield was crusty professor Edward "Bull" Warren, also reflected in the Boston Globe in 2004. [2] In his lecture, Houseman noted that Kingsfield's behavior was actually a toned-down version of Warren's famous classroom rudeness, as enshrined in classroom lore, and recounted several examples of the professor's putdowns.