Home is where the heart is. But if your home is Crothers Hall, your heart had better make room for the mosquitoes. Yet, despite the asbestos, the ecosystem that inhabits my carpet, and the constant clanging of pipes, my fondest memories of my 1L year all occurred in the Law School dorm. While Professor Mitch Polinsky’s economics class taught me that the free market maximizes social welfare, Crothers Hall taught me that there is great joy in sacrificing comfort.

A recent conversation I had with two of my donnmates started me thinking about the importance of the Crothers experience for law students. We were sitting on the only patch of my carpet untouched by exam prep materials and eating Chinese food out of the tins. As usual, the discussion eventually turned to life after law school. “I’m not sure I need to work for a firm,” I said. “I don’t even have expensive tastes.” My friends assured me that after dining with co-workers at fancy restaurants and attending swanky’ parties, I would develop them. 

But if a luxurious lifestyle quickly becomes an acquired necessity, why was I so thrilled to reside in the cheapest, most meager dorm offered to Stanford graduate students? 

It had to be more than the close proximity to all my classes. It wasn’t simply the opportunity to have guitar singalongs, coupled with debate about substantive due process, at 2:00 a.m. It couldn’t just be the ease with which I could climb through my window if I ever forgot my keys. It had to be that there was something personally satisfying about existing without the extra frills of one’s own kitchen, or the extravagance of privacy. I actually enjoyed the creativity and fortitude necessary to thrive, let alone survive, on a diet of peanut butter, milk, and tuna fish-the only three items in my microfridge. 

Crothers Hall provides the law student with a much needed refuge from the world he or she is about to enter, a world of suit jackets, wing tips or high heels, and apartments with screens covering the windows. Life in Crothers teaches a critical lesson: that maximizing convenience often occurs at the expense of opportunity. If I had lived in a suite, I might be watching television in a normal-sized bed instead of wrestling in the hallway. For a little more space and my own bathroom, I would have missed the spontaneously erupting dorm parties, the late-night study sessions, and the professor impersonation contests. Whenever I needed to get away from law school woes, ironically, the law school dorm community provided a wonderful diversion. The Crothers residents who recognize this value return for a new round of masochistic bliss each year.

 A law degree can beget material amenities unfathomable to the debt-strapped law student. Although eating at a restaurant that uses actual silverware now seems posh, there may come a time when I can no longer stomach soup out of a vending machine. Once I acclimate myself to “firm” dollars, I may even think that finding moths in my underwear drawer is disturbing instead of hilarious. At this not-so-distant point on the road to my future, I already remember my “roughing it” days in Crothers with a sense of pride and nostalgia. Even now, as I type words with one hand and scratch bug bites with the other, I realize how pleasant it is to be less than fully comfortable. 

Of course, comfort is a relative term. I recently braved the dark corridors of the Crothers basement to look for a study room. To my surprise,there were dorm rooms down there. When I passed by a student leaving his room, I asked him if he actually lived here, and what that was like. “When I look out my window, I see a cement wall,” he said. “But I’m hoping to move up to Crothers first floor next year.” 

At that moment I realized how pampered I was: I had a room with a view.