As you read this, a college student somewhere in America reflects over textbooks and beer with the uncomfortable realization that an idyllic, sheltered time of learning and experimentation has drawn to an end. Accepted to law school for the impending fall semester, the erstwhile undergrad apprehends a new scholarship in life’s realities: three years to be spent studying a world in which promises and duties -- not to mention skulls and spines -- invariably are broken.

If only legal education was that benign.

In my first semester at a nationally ranked law school, cannibalism was front and center. Regina v. Dudley and Stevens, a Victorian-era English case involving sailors driven to kill and eat one of their shipmates, was part of the curriculum in torts, criminal law and contracts classes (apparently, consumption of human flesh does not raise civil procedure issues). The law of cannibalism per se is not a required first-year course, but it might as well be. Why is cannibalism so important in legal education?

A recently published book on the Dudley and Stevens case, titled The Custom of the Sea, promises "A Shocking True Tale of Shipwreck, Murder and the Last Taboo." Just last year, moreover, an "A" list of legal scholars gathered at Harvard to pay homage to "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers" -- one of the most famous law review articles ever published. The 1949 article, by Lon Fuller, posed the imaginary case of four explorers trapped in a cave for 32 days, forced to resort to...you know what.

The speluncean hypothetical, still a popular law school subject, is used to drive law students to confront sticky legal questions. Should the survivors be convicted? Might their sentences be commuted? Does a human taste like chicken?

After I had been a lawyer for a few years, I began to realize that cases involving cannibalism constituted a much smaller portion of my practice than I had been led to anticipate. Indeed, they are pretty rare. Among the 50 states, only Idaho has bothered to outlaw cannibalism specifically. It is unclear, however, whether the 1990 law was motivated by a wave of cannibalism or by competition-wary potato interests.

Cannibalism’s Golden Years
Prior to Jeffrey Dahmer, the last major U.S. court case involving cannibalism was the prosecution of Alferd Packer, the "Colorado man-eater," well over a century ago. In 1874, Packer and five other prospectors went into the mountains to look for gold. Two months later, Packer came back down, alone and well-nourished.

Packer was arrested, but he escaped from jail and eluded the authorities for nine years before being captured, tried and sentenced to death for murder. His lawyers appealed.

At the time, Colorado had just been admitted as a state and had adopted a new penal code. The legislature, however, repealed the old territorial law without providing for murders committed before the new state code took effect. Consequently, the Colorado Supreme Court could not escape the conclusion that Packer’s murders were not illegal. Packer later would be convicted of manslaughter, but he was released from prison in 1901.

Nearly a century later, the Colorado Supreme Court did Packer another good turn, upholding the criminal mischief conviction of Paul Dunoyair. In 1980, Mr. Dunoyair intentionally damaged an oil painting of Packer on the wall of the University of Boulder’s Alferd Packer Grill.

Clearly, the 19th century was the heyday of cannibalism law. According to Neil Hanson, author of The Custom of the Sea, sailors of that era were well aware that under the euphemistically termed "custom," survivors of sea disasters were authorized to eat their companions when circumstances left no other options. In fact, many shipwreck survivors felt it necessary to assure rescuers that they had not indulged. ("Seriously, guys, right before we left Dover, I had a huge lunch.")

In the 21st century, by contrast, it is much harder to get away with eating people. Modern adventurers know that if things turn dicey, they are mere cell-phone calls away from being plucked from the highest mountain or remotest island, long before they turn peckish -- much less ravenous -- for human flesh.

Missed the Big Party
I admit to having thought a great deal about cannibalism lately. I recently married a woman who grew up in the West. Family legend holds that her ancestors were late meeting up with a group headed for California in 1846. The group left my wife’s family behind, and the family had to find other companions for the journey. The group, delayed for a few crucial days, later would be known to history as the Donner Party. An early snow kept the party pinned down all winter, cold and starving, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they were driven to eat their dead companions.

My wife’s family recounts the story to support the proposition that there are worse fates than being late. As for my part, there is a measure of comfort in the knowledge that no one in her lineage had the opportunity to develop a taste for human flesh. It does make me uneasy, however, that people will do almost anything to survive.

This is a handy thing to know at a law firm.

Corner-Office Cannibals
My first job out of law school was with a genteel, white-shoe firm in Manhattan. Founded in 1817, the firm once had been a powerhouse of admiralty law, with the Cunard line one of its high-profile clients. If anybody knew the custom of the sea, it was the lawyers at that firm.

Almost immediately after I started, there began to float rumors that the firm was in trouble, in part because of an expensive office lease signed just before a recession. And let’s face it: Admiralty law was not exactly the cutting-edge practice area it must have been, say, in 1840.

After a couple of years and numerous defections from the firm, some of the partners agreed to a partial merger with a huge national law firm. Most of the people in the litigation department, where I worked, would be pushed overboard.

I learned my fate on a Friday evening, working late to finish a brief. The department chairman was one of the few litigators who would be going to the new firm. I expected that he would shake my hand and say, in effect, "Sorry, nothing personal" -- as Alferd Packer must have before dispatching his buddies with a miner’s shovel. The chairman, however, left the dirty work to the firm’s most junior partner. Call it the custom of the corner office.

So, study hard and learn your lessons well, lawyers of tomorrow. Remember that people in desperate situations will resort to unsavory measures. Do not be shocked if clients lie to you, if business associates try to cheat you, if other lawyers betray your faith in them.

And if bloated associate salaries of today transform you into a threat to the firm’s survival when business dries up tomorrow, watch out for the guy with the shovel and an appetite.

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