Unfortunately, little documentation survives to offer a full understanding of how The Pleader and HOOPS were perceived by their communities during the time of their publication. The newsletters themselves printed letters that praised and disparaged the newsletters’ content, but the newsletters were rarely mentioned in other primary sources written about and for Northwestern Law. Although editors of The Pleader and HOOPS frequently mentioned deans of the Law School and other administration officials, the degree to which the administration discussed the newsletters in official and unofficial channels is unclear. One source that did mention the newsletters is Northwestern Law’s The Reporter, a magazine that chronicled events and alumni news. The Pritzker Legal Research Center has a rich collection of digitized Reporter issues, and searching this digital collection revealed that The Reporter acknowledged the existence of The Pleader twice around the time of the latter’s foundation. First, the Summer 1978 issue of The Reporter mentioned The Pleader in passing in the essay “A Report on the Year 1977-78, Northwestern University School of Law” by Dean David S. Ruder: “A new student newspaper, The Pleader, has added spice, wit, criticism, and current events to the Law School scene.” Later, the Fall 1978 issue of The Reporter dedicated half a page to The Pleader in an essay about the newsletter’s first year of publication (see illustration). Describing The Pleader’s role as “an open forum for the Law School community [that] strives to be responsive to all areas of the School”, the author plainly recounted the historical formation of the newsletter, naming the founding editors and listing some of the contents of each issue. Besides describing The Pleader as adding “spice”, there is little characterization of the critical role that The Pleader undertook. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, The Reporter made no mention of HOOPS at all. Further research is required to see if The Pleader or HOOPS were described in non-digitized Northwestern publications. 

Despite this apparent dearth in written acknowledgement, both The Pleader and HOOPS were keen to report any opinions expressed by Law School officials about the newsletters, which usually took the form of verbal statements. For example, a 1987 issue of HOOPS ran a cover story describing how a senior faculty member was overheard referring to HOOPS as “trash”. The outrage in the article was palpable: “To disparage this forum is to disparage the many who have sacrificed their time and effort to contribute articles, features, and information; to cheapen their contribution is to demean a valuable asset of law school life.” The responses in the following issue raised questions about the validity of both the faculty member’s remark and HOOPS’s outraged response. In a letter to the editors, one student criticized HOOPS for printing the equivalent of gossip by choosing not to confirm the quote with the faculty member. “It all leads to the conclusion that HOOPS editors are more interested in bashing [the faculty member] than promoting ‘constructive criticism’ or dialogue and providing reliable information,” the student wrote. He also questioned HOOPS’s own character, which seemed to embrace bawdy humor to the point of self-identifying as a “trashy” publication:  

“These are the same editors who dish out plenty of ‘disparaging’ remarks in the Bar Review. And this is, after all, the same publication that prints [the f-word] in a headline and runs cut-outs of NULS faculty in embarrassing costumes and poses. The Sun-Times has been called trash for a lot less. It’s all a lot of fun, and I always enjoy reading HOOPS. It is definitely a ‘valuable asset of law school life,’ as HOOPS editors put it. But sometimes, in some parts, it’s just trash. So what? Are those parts meant to be anything else?” 

On the same page, a wry letter from a professor – indeed, the same professor who wrote the infamous “300-500%” letter back in 1978 — denounced the faculty member’s comment while artfully offering his own attack. “Since I am only objecting to [the faculty member’s] characterization, and not offering an affirmative proposal of my own, I will refrain from attempting to characterize your publication in a mere word. (Actually, the word ‘mere’ itself might be good for starters.) I think you should apply your ingenuity to this task and come up with a self-characterization. You might begin by investigating the ecological significance of the felling of forests to provide thin products upon which symbols of dubious significance are imprinted.” A careful reader might notice that this professor’s name is included in HOOPS’s list of staff members on the issue’s second page, his involvement offering a tacit endorsement to offset the biting tone of his letter. 

Did more readers think of HOOPS as trash or as a valuable asset to the Law School community? As the student letter suggests, there may have been some validity to both stances. Even to a contemporary reader, it is clear that some portions of HOOPS – and The Pleader – included gossip, bawdy humor, and cheap jokes about professors with no basis in legitimate critique. A 1986 issue of HOOPS (see illustration) included a collage of faculty member faces pasted onto models in bikinis, an illustration that might be considered more juvenile than substantive in its content. The Pleader also took its share of jabs at faculty members, such as in heavily annotated caricatures (see illustration). However, the comedy in the newsletters was sometimes used to explore substantive issues, similar to the contemporary parody publication The Onion; a 1987 issue of HOOPS included one such satirical page that discussed censorship (see illustration). Moreover, even at its silliest, the indulgence in jokes for their own sake cannot fully offset the role of these student newsletters in providing a unique, widely-read forum in which students offer critique to the institution receiving their tuition. The Pleader and HOOPS provided a unique means by which to engage in discussions and share law school experiences, cultivating a kind of community in its readership that may not have existed before or since.

Throughout their publication histories, student-run newsletters The Pleader and HOOPS positioned themselves as politically motivated forces: they offered law students a platform that reversed traditional hierarchies of power in the law school, allowing students to respond to the daily function of the school and offer criticism about authority figures whose decisions affected them. In their editorials, the staff writers took an active role in amplifying controversial statements or actions from the administration, boldly sharing their own critiques and soliciting student responses to these issues, too.  

Many of these writers focused on news specific to the law school, like statements from the dean, but others responded to contentious events that affected the Northwestern community on a whole. In an April 1978 issue of The Pleader, the editors addressed Northwestern’s decision to grant an honorary degree to Israel’s Prime Minister. In response to this event, the editors printed several letters from law students criticizing this decision and released a poll inviting students to submit their opinion on the honorary degree conferral. Printing the results of the poll in the next issue, the editors of The Pleader demonstrated a desire to affect institutional change democratically by collecting and disseminating student response.  

The Letters to the Editor sections gave the larger law student body a context in which to discuss law school issues large and small, serving as an analogue social media platform specific to the Law School. Among many other topics, students frequently shared their opinions on their courses; these letters were required to be signed by their author, but the lack of anonymity did not seem to deter students from strongly wording their critiques. A contemporary reader may wonder if these students would be as willing to speak out in a face-to-face classroom setting as they were in The Pleader or HOOPS; like in an online forum or comments section, the removed context of the newsletter may have offered students the freedom to speak more candidly, especially in a newsletter by and for their peers. Despite their student focus, these newsletters were not simply echo chambers for student opinion: as The Pleader gained popularity (and perhaps notoriety) on campus, it also became widely read among faculty and administration members, including those on the receiving end of student criticism. The newsletters allowed such faculty members to respond to criticism that had been printed in previous issues, and dialogue often developed in the Letters to the Editor section from issue to issue. Perhaps because the student-run newsletter prioritized the student voice above any other, students often had the final word in such printed exchanges that involved authority figures like professors.  

For example, a 1978 issue of The Pleader printed a brief letter to the editor from a law student concerned about professors’ grade turnover. Without naming any faculty members, the student is far from shy in her criticism. “What I want to know is this,” she begins. “What are our professors getting paid for if they can never grade our exams within anything approaching a reasonable time?” In the following issue, a law professor submitted a rebuttal to this letter, denouncing the student’s critique and taking the greatest issue with the student’s jab at faculty members’ compensation. “I could be making 300% to 500% more money than I am making here by practicing law, and my colleagues can say the same. Therefore, I would suggest that your tuition be at least quadrupled, so that law professors can earn an income that would be on par with what they could earn on the outside.” 

Student responses to the professor’s rebuttal flooded the following Pleader issue. Nearly 3 pages were dedicated to letters to the editor regarding the professor’s defense of his work, many matching or escalating the biting tone of the previous issues’ letters. “[The professor] suggests that he could quintuple his income in practice,” one student writes. “Perhaps. But I wonder if he would still have time to produce Broadway shows and do leisurely research in areas which interest him.” Another student submitted a clever metaphor that would be legible to anyone who had been following this exchange: “A accepts employment as a garbage collector. He subsequently decides not to empty cans on the north or west side of any street or alley because: (a) it’s a pain in the neck; and (b) he could make more money as a plumber. Logical?” It is easy to imagine such sharp retorts to an authority figure (one who may or may not control these students’ grades) igniting conversation around the law school and even altering the dynamic between students and faculty at the time.