Gardella took five years to finish his undergraduate degree. He was in two intense programs of study–a degree in Politics and Philosophy (P&P) and a secondary major in Russian. He started learning Russian the summer after his sophomore year, putting him behind the requisite three and a half years of language classes. It wasn’t just the workload that kept Gardella busy. He played clarinet in the university orchestra, he was active within his own political agenda (Anarco-Syndicalism). He also had a tendency to stress himself out over the possibility of failing. In his worried state, he would be unable to concentrate on work. His academic experience was littered with extensions out of which brilliant papers would be written.
In his junior year, he began going out with Amanda, an economics student who had only just stopped self-identifying as a NeoCon. While her new university friends spent 2004 campaigning for Kerry/Edwards, she proudly displayed a “Bush/Cheney” sticker. She would share, excitedly, about when she met Dick Cheney at a rally and he shook her hand. She was the youngest person in the crowd, she guessed, by about thirty years. After their initial expressions of interest, Gardella seemed as uncertain about a former NeoCon as she seemed about a self-identified Anarco-Syndicalist. Over time, politics became less important. In spite of their earlier differences, they came to like each other. In 2007, when he began to seriously consider life after graduation, Gardella would reluctantly admit that he didn’t want to leave Pittsburgh.
It wasn’t just his relationship with Amanda that made him want to stay. He had integrated himself firmly into her group of friends–all a year or two behind him in school. During his first senior year, he took comfort in knowing he wasn’t going to be graduating yet. He didn’t want to leave his friends. He wasn’t sure what he had wanted to do.
Early in his undergraduate career, he had become involved with Students in Solidarity, a campus group that worked with the on-campus and community labor unions. As an undergraduate he’d done none of the internships or summer jobs that many students who want to “go pro” do. He wasn’t interested in politics, as many of his P&P peers were. He was interested in the generalized idea of “making a difference.” A lot of the other P&P majors he knew were planning on going to law school or policy school. He took the LSATs and applied to both. It seemed like the thing to do.
The most important thing to him was staying in Pittsburgh. He applied to Pitt’s law school and Pitt’s policy school–citing an interest in their joint degree program.
He didn’t apply anywhere else.
Looking at policy school more seriously, he realized he didn’t like the idea of a “brief capsule summary” of many fields rather than an in depth study where he could actually learn about something. Law seemed like the natural “shadow and companion” to his undergraduate work where he had studied both political philosophy and the relationship between politics and philosophy. “The law has always been a way society reflected its values.”
Will started at Pitt Law in the fall of 2008.
He went in with a plan to study constitutional law and Intellectual Property law. He wanted to help people, but more so he wanted to help causes. He wanted to create a lasting difference and have an effect not just on his field, but on the lives of others. The first year set of classes offered no room for options or electives. He liked torts and contracts. Constitutional law was a necessity, and it quickly became clear that it had a place in all areas of the law and had, as Will saw it, become a field not unto itself. He registered for an Intellectual Property Certificate.
In his second year, he began working on the IP certificate. A patents class was the first step. He hated it. He found it hard to work with “abstract, state created entities,” like patents. In working with patent law, rather than representing the actual product, you’re representing a “patent specification,” which is a way of explaining how a thing is unique in terms of what has come before it rather than at a functional level. He found this frustrating.
Gardella didn’t understand where the lines were drawn with patent law. In patent law, there’s the Machine or Transformation Test. The overall principal is that you cannot patent something that is a part of nature, it’s a part of “the scientific patrimony of the species.” Now, it’s changed. As long as you can show that you’re “transforming the universe in some abstract way,” it’s patentable. Creating a computer program that makes airline reservations is something you can patent because it has an effect on the physical world.
He realized that “there is no such thing as a piece of information that does not affect the physical world.” What he saw as trends in patent law left him so upset with the field, that he dropped the IP certificate program.
This is something he still feels bad about. He made a presumptuous jump, something he recognizes, in ruling out copyright law based on his experiences with patent law. However, he sees relationships between what he learned about patent law and what he knows about copyright law–even if he thinks copyright isn’t as “useless as patent law.” Most of all, he thinks neither is suited for the modern world and that the contingents working for what he views as the right side aren’t enough.
Getting ready for his final year of law school, he still feels guilty about giving up IP. Even though he is plagued by the lack of confidence typical of many capable people, he recognizes that he could have made a difference in the field. When he looks at IP law, he sees a field burdened with centuries of laws that hold no practical applicability anymore. While he moves in crowds full of people who work towards IP reform, he views the group of people who realize “the deep human significance” of IP law as a hushed minority–small ants with high hopes. Even though he never had a chance to actually be involved in the field, he feels as though he abandoned them.
Gardella hasn’t looked back on his decision to go to law school with regret or question, but he has looked at his decision to work with people who have “serious and tangible problems” with uncertainty. While fighting for the rights of those declared criminally insane, he listens to his friends talk about defensive patents and feels a guilty tug of interest. When he reads about the Bilski decision and ACTA, he wonders if he could have made a difference. When he talks with clients at the Psychiatric Defense Unit of the Connecticut Division of Public Defender Service, working with people previously declared criminally insane, struggling to reform themselves and change their lives, he knows he’s doing something and he hopes it’s the right thing.