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the facts in this case."
    I ask Lessig about Greenblatt's charge that by failing to expose Hanson earlier, he bears a measure of guilt.
    "I do feel that," Lessig says. "But I don't suffer that feeling, because very quickly I recognize what it is to be a teenager."
    To Lessig, Greenblatt's charge is a tawdry attempt to score points at the expense of his reputation."Before this case, I never would've had a desire that the Boychoir School close," Lessig says. "It's an interesting place, it's a great experience, it teaches kids to work hard. But the way I feel about it now is, fuck it. If they have to shut down because of this case, I don't care."
     
    Everyone connected to Hardwicke v. American Boychoir School assumed that the supreme court would have ruled long before now. Every morning, they check the Web to see if the opinion has been posted.
    For Don Edwards, victory would mean the school could bury its lurid past, at least legally speaking. A loss would open the door to suits from other boys whose alleged abuse Hardwicke has dredged up. Edwards says,"It's not like I wake up thinking the case will destroy the school-but it's not impossible that it could."
    For John Hardwicke-and for all the potential child-sex-abuse litigants against the Catholic Church in New Jersey-a negative ruling by the supreme court would be a devastating blow, if not a mortal one. He is currently among a group of campaigners working on a parallel track to persuade the state Legislature to amend the Charitable Immunity Act so that it clearly exempts cases of child sexual abuse. At the same time, a ruling in his favor would mean that Hardwicke is only one step closer to putting his case before a jury. "I'll actually be in the position where I thought I was four years ago," he says."I think I'll be ninety-five years old going, I think we're just about done."
    Yet even if Hardwicke does collect a monumental payout, it's far from clear that money will make him whole again. As he sits in his living room, talking about his high-achieving siblings-one brother a partner at a large law firm, one sister an executive at Ernst and Young-his ravaged expectations for himself are never far from the surface. If not for what took place at the school, he says, "I think that I actually could have been a leader of my fellow people. I could've gone on to be a lawyer or politician or something really helpful to society."
    Lessig, of course, is exactly that, and the disparity between his and Hardwicke's lives suggests that the metaphor coined by the latter may in fact be true: When it comes to consequences of child sex abuse, it really does depend on where you were sitting in the car. It affects different people in profoundly different ways.
    "This thing happened to me," Lessig says, "and I can see how it changed me. But to be too angry about it would require me to kind of hate myself. Now, there are certain things I did hate about what it did to me: the way I would destroy relationships and the pain I would inflict on people when I did. But there are other parts-the weirdness of me and my relationship to the world. Being deeply reflective about institutions, responsibilities, and my role. Spinning deeply from the age of fourteen about issues.And it's like, well, if this hadn't happened to me, who would I have been? Maybe I would have gone to work with my dad and run the steel plant and become a Republican congressman from Williamsport. I would have been a totally different person."
    Lessig's sense that the effects of his abuse have been less than cataclysmic is among the reasons Donald Hanson has never been his bete noire. A few years after being fired by the school, Hanson decamped for England, where Lessig ran across him one day in Cambridge -and went punting with him on the Cam. (Since then, Hanson has been hiding out in France, or in Switzerland, or in Canada; no one is certain where.)
    "I've never felt angry, or really angry, at Hanson," Lessig says. "Hanson's sick.