Sustained dominance, not one lucky year, defines a prodigy.

Evidence

The law seemed to Nesson like a series of wonderfully complicated but entertaining riddles involving human behavior. At the end of his first year, when the registrar posted the grades in Langdell Hall, Nesson ranked first in his class of five hundred students. Given his undergraduate record, he considered this “a fluke,” as he put it many years later. But at the end of his second year, he again ranked first. In the hotly competitive atmosphere of Harvard, rumors about his brilliance began to circulate. His rivals for the head of the class were determined to dislodge him in the third and final year. They did not succeed. He was a true legal prodigy. At Harvard Law, grades are carried out to three decimal points, and legend has it that Nesson left the law school with the highest grade point average since Felix Frankfurter graduated in 1907. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1375

Categorization

• CANDY: Harvard Law grades to three decimal places, and Nesson reportedly left with the highest GPA since Felix Frankfurter in 1907 — an elevator-ready fact.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter’s Harvard Health Study material and to how institutional prestige functions in the Woburn drama. — connects to: Situations are structured in dominance but never fully determined by it. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 879; Social formations are complex unities structured in dominance, not determined by a single cause — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 38

Broader Connections

• Situations are structured in dominance but never fully determined by it. #complicates (0.98) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 879
• Social formations are complex unities structured in dominance, not determined by a single cause #complicates (0.98) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 38