Believing the school system to be weak, Mike and his mother moved in with his grandparents in Provo for the school year. (He attended the now-extinct Brigham Young High.) They returned to California only for the summers. After serving a church mission in Japan, he graduated from BYU with a degree in political science and Japanese and was accepted to Harvard Law School.

"I knew from junior high on that I wanted to be a lawyer," he said. "My mother probably hovered over my crib telling me to be a lawyer."

He describes his mother, Ethelyn, as a "feisty, free spirit." She grew up in Provo with little money in a family of eight children. After she caught the flying bug from books about Amelia Earhart, she offered her secretarial services at a local airport in exchange for flying lessons. When World War II began, she flew bombers from the factory to the front, as did other women, freeing men to fly combat missions.

"My mother loved to argue," Young said. "She absolutely detested Richard Nixon until Watergate. Then she loved him. She was in Utah, and everyone hated him, so she loved him, mostly to provoke me. I spent my childhood arguing with her about it. It was wonderful. Sue came to the house and saw my mother and me going at it, and Sue was appalled that I would argue with my mom like that."

He pulled good grades in school, largely because, in his estimation, he had a good memory. ("I spent an inappropriately large amount of time on the ski slopes," he recalled.)

He said two events turned him into a real student. First, he was invited to participate in a research project by a professor who saw something in Young's work.

"It told me serious people might take me seriously and work with me," he recalled. "I wonder if my passion for teaching doesn't come out of that. I can trace my career from that moment to here."

The second event occurred at Harvard. As he tells it, "In law school, a professor would hand me a book, I would memorize it, repeat it on the test, get a good grade and go on my way. It seemed like a good bargain. Then one day, after reading a case, the first words out of the professor's mouth was: 'What is wrong with the judge's decision?'

"I'm thinking, what do you mean? It's in the text. It must be right. It completely upset my routine. It was terrifying. I seriously thought in all likelihood I would flunk out.

"I didn't know if I had any analytic capability at all. I had no backup plan. What was I going to do now, sell insurance? I studied for two months out of sheer terror. Then I remember waking up one morning thinking I love this stuff. The knot in my stomach was gone. I loved studying. I loved the idea of thinking and learning. It was life changing. It gave me a passion for the life of the mind."