Harvard Law professor recounts personal anecdotes about teaching and cultural trips

4.2.12 WC: 191694 In London, I was invited to represent the Harvard Law School at the 750" anniversary of the Magna Carta at Westminster Abby, where I sat several rows behind the Queen. It was only years later that Griswold acknowledged to me that the criminology institutes were just an excuse to have me travel abroad and get a little culture. It worked. I bought my first piece of art in Paris on that trip — a Kandinsky lithograph for which I paid $25. While in Paris, I was offered the opportunity one night either to attend a Paris opera or to hear a new group of British pop singers. Because I was trying to gain some culture, I chose the opera, and missed an opportunity to hear the Beatles in person. My children still kid me about that one. My mother loved to write me letters at Harvard and she would always address me as “Ass Prof,” the abbreviation for assistant professor. Naturally, a student came upon one of the envelopes, and the word got around that my mother was calling me “The Ass Professor.” My grandmother couldn’t get the pronunciation rate, calling me the “Profresser” (in Yiddish, fresser means overeater). One day in criminal law I had a particularly obnoxious student who kept trying to one up other students by referring to his extensive background in philosophy, a subject in which he had a PhD. He would always begin his statements by saying, “Kant would say” or “Hegel would say.” One day we were going to be studying an essay by one of the great contemporary philosophers, Robert Nozick. I knew that this particular student had studied with Nozick and would invoke him during the next class. Unbeknownst to the student, Bob Nozick was one of my closest friends. This was shortly after the release of Woody Allen’s film “Annie Hall,” in which Woody is standing in line for a movie and overhears a pretentious man regaling his date with information about Marshall McCluen. Woody Allen then pulls Marshall McCluen from behind a sign and has McCluen confront the pompous man, saying, “You know nothing of my philosophy.” It was a wonderful putdown scene. I told Bob Nozick about the student. He knew him and agreed with my assessment. On the day in question, Bob sat in the back of the room with a hat over his head. As soon as the student began, “As Professor Nozick would say,” Bob took his hat off, strutted to the front of the room and declared, “You know nothing of my philosophy.” He then turned to me and said, “And neither do you.” We all had a good laugh and Bob co-taught the rest of the class with me. Shortly after I began teaching, the Harvard Law Record wrote an article, headlined “The Psyche and the Law,” describing my somewhat unusual approach to teaching criminal law. “His course in criminal law seems to some not to be a law course at all. For in place of abstracted appellate decisions, the would-be lawyers read pages by Margaret Mead. Where one would expect a capsule treatment of criminal procedure, he is apt to find a papal lecture on medical research and morality. Instead of listing categories of offences, the students skim Alfred Kinsey’s report on the sex life of American males.” It described me as “probably the youngest man ever named to the Harvard Law School faculty, [who] got his appointment at age 24.” It quotes me as making the heretical statement that: “there’s no such thing as The Law....Law is one of our many processes for ordering society. You can’t view this process as a neatly compartmentalized entity. It must be viewed in its full perspective as an ongoing system.” fe) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017160