I had a goal for every class, and when I think back on it, it was far too ambitious. I had to, with

4.2.12 WC: 191694 I had a goal for every class, and when I think back on it, it was far too ambitious. I had to, with every single class, say something original, teach something original that had never been written or said before by anybody. That was my aspiration, and I worked hard to achieve it. Law, of course, was based on precedent: you got points for showing that someone, particularly a judge, had said earlier what you are saying now. I hated that approach. It reminded me of my Yeshiva education. I wanted to be original. Every single class had to have something new. I knew the students wouldn’t appreciate it because they didn’t know it had never been said by anybody, but that was my way of satisfying myself. And I would rip up the notes at the end of the year and I'd say, we have to start from scratch all over again. I was a very energetic teacher and I really tried to put everything I had into each class. I introduced a lot philosophy and psychology into the classroom, and because I was teaching criminal law. I had a lot of freedom since no one really cared about criminal law at Harvard. Our students were unlikely to become criminal lawyers in those days. In fact, I started out one of my classes by saying, “statistically, more of you are going to be criminal defendants than criminal lawyers, so pay attention.” My first year of “crim” class was kind of a course designed to stretch the mind and teach analytic skills because it was not regarded as a “bread and butter” course like corporations or tax. So I had a lot of flexibility in what I could teach. A few years after I became a full professor, Derek Bok became the Dean of the Law School. We never got along all that well. One day he called me into his office with a smile on his face and told me that I was a very expensive professor. Since salaries are fairly standard at Harvard, I didn’t know what he was talking about. He pulled out a letter from a Harvard alum saying that he would make a very considerable donation to Harvard Law School on one condition, namely, that I was fired. Many of the old-fashioned alumni were upset by my liberalism and the fact that I was teaching subjects like Psychiatry and Law, in addition to traditional subjects such as Criminal Law, but this particular alum had a more personal grievance. I had represented, on a pro bono basis, a young man I had grown up with in Brooklyn, who had been accused of making a bomb for the Jewish Defense League that had caused the death of a young woman employee of Sol Hurok. The young woman, as it turned out, was the sister-in-law of this wealthy alumnus. He would not contribute a single penny to Harvard Law as long as I remained on the faculty, but if I were fired he would donate a large building worth millions of dollars. In jest, I suggested to Derek Bok that maybe we could make a deal for a significant severance package. We both laughed. He knew that a great university like Harvard could never be intimidated, by the threat of withholding any amount of money, into firing a tenured professor. In my second semester of teaching, I was assigned the class in family law, which was an advanced elective popular with women students, because women lawyers were thought suitable to practice in such “soft” areas of law as divorce and child custody. My class included some of the most prominent women graduates of that era, including Lydy Dole, who became a United States Senator, Elizabeth Holtzman, who became a member of Congress and the District Attorney of Brooklyn, Elizabeth Bartholet, who is a professor at Harvard Law School and several other prominent figures. 7S HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017162