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4.2.12
WC: 191694

In London, I was invited to represent the Harvard Law School at the 750th 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.”

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