The following is a conversation with Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School,
known for taking on difficult and controversial cases.
He was on the head legal defense team for the Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez
in his double murder case.
He represented one of the Gina VI defendants and never lost the case during his years in
Washington, D.C.'s Public Defender Services Office.
In 2019, Ronald joined the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein, a film producer facing
multiple charges of rape and other sexual assault.
This decision met with criticism from Harvard University students, including an online petition
by students seeking his removal as faculty dean of Winthrop House.
Then, a letter supporting him signed by 52 Harvard Law School professors appeared in
the Boston Globe on March 8, 2019.
Following this, the Harvard administration succumbed to the pressure of a few Harvard
students and announced that they will not be renewing Ronald Sullivan's dean position.
This created a major backlash in the public discourse over the necessary role of universities
in upholding the principles of law and freedom at the very foundation of the United States.
This conversation is brought to you by Brooklyn and Sheets, Wine Access Online Wine Store,
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Click their links to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that the free exchange of difficult ideas is the only mechanism through
which we can make progress.
Truth is not a safe space.
Truth is humbling, and being humbled can hurt.
But this is the role of education, not just in the university but in business and in life.
Freedom and compassion can coexist, but it requires work and patience.
It requires listening to the voices and to the experiences unlike our own.
Listening, not silencing.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Ronald Sullivan.
You were one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in
advance of a sexual assault trial.
For this, Harvard forced you to step down as faculty deans, you and your wife, of Winter
Pulse.
Can you tell the story of this saga from first deciding to represent Harvey Weinstein to
the interesting complicated events that followed?
Yeah, sure, so I got a call one morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who
asked if I would consent to taking a call from Harvey.
He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him.
I said, yes, and one thing led to another.
I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors.
And then a day or two later, I decided to take the case.
This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe.
So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice, most of my time is teaching and writing.
But I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible.
I take the challenging sorts of cases.
And this was fit the bill, it was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had pre-judged
the case.
When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment and the public had the case pre-judged.
Even though the specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker,
to the New Yorker article that sort of exposed everything that was going on, allegedly with
Harvey.
So I decided to take the case and I did.
Is there a philosophy behind you taking on these very difficult cases?
Is it a set of principles?
Is it just your love of the law or is there a set of principles why you take on the cases?
Yeah, I do, I'd like to take on hard cases and I'd like to take on the cases that are
with unpopular defendants, unpopular clients.
And with respect to the latter, that's where Harvey Weinstein fell.
It's because we need lawyers and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases because those
sorts of cases determine what sort of criminal justice system we have.
If we don't protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the
least and the last, the unpopular client, then that's the camel's nose under the tent.
If we let the camel's nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse.
That is to say, if we short circuit the rights of a client like Harvey Weinstein, then the
next thing you know, someone will be at your door, knocking it down and violating your
rights.
There's a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect
the civil rights and civil liberties of people.
And these are the sorts of cases that test it.
So for example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda.
By all accounts, he was not a likable guy.
He was a three-time knife thief and not a likable guy.
But lawyer stepped up and took his case.
And because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent,
those warnings that officers are forced to give to people.
So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the best values in our criminal
justice system.
And I proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual
rights of the person whom I'm representing, but the rights of citizens writ large, most
of whom do not experience the criminal justice system.
And it's partly because of lawyers who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules
that protect us, average everyday ordinary concrete citizens.
As from a psychological perspective, just you as a human, is there fear?
Is there stress from all the pressure?
Because if you're facing, I mean, the whole point, a difficult case, especially in the
latter that you mentioned of the going against popular opinion, you have the eyes of millions
potentially looking at you with anger as you try to defend this set of laws that this country
is built on.
No, it doesn't stress me out particularly.
It sort of comes with the territory.
I try not to get too excited in either direction.
So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions.
And I have gotten over 6,000 people out of prison who've been wrongfully incarcerated
and a subset of those people have been convicted and people have been in jail 20, 30 years
who have gotten out.
And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you and that sort of thing.
And so, look, I do the work that I do, I'm proud of the work that I do.
And in that sense, I'm sort of a part-time Taoist, the expression reversal was the movement
of the Tao.
So I don't get too high, I don't get too low.
I just try to do my work and represent people to the best of my ability.
So one of the hardest cases of recent history would be the Harvey Weinstein in terms of
popular opinion or unpopular opinion.
So if you continue on that line, what was that, where does that story take you of taking
on this case?
Yeah.
So I took on the case and then there was some few students at the college.
So let me back up.
I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate entity from the Harvard
Law School.
Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard University and the law school
is obviously the law school.
And I initially was appointed as master of one of the houses.
We did a name change five or six years into it and we're called faculty deans.
But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge.
So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they're assigned to a particular
house or college and that's where they live and eat and so forth.
And these are undergraduates too.
These are undergraduate students.
So I was responsible for one of the houses as its faculty dean.
So it's an administrative appointment at the college and some students who didn't, clearly
didn't like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation.
And from there, it just mushroomed into one of the most craven cowardly acts by any university
in modern history.
It's just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom.
And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret.
It's frankly, it's an embarrassment.
We expect students to do what students do and I encourage students to have their voices
heard and to protest.
I mean, that's what students do.
What is vexing are the adults.
The dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Claudine Gay, absolutely craven and cowardly.
The dean of the college, same thing, Rakesh Karana, craven and cowardly.
They capitulate it to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19-year-olds.
Oh, 19-year-olds are upset that I need to do something.
And it appeared to me that they so, so desired the approval of students that they were afraid
to make the tough decision and the right decision.
It really could have been an important teaching moment at Harvard.
A teaching moment, yeah.
Very important teaching moment.
So they forced you to step down from that faculty dean position at the house.
I would push back on the description a little bit, so I don't write the references to the
op-ed I did in the New York time, Harvard made a mistake by making me step down or something
like that.
So I don't write those things.
I did not step down and refuse to step down.
Harvard declined to renew my contract and I made it clear that I was not going to resign
as a matter of principle and forced them to do the cowardly act that they, in fact, did.
And the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Karana, commission
this survey.
They've never done this before, surveyed from the students.
How do you feel at Winthrop House?
And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results.
Why did they never release the results?
They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came
back positive for me and it didn't fit their narrative because most of the students were
fine.
Yes.
Most of the students were fine.
It was the loudest voice in the room.
So they never released it and I challenged them to this day, release it, release it.
But no, but, you know, they wanted to create this narrative and when the data didn't support
the narrative, then they just got silent, oh, we're not going to release it.
The students demanded it, I demanded it and they wouldn't release it because I am, I just
know in my heart of hearts that it was, it came back in my favor that most students at
Winthrop House said they were fine.
There was a group of students that weaponized the term unsafe.
They said we felt unsafe and they bantied this term about, but I am, again, I'm confident
that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt completely fine and the
majority felt safe and so forth and the super majority, I am confident, either said I feel
great at Winthrop or, you know, I don't care one way or the other and then there was some
minority who had a different view.
But, you know, lessons learned.
It was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop.
I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean and I'm still
in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school.
So in the end, I thought it was, it ended up being a great experience.
The national media was just wonderful in this, just wonderful.
People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard.
I don't mean that John Adams, which I don't think is an apt comparison, but it's always
great to read something like that.
But anyway, that was the Harvard versus Harvey situation.
So that seems like a seminal mistake by Harvard and Harvard is one of the great universities
in the world and sort of its successes and its mistakes are really important for the
world as a beacon of like how we make progress.
So what lessons for the bigger academia that's under fire a lot these days, what bigger lessons
do you take away?
How do we make Harvard great?
How do we make other universities Yale, MIT great in the face of such mistakes?
Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education.
That is to say, we have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students
say.
Now this comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance,
but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason.
They are among the greatest minds on the planet Earth in their particular fields at schools
like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the
greatest minds on Earth.
They are there for a reason.
Students like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty.
And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately the grownups in the room
have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a student's
education.
And my situation is one example where it really could have been an excellent teaching moment
about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat people who are in the
crosshairs of the criminal justice system.
But rather than having that conversation, it's just this consumerization model.
Well, there's a lot of noise out here, so we're going to react in this sort of way.
Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that
has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools' commitments to free and robust and open dialogue.
So to the degree that academic freedom doesn't sit squarely at the center of the academic
mission, any school is going to be in trouble.
And I really hope that we weather this current political moment where 19-year-olds without
degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make
decisions in the best interests of the university and the best interests of the student, even
to the degree though some of those decisions may be unpopular.
And that is going to require a certain courage and hopefully in time, and I'm confident that
in time administrators are going to begin to push back on these current trends.
Harvard's been around for a long time, it's been around for a long time for a reason,
and one of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static.
So I have every view that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and
be around another 400 years, at least that's my hope.
So what this kind of boils down to is just having difficult conversation, difficult debates.
When you mentioned 19-year-olds, and it's funny I've seen this even at MIT, it's not
that they shouldn't have a voice, they do seem to, I guess you have to experience it
and just observe it, they have a strangely disproportionate power.
It's very interesting to basically, I mean you say yes, there's great faculty and so
on, but it's not even just that the faculty is smart or wise or whatever, it's that they're
just silenced.
So the terminology that you mentioned is weaponized as sort of safe spaces or that certain conversations
make people feel unsafe.
What do you think about this kind of idea?
Is there some things that are unsafe to talk about in the university setting?
Is there lines to be drawn somewhere?
And just like you said on the flip side with the slippery slope, is it too easy for the
lines to be drawn everywhere?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic
research about feeling psychologically unsafe.
And so the notion here is that there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people
from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible.
And that's the argument.
And assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet at elite universities
like MIT and like Harvard, that's probably the safest space people are going to be in
for their lives because when they get out into the quote unquote real world, they won't
have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide.
So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling, I think that the
duty of the universities are to challenge people.
It seems to me that it's a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale,
any of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went
in.
That seems to be a horrible waste of four years and money and resources.
However, we ought to challenge students, that they grow, challenge some of their most deeply
held assumptions.
They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate
these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far and to do it fairly and civilly.
So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there's a long tradition
in the University of Civil Discourse.
So you should draw lines somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse.
The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly
and frankly, but do it civilly.
And so to yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, do that on your own space,
but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university.
So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate
to talk about at a university.
That ought to be the presumption.
Now, you know, should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing
the flat earth theory, you know, the earth is flat, right?
So if certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment,
yeah, there's space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we're not going to give you this
platform to tell our students that the earth is flat.
But you know, it's a topic that's controversial, but contestatory.
That's what universities are for.
If you don't like the idea, present better ideas and articulate them.
And I think there needs to be a mechanism outside of the space of ideas of humbling.
Like I've done martial arts for a long time.
I got my ass kicked a lot.
I think that's really important.
I mean, in the space of ideas, I mean, even just in engineering, just all the math classes,
my memories of math, which I love, it's kind of pain.
It's basically coming face to face with the idea that I'm not special, that I am much
dumber than I thought I was, and that anything, accomplishing anything in this world requires
really hard work.
It's really humbling.
That puts you, because I remember when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I was going to be
the smartest, the best fighter, the Nobel Prize winning, all those kinds of things.
And then you come face to face with reality and it hurts.
And it feels like there needs to be efficient mechanisms from the best universities in the
world to, without abusing you, it's a very difficult line to walk without mentally or
physically abusing you, be able to humble you.
And that's what I felt was missing in these very difficult, very important conversations
is the 19 year olds, when they spoke up, the mechanism for humbling them with ideas was
missing.
It kind of got broken down because, as you say, there does, I sensed fear.
Everything was permeated with fear.
And fear is paralyzing, fear is destructive, especially in a place that's supposed to be
all about freedom of ideas.
And I don't know if you have anything, any thoughts to say on this whole idea of cancel
culture, where people, a lot of people usually become political, so staying maybe outside
of the world to politics.
Is this, Jeff, do you have thoughts about it, does it bother you that people are sort
of put in this bin and labeled as something and then thereby you can ignore everything
they say?
I mean, Steven Pinker, there's a lot of Harvard folks that are fighting against these set of
ideas, but do you have thoughts?
I think that we, as a culture, are way, way, way too quick to cancel people.
And it's become almost reflexive now, you know, someone say something or makes an off-hand
comment, even a mistake, there's a move to simply cancel folks.
So I think that this, quote, unquote, cancel culture has really gotten out of control at
this point.
It's forcing people to be robotic in many ways.
No offense to robots.
I was going to say, now I know I'm venturing into your intellectual domain.
For future robots, watching is no offense.
And they're, and it's discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life
in any sort of way because, you know, who needs the, who needs the stress of it?
Well, in some sense, you're an inspiration that you're able to withstand the pressure,
the pressure of the masses.
But it is, it's a sad, it's a sad aspect of human nature that we kind of get into these
crowds and we get, we start chanting and it's fun for some reason, and then you forget yourself
and then you sort of wake up the next day, not, not having anticipated the consequences
of all the chanting and we would get ourselves in trouble in that.
I mean, there's some responsibility on the, on social networks and the mechanisms by which
they make it more frictionless to do the chanting, to do the canceling, to do the outrage and
all that kind of stuff.
So I actually on the technology side have a hope that that's fixable, but yeah, it does
seem to be, you know, it almost like the internet showed to us that we have a lot of broken
ways about which we communicate with each other and we're trying to figure that out.
Same with the university, the, this mistake by Harvard showed that we need to reinvent
what the university is and I mean, all of this is, it's almost like we're finding our
baby deer legs and trying to strengthen the institutions that have been very successful
for, for, for a long time.
You know, the really interesting thing about Harvey Weinstein and you choosing these exceptionally
difficult cases is also thinking about what it means to defend evil people, what it means
to defend these, we could say unpopular and you might push back against the word evil,
but bad people in society.
First of all, do you think there's such a thing as evil or do you think all people
are good and it's just circumstances that create evil and also is there somebody too
evil for the law to defend?
And so that's a, so the first question, that's a deep philosophical question, whether the
category of evil does any work for me, it does for me.
I do think that I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally
understood.
So, so there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn't, doesn't do any work for
me, but the category evil, in fact, does intellectual work for me and I understand
it as something that, that exists.
Is it genetic or is it the circumstance like, what kind of work does it do for you intellectually?
I think that it's tightly contingent, that is to say that the conditions in which one
grows up and so forth, begins to create this category that we may think of as evil.
Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth
are more prevalent in say, serial killer.
So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct, but I don't,
I don't have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil in.
And, you know, I'm not a determinist thinker in that way.
So you come out the womb evil and you're destined to be that way.
To the extent there may be biological determinants, there still require some nurture as well.
So.
But do you still put a responsibility for the, on the individual?
Of course.
Yeah.
We all make choices.
And so some responsibility on the individual indeed.
We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad
choices in front of them.
And that makes me very sad that the people grow up with predominantly bad choices in
front of them.
And that's unfair.
And that's on all of us.
But yes, I do think we make, we make choices.
Wow.
That's so powerful.
The constellation of bad choices.
That's such a powerful way to think about sort of equality, which is the set of trajectories
before you that you could take if you just roll the dice is a, you know, life is a kind
of optimization problem, sorry to take us into math over a set of trajectories under
imperfect information.
So you're going to do a lot of stupid shit to put it in technical terms.
But the, the, the fraction of the trajectories that take you into, into bad places or into
good places is really important.
And that's ultimately what we're talking about.
And evil might be just a little bit of predisposition biologically, but the rest is just trajectories
that you can take.
I've been studying Hitler a lot recently.
I've been reading probably way too much and it's, it's interesting to think about all
the possible trajectories that could have avoided the, this particular individual developing
the hate that he did, the following that he did, the, the actual final, there's a few
turns in him psychologically where he went from being a leader that just wants to conquer
and to somebody who allowed his anger and emotion to take over to where he started making mistakes
for in terms of militarily speaking, but also started doing, you know, evil things.
And all the possible trajectories that could have avoided that are fascinating, including
he wasn't that bad at painting and drawing from the very beginning.
And, and it's time in Vienna, there's all these possible things to think about.
And of course, there's millions of others like him that never came to power and all
those kinds of things.
So, but that goes to the second question on the, on the side of evil.
Do you think, and, and Hitler's often brought up as like an example of somebody who is like
the epitome of evil.
Do you think you would, if you got that same phone call after World War II and Hitler survived
during war, you know, the trial for war crimes, would you take the case defending Adolf Hitler?
If you don't want to answer that one, is there a line to draw for evil for who to not to
defend?
No, I think, I think everyone, I'll do the second one first.
Everyone has a right to a defense if you're charged criminally in the United States of
America.
So, no, I do not think that there's someone so evil that they do not deserve a defense.
Process matters.
Process helps us get to results more accurately than we would otherwise.
So it is important and it's vitally important and indeed more important for someone deemed
to be evil to receive the same quantum of process and the same substance of process
that anyone else would.
It's vitally important to the health of our criminal justice system for that to happen.
So yes, everybody, Hitler included, were he charged in the United States for a crime that
occurred in the United States?
Yes.
Whether I would do it, if I were a public defender and assign the case, yes, I started
my career as a public defender.
I represent anyone who was assigned to me.
I think that is our duty.
In private practice, I have choices and I likely, based on the hypo you gave me, and
I would tweak it a bit because it would have to be a U.S. crime.
But I get the broader point and don't want to bog down in technicalities.
I'd likely pass right now as I see it unless it was a case where nobody else would represent
him.
Then I would think that I have some sort of duty and obligation to do it.
But yes, everyone absolutely deserves a right to competent counsel.
That is a beautiful idea.
It's difficult to think about it in the face of public pressure.
It's terrifying to watch the masses during this past year of 2020 to watch the power
of the masses to make a decision before any of the data is out, if the data is ever out,
any of the details, any of the processes.
There is an anger to the justice system.
There's a lot of people that feel like even though the ideal you describe is a beautiful
one, it does not always operate justly.
It does not operate to the best of its ideals.
It operates unfairly.
Can we go to the big picture of the criminal justice system?
What do you, given the ideal, works about our criminal justice system and what is broken?
Well, there's a lot broken right now and I usually focus on that.
But in truth, a lot works about our criminal justice system.
So there's an old joke and it's funny, but it carries a lot of truth to it.
The joke is that in the United States we have the worst criminal justice system in the world
except for every place else.
And yes, we certainly have a number of problems and a lot of problems based on race and class
and economic station, but we have a process that privileges liberty and that's a good
feature of the criminal justice system.
So here's how it works.
The idea of the relationship between the individual and the state is such that in the United
States we privilege liberty over and above very many values, so much so that a statement
by increased matter, not terribly far from where we're sitting right now, has gained
traction over all these years and it's that better, 10 guilty go free than one innocent
person convicted.
That is an expression of the way in which we understand liberty to operate in our collective
consciousness.
We would rather a bunch of guilty people go free than to impact the liberty interests
of any individual person.
So that's a guiding principle in our criminal justice system, liberty.
So we set a process that makes it difficult to convict people.
We have rules of procedure that are cumbersome and that slow down the process and that exclude
otherwise reliable evidence and this is all because we place a value on liberty and I
think these are good things and it says a lot about our criminal justice system.
Some of the bad features have to do with the way in which this country sees color as a
proxy for criminality and treats people of color in radically different ways in the criminal
justice system from arrests to charging decisions to sentencing people of color are disproportionately
impacted on all sorts of registers.
One example and it's a popular one that although there appears to be no distinguishable difference
between drug use by whites and blacks in the country, blacks though only 12% of the population
represent 40% of the drug charges in the country, there's some inequities along race and class
in the criminal justice system that we really have to fix and they've grown to more than
bugs in the system and they've become features unfortunately of our system.
To make it more efficient to make judgments so the racism makes it more efficient.
It efficiently moves people from society to the streets and that's and a lot of innocent
people get caught up in that.
Let me ask in terms of the innocence, so you've gotten a lot of people who are innocent.
I guess revealed their innocence, demonstrated their innocence.
What's that process like?
What's it like emotionally, psychologically?
What's it like legally to fight the system in through the process of revealing sort of
the innocence of a human being?
Yeah, emotionally and psychologically, it can be taxing.
I follow a model of what's called empathic representation and that is I get to know my
clients and their family, I get to know their strivings, their aspirations, their fears,
their sorrows, so that certainly sometimes can do psychic injury on one if you get really
invested and really sad and or happy and it does become emotionally taxing.
But the idea of someone sitting in jail for 20 years, completely innocent of a crime,
can you imagine sitting there every day for 20 years knowing that you factually did not
do the thing that you were convicted of by a jury of your peers?
It's got to be the most incredible thing in the world.
But the people who do it and the people who make it and come out on the other side as
productive citizens are folks who say they've come to an inner peace in their own minds
and they say these bars aren't going to define me, that my humanity is there and it's immutable
and they are not bitter, which is amazing.
I tend to think that I'm not that good of a person.
I would be bitter for every day of 20 years if I were in jail for something, but people
tell me that they can't survive, like the one cannot survive like that and you have
to come to terms with it and the people whom I've exonerated, I mean they come out, most
of them come out and they just really just take on life with a vim and vigor without
bitterness and it's a beautiful thing to see.
Do you think it's possible to eradicate racism from the judicial system?
I do.
I think that race insinuates itself in all aspects of our lives and the judicial system
is not immune from that.
So to the extent we begin to eradicate dangerous and deleterious race thinking from society
generally, then it will be eradicated from the criminal justice system.
I think we've got a lot of work to do and I think it'll be a while, but I think it's
doable.
And the country, so historians will look back 300 years from now and take note of the incredible
journey of diasporic Africans in the US, an incredible journey from slavery to the heights
of politics and business and judiciary and the academy and so forth in not a lot of time
and actually not a lot of time.
And if we can have that sort of movement historically, let's think about what the next 175 years
will look like.
I'm not saying it's going to be short, but I'm saying that if we keep at it, keep getting
to know each other a little better, keep enforcing laws that prohibit the sort of race-based
discrimination that people have experienced and provide as a society opportunities for
people to thrive in this world, then I think we can see a better world and if we see a
better world, we'll see a better judicial system.
So I think it's kind of fascinating if you look throughout history and race is just part
of that is we create the other and treat the other with disdain through the legal system,
but just through human nature.
I tend to believe we mentioned offline that I work with robots.
It sounds absurd to say, especially to you, especially because we're talking about racism
and it's so prevalent today.
I do believe that there will be almost like a civil rights movement for robots because
with, I think there's a huge value to society of having artificial intelligence systems
that interact with humans and are human-like.
And the more they become human-like, they will start to ask very fundamentally human
questions about freedom, about suffering, about justice.
And they will have to come face to face, like look in the mirror and ask in the question
just because we're biologically based, just because we're human.
Does that mean we're the only ones that deserve the rights?
Again, forming another group, which is robots.
And I'm sure there could be along that path different versions of other that we form.
So racism, race is certainly a big other that we've made, as you said, a lot of progress
on throughout the history of this country, but it does feel like we always create, as
we make progress, create new other groups.
And of course, the other group that perhaps is outside the legal system that people talk
about is the essential, no, I eat a lot of meat, but the torture of animals.
The people talk about when we look back from a couple of centuries from now, look back
at the kind of things we're doing to animals, we might regret that, we might see that in
a very different light.
And it's kind of interesting to see the future trajectory of what we wake up to about the
injustice in our, in our ways.
But the robot one is the one I'm especially focused on because, but at this moment in
time, it seems ridiculous, but I'm sure most civil rights movements throughout history
seem ridiculous at first.
Well, it's interesting, sort of outside of my intellectual Bailey Wick robots, as I
understand the development of artificial intelligence, though the, the aspect that
still is missing is this notion of consciousness and that it's, it's consciousness.
That is the thing that will, will move if it were to exist, and I'm not saying that
it can or will, but if it were to exist would move robots from machines to something different,
that is something that experienced the world in a way analogous to what, how we experience
it.
And also, as I understand the science, there's a, unlike what you see on, on television that
we're not, we're not there yet in terms of this notion of the machines having a consciousness.
Or a great general intelligence, all those kinds of things, a huge amount of progress
has been made and there is, it's fascinating to watch.
So I'm on both minds as a person who's building them, I'm realizing how sort of quote unquote
dumb they are, but also looking at human history and how poor we are predicting the progress
of innovation and technology.
It's obvious that we have to be humble by our ability to predict coupled with the fact
that we keep to use terminology carefully here.
We keep discriminating against the intelligence of artificial systems.
The smarter they get, the more ways we find to dismiss the, their intelligence.
So this, this has just been going on throughout where I, it's almost as if we're threatened
in the most primitive human way, animalistic way.
We're threatened by the power of other creatures and we want to lessen, dismiss them.
So consciousness is a really important one.
But the one I think about a lot in terms of consciousness, the very engineering question
is whether the display of consciousness is the same as the possession of consciousness.
So if a robot tells you they are conscious, if a robot looks like they're suffering when
you torture them, if a robot is afraid of death and says they're afraid of death and
are legitimately afraid, like for, in terms of just everything we as humans use to determine
the ability of somebody to be their own entity, they're the one that loves, one that fears,
one that hopes, one that can suffer.
If a robot like in the dumbest of ways is able to display that, we, it change, it starts
changing things very quickly.
I'm not sure what it is, but it does seem that there's a huge component to consciousness
that is a social creation.
Like we together create our consciousness, like we believe our common humanity together.
Alone, we wouldn't be aware of our humanity and the law as it protects our freedoms seems
to be a construct of the social construct.
And when you add other creatures into it, it's not obvious to me that like you have
to build, there'll be a moment when you say, this thing is now conscious.
I think there's going to be a lot of fake it until you make it.
And there'll be a very gray area between fake and make that is going to force us to contend
with what it means to be an entity that deserves rights where all men are created equal.
The men part might have to expand in ways that we are not yet anticipating.
It's very interesting.
I mean, my favorite, the fundamental thing I love about artificial intelligence is it
gets smarter and smarter.
It challenges to think of what is right, the questions of justice, questions of freedom.
It basically challenges us to understand our own mind, to understand what like almost from
an engineering first principles perspective to understand what it is that makes us human
that is at the core of all the rights that we talk about and all the documents we write.
So even if we don't give rights to artificial intelligence systems, we may be able to construct
more fair legal systems to protect us humans.
Well, I mean, interesting ontological question between the performance of consciousness and
actual consciousness to the extent that actual consciousness is anything beyond some contingent
reality.
But you've posed a number of interesting philosophical questions.
And then there's also, it strikes me that philosophers of religion would pose another
set of questions as well when you deal with issues of structure versus soul, body versus
soul.
And it would be a, it will be a complicated mix and I suspect I'll be dust by the time
those questions get worked out.
And so yeah, the soul, the soul is a fun one.
There's no soul.
I'm not sure maybe you can correct me, but there's very few discussion of soul in our
legal system.
Right?
Correct.
So, but there is a discussion about what constitutes a human being and I mean, you gestured at
the notion of the potential of the law widening the domain of so of human being.
So in that sense, right, you know, people are very angry because they can't get sort
of pain and suffering damages if someone negligently kills a pet because a pet is not a human being.
And people say, well, I love my pet, but the law sees a pet as chattel as property like
this, this water bottle.
So the current legal definitions trade on a definition of humanity that may not be worked
out in any sophisticated way, but certainly there's a, there's a broad and shared understanding
of what, what it, what it means.
So probably doesn't explicitly contain a definition of something like soul, but it's, it's more
robust than, you know, a carbon-based organism that there's something a little more distinct
about what the law thinks a human being is.
So if we can dive into, we've already been doing it, but if we can dive into more difficult
territory, so 2020 had the tragic case of George Floyd when you reflect on the protests,
on the racial tensions over the death of George Floyd, how do you make sense of it all?
What do you take away from these events?
Look, the George Floyd moment occurred at an historical moment where people were in quarantine
for COVID and people have these cell phones to a degree greater than we've ever had them
before.
And this was a sort of the straw that broke the camos back after a number of these sorts
of cell phone videos surfaced.
This was fed up, there was unimpeachable evidence of a form of mistreatment, whether it constitutes
murder or manslaughter, the trial is going on now, and jurors will figure that out, but
there was widespread appreciation that a fellow human being was mistreated, that we were just
talking about humanity, that there was not a sufficient recognition of this person's
humanity.
The common humanity of this person, yeah.
The common humanity of this person, well said, and people were fed up.
So we were already in this COVID space where we were exercising care for one another, and
there was just an explosion, the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the civil
rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s, and people simply said, enough, enough, enough.
This has to stop.
We cannot treat fellow citizens in this way, and we can't do it with impunity.
And the young people said, we're not going to stand for it anymore, and they took to
the streets.
But with millions of people protesting, there is nevertheless taken us back to the most
difficult of trials.
You have the trial, like you mentioned, that's going on now of Derek Chauvin, of one of the
police officers involved.
What are your thoughts?
What are your predictions on this trial where the process of the law is trying to proceed
in the face of so much racial tension?
Yeah, it's going to be an interesting trial.
I've been keeping an eye on it there in jury selection now, today, as we're talking.
So a lot's going to depend on what sort of jury gets selected.
Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but so one of the interesting qualities of this trial, maybe
you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the cameras are allowed in the courtroom, at least during
the jury selection, so you get to watch some of this stuff.
And the other part is the jury selection, again, I'm very inexperienced, but it seems
like selecting an unbiased jury is really difficult for this trial.
It almost like, I don't know, me as a listener, listening to people that are trying to talk
their way into the jury kind of thing, trying to decide, is this person really unbiased
or are they just trying to hold on to their deeply held emotions and trying to get onto
the jury?
I mean, it's incredibly difficult process.
I don't know if you can comment on a case so difficult, like the ones you've mentioned
before, how do you select a jury that represents the people and carries the ideal of the law?
Yes, so a couple things, so first, yes, it is televised and it will be televised as they
say gavel to gavel, so the entire trial, so the whole thing is going to be televised.
So people are getting a view of how laborious jury selection can be.
I think as of yesterday, they had picked six jurors and it's taken a week and they have
to get to 14.
So they've got probably another week or more to do.
I've been in jury trials where it took a month to choose a jury.
So that's the most important part, you have to choose the right sort of jury.
So unbiased in the criminal justice system has a particular meaning.
It means that, let me tell you what it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that a person is not
aware of the case.
It also does not mean that a person hasn't formed an opinion about the case.
Those are two popular misconceptions.
What it does mean is that notwithstanding whether an individual has formed an opinion,
notwithstanding whether an individual knows about the case, that individual can set aside
any prior opinions, can set aside any notions that they've developed about the case and
listen to the evidence presented at trial in conjunction with the judges' instructions
on how to understand and view that evidence.
So if a person can do that, then they're considered unbiased.
So as a longtime defense attorney, I would be hesitant in a big case like this to pick
a juror who's never heard of the case or anything going around because I'm thinking, well, who
is this person and what in the world do they do?
Or are they lying to me?
I mean, how can you not have heard about this case?
So they may bring other problems.
So I don't mind so much people who've heard about the case or folks who've formed initial
opinions, but what you don't want is people who have tethered themselves to that opinion
in a way that they can't be convinced otherwise.
So but you also have people who, as you suggested, who just lie because they want to get on
the jury or lie because they want to get off the jury.
So sometimes people come and say, you know, the most ridiculous, outrageous, offensive
things to know because they know that they'll get excused for cause.
And others who you can tell really badly want to get on the jury.
So they're just, they pretend to be the most neutral, unbiased person in the world.
What the law calls the reasonable person, we have in law the reasonable person standard.
And I would tell my class, the reasonable person in real life is the person that you
would be least likely to want to have a drink with.
They're the most boring, neutral, not interesting sort of person in the world.
And so a lot of jurors engage in the performative act of presenting themselves as the most sort
of even killed, rational, reasonable person because they really want to get on the jury.
Yeah.
There's an interesting question.
I apologize.
I haven't watched the law because it is very long I watched it.
You know, there's certain questions you've asked in the jury, you ask in the jury selection.
I remember, I think one jumped out at me, which is, you know, something like, does the fact
that this person is a police officer make you feel any kind of way about them?
So trying to get at that, you know, I don't know what that is.
I guess that's bias.
And it's such a difficult question to ask.
Like I asked myself for that question, like how much, you know, we all kind of want to
pretend that we're not racist, we don't judge, we don't have, we're like these, we're the
reasonable human, but, you know, legitimately asking yourself, like, are you, what are the
what are the prejudgements you have in your mind?
Is that even possible for a human being?
Like when you look at yourself in the mirror and think about it, is it possible to actually
answer that?
Yeah, look, I do not believe that people can be completely unbiased.
We all have baggage and bias and bring it wherever we go, including to court.
What you want is to try to find a person who can at least recognize when a bias is working
and actively try to do the right thing.
That's the best we can ask.
So if a juror says, yeah, you know, I grew up in a place where I tend to believe what
police officers say, that's just how I grew up.
But if the judge is telling me that I have to listen to every witness equally, then I'll,
you know, I'll do my best and I won't weigh that testimony any higher than I would any
other testimony.
If you have someone answer a question like that, that sounds more sincere to me, sounds
more honest.
If you want a person, you want a person to try to do that.
And then in closing arguments, right, as the lawyer, right, I'd say something like,
ladies and gentlemen, you know, we chose you to be on this jury because you swore that
you would do your level best to be fair.
That's why we chose you.
And I'm confident that you're going to do that here.
So when you heard that police officer's testimony, the judge told you, you can't give more credit
to that testimony just because it's a police officer.
And I trust that you're going to do that.
And that you're going to look at witness number three, you know, John Smith, you don't look
at John Smith.
John Smith has a different recollection and you're duty bound, duty bound to look at
that testimony and this person's credibility, you know, the same degree as that other witness,
right?
And now what you have is just a he said, she said, matter, and this is a criminal case
that has to be reasonable doubt.
Right.
So, you know, and really someone who's trying to do the right thing, it's helpful.
But no, you're not going to just fine 14 people with no biases.
That's absurd.
Well, that's fascinating that especially the way you're inspiring the way you're speaking
now is, I mean, I guess you're calling on the jury.
That's kind of the whole system.
As you're calling on the jury, each individual on the jury to step up and really think, you
know, to step up and be their most thoughtful selves, actually, most introspective, like
you're trying to basically ask people to be their best selves.
And that's, and they, I guess a lot of people step up to that.
Yeah.
That's why the system works.
I'm very, I'm very pro jury of juries, they, they get it right a lot of the time, most
of the time, and they really work hard to do it.
So what do you think happens?
I mean, maybe I'm not so much on the legal side of things, but on the social side, it's
like with OJ Simpson trial.
Do you think it's possible that Derek Chauvin does not get convicted of the, what is it,
second degree murder?
How do you think about that?
How do you think about the potential social impact of that, the riots, the protests, the
either, either direction?
Any words that are said, the tension here could be explosive, especially with the cameras.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's only a possibility that he, he'll be acquitted for homicide charges for the jury
to convict.
They have to make a determination as to officer Chauvin's, former officer Chauvin's state
of mind, whether he intended to cause some harm, whether he was grossly reckless in causing
harm, so much so that he disregarded a known risk of death or serious bodily injury.
And as you may have read in the papers yesterday, the judge allowed a third degree murder charge
in Kentucky, which is, it's the mindset, the state of mind there is not an intention,
but it's a depraved indifference.
And what that means is that the jury doesn't have to find that he intended to do anything.
Rather, they could find that he was just indifferent to a risk.
As dark.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what's worse.
Well, that's a good point, but it's another basis for the jury to convict.
But look, you never know what happens when you go to jury trial.
So there could be an acquittal, and if there is, I imagine there would be massive protests.
If he's convicted, I don't think that would happen, because I just don't see, at least
nothing I've seen or read suggests that there's a big pro Chauvin camp out there ready to
protest.
But is there also potential tensions that could arise from the sentencing?
I don't know how that exactly works, sort of not enough years kind of thing.
Yeah, it could be.
All that kind of stuff.
It could be.
I mean, it's a lot could happen.
So it depends on what he's convicted of.
One count, I think is like up to 10 years, another counts up to 40 years.
So it depends what he's convicted of, and yes, it depends on how much of the, how much
time the judge gives him if he is convicted.
But there's a lot of space for people to be very angry, and so we will see what happens.
I just feel like with the judge and the lawyers, there's an opportunity to have really important
long lasting speeches.
I don't know if they think of it that way, especially with the cameras.
It feels like they have the capacity to heal or to divide.
Do you ever think about that as a lawyer, as a legal mind, that your words aren't just
about the case, but they'll reverberate through history potentially?
That is certainly a possible consequence of things you say.
I don't think that most lawyers think about that in the context of the case.
Your role is much more narrow.
You're the partisan advocate, as a defense lawyer, partisan advocate for that client
as a prosecutor.
You're a minister of justice attempting to prosecute that particular case, but the reality
is you are absolutely correct that sometimes the things you say will have a shelf life.
You mentioned O.J.
Simpson before, if the glove doesn't fit, you must have quit.
It's going to be in our lexicon for probably a long time now.
It happens, but it shouldn't be foremost on your mind.
What do you make of the O.J.
Simpson trial?
Do you have thoughts about it?
He's out and about on social media now.
He's a public figure.
Is there lessons to be drawn from that whole saga?
That was an interesting case.
When I was a young public defender, I want to say in my first year as a public defender
when that verdict came out, so that case was important in so many ways.
One, it was the first DNA case, major DNA case, and there were significant lessons learned
from that.
One mistake that the prosecution made was that they didn't present the science in a
way that a lay jury could understand it.
What Johnny Cochran did was he understood the science and was able to translate that
into a vocabulary that he bet that that jury understood.
Cochran was dismissive of a lot of DNA.
They said they found such and such amount of DNA.
That's just like me wiping my finger against my nose and just that little bit of DNA.
That was effective because the prosecution hadn't done a good job of establishing that,
yes, it's microscopic.
You don't need that much.
Yes, wiping your hand on your nose and touching something, you can transfer a lot of DNA and
that gives you good information, but it was the first time that the public generally and
that jury maybe since high school science had heard nucleotide, it was just all these
terms getting thrown at them, but it was not weaved into a narrative.
Cochran taught us that no matter what type of case it is, no matter what science is
involved, it's still about storytelling.
It's still about a narrative and he was great at that narrative and was consistent with
his narrative all the way out.
Another lesson that was relearned is that you never ask a question to which you don't
know the answer.
That's like trial after C-101.
When they gave O.J. Simpson the glove and it wouldn't fit, you don't do things where
you just don't know how it's going to turn out.
It was way, way too risky and I think that's what acquitted him because the glove just
wouldn't fit and he got to do this and ham in front of the camera and all of that and
it was big.
Do you think about representation as storytelling, like you, yourself and your role?
Absolutely.
We tell stories.
It is fundamental.
Since time immemorial, we have told stories to help us make sense of the world around
us.
As a scientist, you tell a different type of story but we as a public have told stories
from time immemorial to help us make sense of the physical and the natural world.
We are still a species that is moved by storytelling so that's first and last in trial work.
You have to tell a good story.
The basic introductory books about trial work teach young students, young students
and young lawyers to start an opening with this case is about.
This case is about and then you fill in the blank and that's your narrative.
That's the narrative you're going to tell.
Of course, you can do the ultra dramatic, the glove doesn't fit the climax and all those
kinds of things but that's the best of narratives, the best of stories.
Anything of other really powerful stories that you were involved with is the Aaron Hernandez
trial and the whole story, the whole legal case.
Can you maybe overview the big picture story and legal case of Aaron Hernandez?
Aaron, whom I missed a lot, he was charged with a double murder in the case that I tried
and this was a unique case in one of those impossible cases in part because Aaron had
already been convicted of a murder and so we had a client who was on trial for a double
murder after having already been convicted of a separate murder and we had a jury pool
just about all of whom knew that he had been convicted of a murder because he was a very
popular football player in Boston, which is a big football town with the Patriots.
So everyone knew that he was a convicted murderer and here we are defending for in a double
murder case.
So that was the context.
It was not a case in the sense that this murder had gone unsolved for a couple of years and
then a nightclub bouncer said something to a cop who was working at a club that Aaron
Hernandez was somehow involved in that murder that happened in the theater district.
That's a district where all the clubs are in Boston and where the homicide occurred
and once the police heard Aaron Hernandez's name then it was, you know, they went all
out in order to do this and they found a guy named Alexander Bradley who was a very significant
drug dealer in the sort of Connecticut area, very significant, very powerful and he essentially
in exchange for a deal pointed to Aaron said, yeah, I was with Aaron and Aaron was the
murderer.
So that's how the case came to court.
Okay, so that says the context.
What was your involvement in this case like legally, intellectually, psychologically
when this particular is a second charge of murder?
So a friend called me, Jose Baez, who is the defense attorney and he comes to a class that
I teach every year at Harvard, the trial advocacy workshop as one of my teaching faculty members.
It's a class where we teach students how to try cases.
So Jose called me and said, hey, I got a call from Massachusetts, Aaron Hernandez.
You want to go and talk to him with me.
So I said, sure.
So we went up to the prison and met Aaron and spoke with him for two or three hours
that first time and before we left, he said he wanted to retain us, he wanted to work
with us and that started the representation.
What was he like?
In that time, what was he worn down by the whole process?
Was there still a light in that?
He was not.
He had, I mean, more than just a light, he was luminous almost.
He had a radiant million-dollar smile whenever you walked in.
My first impression I distinctly remember was, wow, this is what a professional athlete
looks like.
He walked in and he's just bigger and more fit than anyone anywhere and it's like, wow,
and when you saw him on television, he looked kind of little and I was like, so I remember
thinking, well, what did those other guys look like in person?
And he's extraordinarily polite, young, I was surprised by how young he was.
Both in mind and body.
Chronologically, I was thinking, he was in his early 20s, I believe.
But there seemed to be like an innocence to him in terms of just the way he saw the world.
I think that's right.
They picked that up from the documentary, just taking that in.
I think that's right, yeah, yeah.
So there is a Netflix documentary titled Killer Inside the Mind of Aaron Hernandez.
What are your thoughts on this documentary?
I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see.
I've not seen it.
I did not participate in it.
I know I was in it because of there was news footage, but I did not participate in it.
I had not talked to Aaron about press or anything before he died.
My strong view is that the attorney-clad privilege survives death.
And so I was not inclined to talk about anything that Aaron and I talked about.
So I just didn't participate and have never watched.
Not even watch, huh?
Does that apply to most of your work?
Do you try to stay away from the way the press perceives stuff?
During, yes, I try to stay away from it.
I will view it afterwards.
I just hadn't gotten around to watching Aaron because it's kind of sad.
So I just haven't watched it, but I definitely stay away from the press during trial.
And there are some lawyers who watch it religiously to see what's going on, but I'm confident
in my years of training and so forth that I can actively sense what's going on in the
courtroom and that I really don't need advice from Joe476 at Gmail, some random guy on the
Internet telling me how to try cases.
So it's just, to me, it's just confusing and I just keep it out of my mind.
And even if you think you can ignore it, just reading it will have a little bit of an effect
on your mind.
I think that's right.
Over time might accumulate.
So the documentary, but in general, it mentioned or kind of emphasized and talked about Aaron's
sexuality or sort of, they were discussing basically the idea that he was a homosexual
and some of the trauma, some of the suffering that he endured in his life had to do with
sort of fear given the society of what his father would think, of what others around
him, sort of especially in sport culture and football and so on.
So I don't know in your interaction with him was, do you think that maybe even leaning
up to a suicide, do you think his struggle with coming to terms with the sexuality had
a role to play in much of his difficulties?
Well, I'm not going to talk about my interactions with him and anything I derived from that.
But what I will say is that a story broke on the radio at some point during the trial
that Aaron had been in the same sex relationship with someone and some local sports casters,
local Boston sports casters would be really mushroomed the story.
So he and everyone was aware of it, you also may know from the court record that the prosecutors
floated a specious theory for a minute but then backed off of it that, you know, that
Aaron was, that there was some sort of, I guess, gay rage at work with him and that
might be a cause, a motive for the killing and luckily they really backed off of that.
That was quite an offensive claim in theory.
So but to answer your question more directly, I mean, I have no idea why he killed himself.
It was a surprise and a shock.
I was scheduled to go see him like a couple days after it happened.
I mean, he was anxious for Jose and I to come in and do the appeal from the murder which
he was convicted for.
He wanted us to take over that appeal.
He was talking about going back to football.
I mean, he said, well, you talked about this earlier, you talked about the sort of innocent
aspect of him.
He said, you know, well, Ron, maybe not, maybe not the Patriots, but, you know, I want to
get back in the league and I was like, you know, Aaron, that's, that's going to be tough,
man.
But he really, you know, he really believed it and and then, you know, for a few days
later that to happen, it was just, it was a real shock to me.
Like when you look back at that, at his story, does it make you sad?
Very.
Very.
And I thought, so one, I believe he, he absolutely did not commit the crimes that we acquitted
him on.
I think that was the right answer for, for, for that.
I don't know enough about Bradley, the first case, I'm sorry, to make a, make an opinion
on, but, but in our case, you know, it was just, he had the misfortune of having a family
a famous name and the police department just really, just, just, just really got, got on
them there.
So, yes, it's, it's, I, I miss him a lot.
It was very, very sad, surprising.
Yeah.
And, and I mean, just on the human side, of course, we don't know the full story, but
just everything that led up to suicide, everything led up to an incredible professional football
player, you know, that whole story, if remarkably talented athlete, remarkably talented athlete.
And it's, it has to do with all the, all the possible trajectories, right, that we can
take through life as we were talking about before.
And some of them lead to, to suicide, sadly enough.
And it's, it's always tragic when you have some, you know, somebody with, with great
potential result in, in the things that happen, right.
People love it.
When I ask about books, I don't know if, whether technical, like legal or fiction, nonfiction
books throughout your life have had an impact on you.
If there's something you could recommend or something you could speak to about something
that inspired ideas, insights about this world, complicated world of ours.
Oh, wow, yeah.
So I'll give you a couple.
So one is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Wardy.
He's passed away now, but was a philosopher at some of our major institutions, Princeton,
Harvard, Stanford.
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, at least that's a book that really helped me work
through a series of thoughts.
So it stands for the proposition that, that our most deeply held beliefs are contingent,
that there, there's nothing beyond history or prior to socialization.
That's the finatory of the, of the human being, that's Wardy.
And he says that our most deeply held beliefs are received wisdom and highly contingent
along a number of registers.
And he does that, but then goes on to say that he nonetheless can hold strongly held
beliefs, recognizing their contingency, but still believes them to be true and accurate.
And it helps you to work through what could be an intellectual tension, other words.
So you don't delve into, one doesn't delve into relativism, everything is okay.
But it gives you a vocabulary to think about how to negotiate these, these, these realities.
Do you share this tension?
I mean, there, there is a real tension that seems like even like the law, the legal system
is all just a construct of our human ideas.
And yet it seems to be almost feels fundamental to what a, what a just society is.
Yeah.
I definitely share the tension and love the, his, his vocabulary and the way he's helped
me resolve the tension.
So right.
Yeah, yeah, so like, you know, infanticide, for example, perhaps it's socially contingent,
perhaps it's received wisdom, perhaps it's anthropological, you know, we need to propagate
the species.
And I still think it's wrong.
Yeah.
And, and, and, and Rory has helped me develop a category to say, to say that, no, I can't
provide any, in Rory's words, non-circular theoretical backup for this proposition.
At some point, it's going to run me in a, in a circularity problem, but that's okay.
I, I, I, I hold this nonetheless and for recognition of its contingency.
But what it does is, is, is, is makes you humble and, and when you're humble, that's
good because you know, this notion that ideas are always already in progress.
Whatever fully formed, I think is, is, is the sort of intellectual I strive to be.
And if I have a, a, a sufficient degree of humility that I don't have the final answer,
capital A, then that's going to help me to get to better answers, lowercase A. And, and,
and Rory does it.
And he talks about, in, in the solidarity part of the book, he has this concept of imaginative
I, the imaginative ability to see other different people as we instead of they.
And I just think it's a beautiful concept, but he talks about this imaginative ability
and it's this active process.
So I mean, so that's a book that's done a lot of work for me over the, the, the years.
Souls of Black Folk by W.B. Du Bois was absolutely pivotal, pivotal in my intellectual development.
One of the premier set of essays in the Western literary tradition.
And it's a deep and profound sociological philosophical and historical analysis of the
predicament of blacks in America from one of our country's greatest polymaths.
It, it's just a, it's, it's a beautiful text and, and I go to it yearly.
So for somebody like me, so growing up in the Soviet Union, the struggle, the civil rights
movement, the struggle of race and all those kinds of things that, that is, you know, this
is universal, but it's also very much a journey of the United States.
It was kind of a foreign thing that I stepped into.
Is that something you would recommend somebody like me to read?
Or is there other things about race that are good to connect?
Because my, my, my flavor of suffering injustice, I'm a Jew as well.
My flavor has to do with World War II and the studies of that, you know, all the injustices
there.
So I'm just stepping into a new set of injustices and trying to learn the, the landscape.
I would, I would say anyone is, is a better person for having read Du Bois.
It's just, he's just a remarkable writer and thinker and it, I mean, and to the extent
you're interested in learning another history, he does it in a way that is quite sophisticated.
So it's, so it's interesting, I was going to give you three books.
I noted the accent when I met you, but I didn't know exactly where you're from.
But the other book I was going to say is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
And I mean, I've always wanted to go to St. Pete's just to, to sort of see with my own
eyes what the word pictures that Dostoevsky created in Crime and Punishment.
And you know, I love others of his stuff too, the Brothers Care, Masov, and so forth.
But Crime and Punishment, I first read in high school as a junior or a senior.
And it is a deep and profound meditation on the, the, both the meaning and the measure
of our lives.
And Dostoevsky, obviously in, in, in conversation with other thinkers, really gets at the, the
crux of a fundamental philosophical problem.
What does it mean to be a human being?
And, and for that Crime and Punishment captured me as a teenager, and that's another text
that I return to often.
We've talked about young people a little bit at the beginning of our conversation.
Is there advice that you could give to a young person today, thinking about their career,
thinking about their life, thinking about making their way in this world?
Yeah, sure.
I'll share some advice.
It actually picks up on a question we talked about earlier with, in the academy and schools.
But it's an, it's some advice that a professor gave to me when I got to Harvard.
And it is this, that you have to be willing to come face to face with your intellectual
limitations and keep going.
And that's it.
And it's hard for people.
I mean, you mentioned this earlier to, to face really difficult tasks to, and particularly
in these sort of elite spaces where you've excelled all your life and you come to MIT
and you're like, wait a minute, I don't understand this.
Yeah.
Wait, this is hard.
I've never had something really hard before.
And there, there are a couple options and a lot of people will pull back and take the
gentleman or just a woman's B and, and just go on or risk going out there, giving it your
all and still not quite getting it and that, that, that's a risk, but it's a risk well
worth it because you're just going to be the better person, the better student for it.
And you know, and even outside of the academy, I mean, come, come face to face with your
fears and keep going and keep going in life and you're going to be the better person,
the better human being.
Yeah.
And it does seem to be, I don't know what it is, but it does seem to be that fear is
a good indicator of something you should probably face.
Yes.
Like fear kind of shows the way a little bit.
Not always.
You might not want to go into the cage with a lion, but, but it's, maybe you should.
Maybe.
Let me ask sort of a darker question because we're talking about Dostoevsky, who might
as well.
Do you, do you, and connected to the freeing innocent people, do you think about mortality?
Do you think about your own death?
Are you afraid of death?
I'm not afraid of death.
I do think about it more now because I'm now in my mid fifties.
So I used to not think about it much at all, but the harsh reality is that I've got more
time behind me now that I do in front of me and it kind of happens all of a sudden to
realize, wait a minute, I'm, I'm, I'm actually on the back nine now.
So yeah, my mind moves to it from time to time.
I don't dwell on it.
I'm not afraid of it.
My own personal religious commitments, I'm, I'm, I'm Christian and my religious commitments
buoy me that, you know, that, that death and I, I believe this death is not, not, not
the end.
So I'm not afraid of it.
Now, this is not to say that I want to, I want to, I want to rush to the afterlife.
I'm good right here for a long time and I hope I've got, you know, 30, 35, 40 more years
to go.
Uh, but, um, but, um, but no, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't fear death though.
We're, we're, we're, we're finite creatures.
We're all going to, we're all going to die.
Well, the mystery of it, uh, you know, for, for somebody, at least for me, we human beings
want to figure everything out.
Uh, whatever the afterlife is, there's still a mystery to it.
That uncertainty, it can be terrifying if you ponder it, but maybe, uh, what you're
saying is, uh, you haven't pondered it too deeply so far and it's worked out pretty good.
It's worked out.
Yeah.
No, no, no complaints.
So you said, uh, again, the Steyevsky kind of was exceptionally good at getting to the
core of what it means to be human.
Do you think about like the why of why we're here, the, the meaning of this whole, uh,
existence?
Yeah.
No, I, I, I do.
I think, uh, and actually think that's the purpose of an education.
Uh, what does it mean to be a human being?
And in one way or another, uh, we set out to answer those questions and we do it in a different
way.
Uh, I mean, some, uh, may look to, uh, philosophy to answer, uh, these questions.
Why is it in one's personal interest to, to, uh, to do good, to do just, uh, to do justice?
Some may, uh, look at it through the economist's lens, uh, some may, uh, look at it through
the, uh, microscope in the laboratory that the phenomenal world is, uh, is, is the meaning,
uh, of life.
Uh, others may say that that's one, uh, vocabulary.
That's one description, but the poet describes a reality to the same degree as a physicist.
Uh, but that's the purpose of, uh, of, of an education.
Just to sort of work through these issues, what does it mean to be a, uh, uh, what does
it mean to be a human being?
And I think it's a fascinating journey and I think it's a lifelong, uh, endeavor to
figure out what is the thing that nugget that makes us, uh, human.
Do you still see yourself as a student?
Of course.
Uh, yes.
I mean, that's, uh, that's the best part about going into, into university teaching.
You're, you're, you're a lifelong student.
I'm always learning.
I learned from my students and with my students and, uh, my colleagues and you're, you continue
to read and, and, and learn and, and modify opinions.
And I think it's just a wonderful thing.
Well, Ron, um, I'm so glad that, uh, somebody like you is, uh, carrying the fire of what
is the best of Harvard.
So it's a huge honor that you will spend so much time, waste so much of your valuable
time with me.
I really appreciate that.
Not a waste at all.
I think a lot of people love it.
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ronald Sullivan and thank you to Brooklyn
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And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela, when a man is denied the right
to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.