Personal recollections of Yale law school experiences and notable acquaintances

4.2.12 WC: 191694 know what to do with it so I tucked it under my neck to protect my new tie. One of the partners pulled it off and said “Young man, this is a restaurant, not a barbershop.” All first year law students at Yale are required to participate in a moot court competition. My opponent was a classmate named Taft, one of whose ancestors was the President of the United States and the Chief Justice; another a senator from Ohio and the third the mayor of Cincinnati. It is fair to say at that time that Taft was one of the most prominent names in America. My mother was convinced that I couldn’t possibly compete with a Taft and that I would be demolished in moot court. To provide support, she and my father came up to New Haven to watch me argue. I did fine. When my mother told my grandmother that I had beaten a Taft, she replied, “Taft? That’s a funny name. I wonder what he changed it from?” In my neighborhood, many short names, like many short noses, had once been longer. In my third year, I served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. I was the first orthodox Jew to serve in that capacity, and there were some who doubted that this seven day a week job could be done by a six-day a week worker. But I managed to get the job done, and at the end of the year a few of my associate editors presented me with a mock copy of the law journal in which every seventh page was blank. The speaker at my law school graduation was President John F. Kennedy. He used the occasion to make the statement about having the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree. (I now have what I think is the best of both worlds, a Yale education and a Harvard teaching job). My son Elon was a year old at graduation, and I brought him along. During Kennedy’s speech, he started crying. A local New Haven television station caught him in the act, and the voiceover said that Yale was always a Republican school. (I don’t think Elon has ever voted for a Republican in his life.) During my years at law school, I developed an interest in writing academic articles. At Brooklyn College, I wrote a paper about the 5" Amendment. In it, I explored the history, policies and applications of the privilege, especially in the context of legislative investigations, where many of the battles over the scope of the 5 Amendment were then being fought. I pointed out that the privilege had “traversed many cycles” over the years and had been “adapted to changing times and needs,” and concluded that though we “are considering the very same constitutional phrase, we are dealing with a completely new and hitherto unknown privilege.” I would repeat the theme of a changing Constitution in much of my writings over the years and would eventually write a book about the 5" Amendment. At Yale, I wrote two articles for the law journal—one about attempted murder, the other about corporate crime—that brought me to the attention of the faculty not only at Yale but at Harvard as well. Both schools had their eyes out for me as a potential faculty recruit. I worked with several professors at Yale, serving as a research assistant to Professor Guido Calabresi, Joseph Goldstein, Jay Katz, Alexander Bickel and Telford Taylor. They each became mentors to me and I tried to follow in their very large footsteps. The professor who most influenced my legal thinking were Joseph Goldstein, who taught me criminal law, but he really didn’t teach me much about the actual law; his job was to get the students to question everything, to accept nothing and to rethink every principle of law. Some 43 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017130