Personal recollections of law school admissions and family anecdotes

4.2.12 WC: 191694 grandmother laughed and said: “Berenkoff’s no judge, he’s a butcher.” She explained that “his first name is Judge,” and then she spelled it out: “G-E-O-R-G-E,” which she, with her Yiddish accent, pronounced “Judge.” Shortly after New Year I got my letters of acceptance from the various law schools to which I had applied. Since I had done very well in college and was president of the student government, I got into all the law schools to which I applied. I chose Yale, much to my mother’s regret. She wanted me to go to Harvard. Until the day she died at age 95, when people ask her where I went to law school, she replied, “He got into Harvard, but he went to Yale.” I also got into Columbia Law School, and the dean of Columbia, William Warren, wrote a letter to my parents, congratulating them on my admission and on the fancy scholarship I had won. (I still have the letter addressed “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Dershowitz”). I interpreted his letter as an attempt to have my parents try to persuade me to go to Columbia. So I wrote back—not to Dean Warren, but to “Dean Warren’s parents, care of Dean Warren, Columbia Law School.” I told his parents that their son was writing to my parents, and suggested that they tell him that if he wanted students to go to his law school, he should write to the students themselves rather than to their parents. I thought it was pretty funny, but I stopped laughing several years later, when I was on the law school teaching market and I went to Columbia for an interview. After meeting several members of the faculty, I was taken in to meet Dean Warren. He was waiting for me, with my letter in his hand. I was sure I would never get a job offer, but he looked at me and said, “That was a really good letter. I stopped writing to parents after getting it.” He offered me a job. Immediately after graduating from Brooklyn College, I got married to a woman I had met in a Jewish summer camp that boasted of the many “shidachs” (meetings that resulted in marriages) for which it was responsible. I was not yet 21. Sue was 19. My mother wouldn’t let me go to an out of town law school unless I was married, for fear that I would meet “the wrong kind of girl.” A year after we were married, Sue became pregnant with our first child, Elon. I loved Yale Law School. During my first year, I had Professor Guido Calabresi as a teacher. It was his first year of teaching. When I came home for the Jewish holidays, my mother asked me how I found my professors. I told her that they were all brilliant mentioning Professor Pollak and Professor Goldstein, but I told her my most brilliant teacher was Professor Guido Calabresi. Without missing a beat she said, “Is he an Italian Jew?” I replied, “Ma, you really are a bigot. Non-Jews can be smart too.” She looked at me as if to say, “Wait, you'll see.” Sure enough, several weeks later, my wife and I invited Calabresi, who was a bachelor at the time, to our apartment for dinner. We served him lamb chops and a baked potato with margarine on it. Calabresi looked at the margarine and the lamb chops and said, “Isn’t this fleishicks mixed with milichicks,” using the Yiddish words for meat and milk. I explained that the margarine did not contain dairy, although it looked like butter. I then asked him how he knew these words. He explained that he was an Italian Jew. I refuse to give my mother the satisfaction by telling her that she was right, at least about Calabresi. One of my teachers was Abe Goldstein who had grown up in Williamsburg, near where my family had lived. My class contained lots of students with famous names—William Brennan, Jr. (son of the Justice), a grandson of Chief Justice Warren, a descendent of President and Chief Justice Taft, 4l HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017128