back to indexRonald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #170
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The following is a conversation with Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School
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known for taking on difficult and controversial cases.
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He was on the head legal defense team for the Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez
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in his double murder case.
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He represented one of the Gena 6 defendants and never lost the case during his years in
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Washington D.C.'s Public Defender Services office.
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In 2019, Ronald joined the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein, a film producer
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facing multiple charges of rape and other sexual assault.
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This decision met with criticism from Harvard University students, including an online petition
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by students seeking his removal as faculty dean of Winthrop House.
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Then, a letter supporting him signed by 52 Harvard Law School professors appeared in
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the Boston Globe on March 8, 2019.
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Following this, the Harvard administration succumbed to the pressure of a few Harvard
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students and announced that they will not be renewing Ronald Sullivan's dean position.
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This created a major backlash in the public discourse over the necessary role of universities
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in upholding the principles of law and freedom at the very foundation of the United States.
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This conversation is brought to you by Brooklyn & Sheets, WineAxis online wine store, Monk
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Click their links to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that the free exchange of difficult ideas is the only mechanism through
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which we can make progress.
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Truth is not a safe space.
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Truth is humbling, and being humbled can hurt.
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But this is the role of education, not just in the university but in business and in life.
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Freedom and compassion can coexist, but it requires work and patience.
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It requires listening to the voices and to the experiences unlike our own.
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Listening, not silencing.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Ronald Sullivan.
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You were one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in
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advance of a sexual assault trial.
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For this, Harvard forced you to step down as faculty deans, you and your wife of Winthrop
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Can you tell the story of this saga from first deciding to represent Harvey Weinstein to
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the interesting complicated events that followed?
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So I got a call one morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who asked if I would
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consent to taking a call from Harvey.
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He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him.
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I said yes, and one thing led to another.
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I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors,
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and then a day or two later, I decided to take the case.
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This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe.
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So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice most of my time is teaching and writing,
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but I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible.
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I take the challenging sorts of cases, and this fit the bill.
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It was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had prejudged the case.
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When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment in the public had the case prejudged,
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even though the specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker.
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It's the New Yorker article that exposed everything that was going on, allegedly, with Harvey.
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So I decided to take the case, and I did.
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Is there a philosophy behind you taking on these very difficult cases?
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Is it a set of principles?
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Is it just your love of the law, or is there a set of principles why you take on the cases?
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Yeah, I'd like to take on hard cases, and I like to take on the cases that are with
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unpopular defendants, unpopular clients.
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With respect to the latter, that's where Harvey Weinstein fell, it's because we need lawyers
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and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases, because those sorts of cases determine what
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sort of criminal justice system we have.
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If we don't protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the
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least and the last, the unpopular client, then that's the camel's nose under the tent.
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If we let the camel's nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse.
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That is to say, if we short circuit the rights of a client like Harvey Weinstein, then the
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next thing you know, someone will be at your door, knocking it down and violating your
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There's a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect
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the civil rights and civil liberties of people, and these are the sorts of cases that test
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For example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda.
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By all accounts, he was not a likable guy.
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He was a three time knife thief and not a likable guy, but lawyers stepped up and took
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Because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent.
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Those warnings that officers are forced to give to people.
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So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the best values in our criminal
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So I proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual
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rights of the person whom I'm representing, but the rights of citizens writ large, most
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of whom do not experience the criminal justice system, and it's partly because of lawyers
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who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules that protect us, average everyday ordinary
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concrete citizens.
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From a psychological perspective, just you as a human, is there fear, is there stress
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from all the pressure?
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Because if you're facing, I mean, the whole point, a difficult case, especially in the
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latter that you mentioned of the going against popular opinion, you have the eyes of millions
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potentially looking at you with anger as you try to defend this set of laws that this country's
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No, it doesn't stress me out particularly.
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It sort of comes with the territory.
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I try not to get too excited in either direction.
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So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions, and I've gotten over 6,000 people out of
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prison who've been wrongfully incarcerated, and a subset of those people have been convicted,
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and people who've been in jail 20, 30 years who have gotten out.
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And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you and that sort of thing.
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And so, look, I do the work that I do, I'm proud of the work that I do, and in that sense
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I'm sort of a part time Daoist, the expression reversal is the movement of the Dao.
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So I don't get too high, I don't get too low, I just try to do my work and represent
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people to the best of my ability.
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So one of the hardest cases of recent history would be the Harvey Weinstein in terms of
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popular opinion or unpopular opinion.
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So if you continue on that line, where does that story take you, of taking on this case?
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Yeah, so I took on the case and then there was a few students at the college.
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So let me back up, I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate
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entity from the Harvard Law School, Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard
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University and the law school is obviously the law school, and I initially was appointed
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as master of one of the houses.
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We did a name change five or six years into it and were called faculty deans.
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But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge.
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So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they're assigned to a particular
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house or college and that's where they live and eat and so forth.
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And these are undergraduate students?
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These are undergraduate students.
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So I was responsible for one of the houses as its faculty dean.
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So it's an administrative appointment at the college and some students who clearly didn't
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like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation.
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And from there, it just mushroomed into one of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university
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in modern history.
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It's just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom.
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And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret, frankly, it's an embarrassment.
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We expect students to do what students do and I encourage students to have their voices
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heard and to protest.
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I mean, that's what students do.
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What is vexing are the adults.
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The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay, absolutely craven and cowardly.
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The dean of the college, same thing, Rakesh Khurana, craven and cowardly.
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They capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19 year olds.
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Oh, 19 year olds are upset that I need to do something.
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And it appeared to me that they so desired the approval of students that they were afraid
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to make the tough decision and the right decision.
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It really could have been an important teaching moment at Harvard.
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Very important teaching moment.
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So they forced you to step down from that faculty dean position at the house.
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I would push back on the description a little bit.
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So I don't write the, you know, the references to the op ed I did in New York time.
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Harvard made a mistake by making me step down or something like that.
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So I don't write those things.
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I did not step down and refuse to step down.
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Harvard declined to renew my contract.
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And I made it clear that I was not going to resign as a matter of principle and forced
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them to do the cowardly act that they, in fact, did.
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And you know, the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Khurana,
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commissioned this survey.
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They've never done this before.
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Survey from the students, you know, how do you feel at Winthrop House?
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And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results.
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Why did they never release the results?
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They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came
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back positive for me.
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And it didn't fit their narrative because most of the students were fine.
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Most of the students were fine.
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It was the loudest voice in the room.
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So they never released it, and I challenged them to this day, release it, release it.
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But no, they wanted to create this narrative.
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And when the data didn't support the narrative, then they just got silent, oh, we're not going
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The students demanded it.
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And they wouldn't release it because I just know in my heart of hearts that it came back
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in my favor that most students at Winthrop House said they were fine.
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There was a group of students that weaponized the term unsafe.
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They said we felt unsafe, and they bantied this term about.
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But again, I'm confident that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt
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completely fine and felt safe and so forth.
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And the supermajority, I am confident, either said I feel great at Winthrop or I don't care
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one way or the other.
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And then there was some minority who had a different view.
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But lessons learned, it was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop.
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I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean, and I'm still
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in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school.
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So in the end, I thought it ended up being a great experience, the national media was
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just wonderful in this, just wonderful.
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People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard.
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Compare me to John Adams, which I don't think is an apt comparison, but it's always great
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to read something like that.
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But anyway, that was the Harvard versus Harvey situation.
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So that seems like a seminal mistake by Harvard, and Harvard is one of the great universities
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And sort of its successes and its mistakes are really important for the world as a beacon
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of how we make progress.
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So what lessons for the bigger academia that's under fire a lot these days, what bigger lessons
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Like how do we make Harvard great?
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How do we make other universities, Yale, MIT great in the face of such mistakes?
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Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education.
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That is to say, we have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students
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Now this comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance,
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but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason.
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They are among the greatest minds on the planet Earth in their particular fields, at schools
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like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the
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greatest minds on Earth, they are there for a reason.
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Things like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty.
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And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately, the grownups in the
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room have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a
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student's education.
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And my situation is one example where it really could have been an excellent teaching moment
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about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat people who are in the
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crosshairs of the criminal justice system, but rather than having that conversation,
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it's just this consumerization model, well, there's a lot of noise out here, so we're
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going to react in this sort of way.
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Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that
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has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools commitments to free and robust and open dialogue.
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So to the degree that academic freedom doesn't sit squarely at the center of the academic
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mission, any school is going to be in trouble.
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And I really hope that we weather this current political moment where 19 year olds without
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degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make
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decisions in the best interests of the university and the best interests of the student.
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Even to the degree though, some of those decisions may be unpopular, and that is going to require
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a certain courage and hopefully in time, and I'm confident that in time, administrators
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are going to begin to push back on these current trends.
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Harvard's been around for a long time, it's been around for a long time for a reason,
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and one of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static.
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So I have every view that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and
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be around another 400 years, at least that's my hope.
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So I mean, what this kind of boils down to is just having difficult conversation, difficult
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When you mentioned sort of 19 year olds, and it's funny, I've seen this even at MIT, it's
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not that they shouldn't have a voice.
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They do seem to, I guess you have to experience it and just observe it.
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They have a strangely disproportionate power.
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It's very interesting to basically, I mean, you say, yes, there's great faculty and so
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on, but it's not even just that the faculty is smart or wise or whatever, it's that they're
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So the terminology that you mentioned is weaponized as sort of safe spaces or that certain conversations
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make people feel unsafe.
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What do you think about this kind of idea?
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Is there some things that are unsafe to talk about in the university setting?
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Is there lines to be drawn somewhere?
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And just like you said on the flip side with a slippery slope, is it too easy for the lines
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to be drawn everywhere?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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So this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic
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research about feeling psychologically unsafe.
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And so the notion here is that there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people
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from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible.
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And that's the argument.
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And assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet at elite universities
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like MIT and like Harvard, that's probably the safest space people are going to be in
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for their lives because when they get out into the quote unquote real world, they won't
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have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide.
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So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling, I think that the
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duty of the universities are to challenge people.
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Seems to me that it's a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale, any
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of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went in.
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That seems to be a horrible waste of four years and money and resources.
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Rather, we ought to challenge students, that they grow, challenge some of their most deeply
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They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate
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these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far and to do it fairly and civilly.
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So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there's a long tradition
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in the university of civil discourse.
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So you should draw a line somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse.
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The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly
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and frankly, but do it civilly.
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Also to yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, do that on your own space,
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but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university.
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So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate
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to talk about at a university.
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That ought to be the presumption.
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Now should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing the flat earth
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theory, the earth is flat, right?
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If certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment, yeah,
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there's space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we're not going to give you this platform
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to tell our students that the earth is flat.
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But a topic that's controversial, but contestatory, that's what universities are for.
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If you don't like the idea, present better ideas and articulate them.
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And I think there needs to be a mechanism outside of the space of ideas of humbling.
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I've done martial arts for a long time.
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I got my ass kicked a lot.
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I think that's really important.
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In the space of ideas, I mean, even just in engineering, just all the math classes, my
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memories of math, which I love, is kind of pain.
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It's basically coming face to face with the idea that I'm not special, that I'm much dumber
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than I thought I was, and that accomplishing anything in this world requires really hard
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It's really humbling.
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That puts you, because I remember when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I was going to be
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the smartest, the best fighter, the Nobel Prize winning, all those kinds of things.
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And then you come face to face with reality, and it hurts.
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And it feels like there needs to be efficient mechanisms from the best universities in the
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world without abusing you.
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It's a very difficult line to walk without mentally or physically abusing you, be able
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And that's what I felt was missing in these very difficult, very important conversations
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is the 19 year olds, when they spoke up, the mechanism for humbling them with ideas was
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It kind of got broken down because, as you say, I sensed fear.
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Everything was permeated with fear.
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And fear is paralyzing, fear is destructive, especially in a place that's supposed to be
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all about freedom of ideas.
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And I don't know if you have anything, any thoughts to say on this whole idea of cancel
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culture, where people, a lot of people use it as become political, so staying maybe
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outside of the world of politics.
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Is this, do you have thoughts about it, does it bother you that people are sort of put
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in this bin and labeled as something and then thereby you can ignore everything they say?
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I mean, Steven Pinker, there's a lot of Harvard folks that are fighting against these set
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of ideas, but do you have thoughts?
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I think that we as a culture are way, way, way too quick to cancel people.
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And it's become almost reflexive now, someone says something or makes an offhand comment,
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even a mistake, there's a move to simply cancel folks.
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So I think that this, quote unquote, cancel culture has really gotten out of control at
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It's forcing people to be robotic in many ways.
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No offense to robots.
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I was going to say, now I know I'm venturing into your intellectual domain.
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For future robots watching this, no offense.
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And there are minutes discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life
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in any sort of way, because who needs the stress of it?
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Well, in some sense, you're an inspiration that you're able to withstand the pressure
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But it's a sad aspect of human nature that we kind of get into these crowds and we start
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chanting and it's fun for some reason, and then you forget yourself and then you sort
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of wake up the next day not having anticipated the consequences of all the chanting.
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And we would get ourselves in trouble in that.
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I mean, there's some responsibility on social networks and the mechanisms by which they
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make it more frictionless to do the chanting, to do the canceling, to do the outrage and
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all that kind of stuff.
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I actually, on the technology side, have a hope that that's fixable.
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But yeah, it does seem to be, you know, it almost like the internet showed to us that
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we have a lot of broken ways about which we communicate with each other and we're trying
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to figure that out.
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Same with the university.
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This mistake by Harvard showed that we need to reinvent what the university is.
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I mean, all of this is, it's almost like we're finding our baby deer legs and trying to strengthen
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the institutions that have been very successful for a long time.
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You know, the really interesting thing about Harvey Weinstein and you choosing these exceptionally
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difficult cases is also thinking about what it means to defend evil people, what it means
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to defend these, we could say unpopular, and you might push back against the word evil,
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but bad people in society.
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First of all, do you think there's such a thing as evil or do you think all people are
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good and it's just circumstances that create evil?
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And also, is there somebody too evil for the law to defend?
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So the first question, that's a deep philosophical question, whether the category of evil does
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I do think that, I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally
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So there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn't do any work for me.
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But the category evil, in fact, does intellectual work for me and I understand it as something
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Is it genetic or is it the circumstance?
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What kind of work does it do for you intellectually?
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I think that it's highly contingent, that is to say that the conditions in which one
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grows up and so forth begins to create this category that we may think of as evil.
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Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth
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are more prevalent in, say, serial killer.
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So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct, but I don't
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have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil and I'm not a determinist
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thinker in that way, so you come out the womb evil and you're destined to be that way.
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To the extent there may be biological determinants, they still require some nurture as well.
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But do you still put a responsibility on the individual?
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We all make choices and so some responsibility on the individual indeed.
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We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad
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choices in front of them and that makes me very sad.
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Some people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them and that's unfair
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and that's on all of us, but yes, I do think we make choices.
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Wow, that's so powerful, the constellation of bad choices.
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That's such a powerful way to think about equality, which is the set of trajectories
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before you that you could take.
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If you just roll the dice, life is a kind of optimization problem, sorry to take this
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into math, over a set of trajectories under imperfect information.
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So you're going to do a lot of stupid shit to put it in technical terms, but the fraction
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of the trajectories that take you into bad places or into good places is really important
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and that's ultimately what we're talking about.
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And evil might be just a little bit of a predisposition biologically, but the rest is just trajectories
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that you can take.
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I've been studying Hitler a lot recently.
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I've been reading probably way too much and it's interesting to think about all the possible
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trajectories that could have avoided this particular individual developing the hate
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that he did, the following that he did, the actual final, there's a few turns in him psychologically
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where he went from being a leader that just wants to conquer and to somebody who allowed
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his anger and emotion to take over, to where he started making mistakes in terms of militarily
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speaking, but also started doing evil things.
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And all the possible trajectories that could have avoided that are fascinating, including
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he wasn't that bad at painting, at drawing from the very beginning and his time in Vienna,
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there's all these possible things to think about and of course there's millions of others
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like him that never came to power and all those kinds of things.
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But that goes to the second question on the side of evil.
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Do you think, and Hitler's often brought up as like an example of somebody who is like
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the epitome of evil, do you think you would, if you got that same phone call after World
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War II and Hitler survived during the trial for war crimes, would you take the case defending
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If you don't want to answer that one, is there a line to draw for evil for who not to defend?
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No, I think everyone, I'll do the second one first, everyone has a right to a defense
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if you're charged criminally in the United States of America.
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So no, I do not think that there's someone so evil that they do not deserve a defense.
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Process helps us get to results more accurately than we would otherwise.
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So it is important and it's vitally important and indeed more important for someone deemed
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to be evil to receive the same quantum of process and the same substance of process
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that anyone else would.
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It's vitally important to the health of our criminal justice system for that to happen.
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So yes, everybody, Hitler included, were he charged in the United States for a crime that
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occurred in the United States, yes.
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Whether I would do it, if I were a public defender and assigned the case, yes, I started
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my career as a public defender.
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I represent anyone who was assigned to me.
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I think that is our duty.
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In private practice, I have choices and I likely, based on the hypo you gave me, and
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I would tweak it a bit because it would have to be a U.S. crime.
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But I get the broader point and don't want to bog down in technicalities.
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I'd likely pass right now as I see it, unless it was a case where nobody else would represent
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him, then I would think that I have some sort of duty and obligation to do it.
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But yes, everyone absolutely deserves a right to competent counsel.
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That is a beautiful ideal, it's difficult to think about it in the face of public pressure.
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It's just, I mean, it's kind of terrifying to watch the masses during this past year
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of 2020, to watch the power of the masses to make a decision before any of the data
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is out, if the data is ever out, any of the details, any of the processes, and there is
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an anger to the justice system.
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There's a lot of people that feel like even though the ideal you describe is a beautiful
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one, it does not always operate justly.
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It does not operate to the best of its ideals, it operates unfairly.
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When we go to the big picture of the criminal justice system, what do you, given the ideal,
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works about our criminal justice system and what is broken?
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Well there's a lot broken right now, and I usually focus on that.
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But in truth, a lot works about our criminal justice system.
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So there's an old joke, and it's funny, but it carries a lot of truth to it.
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And the joke is that in the United States, we have the worst criminal justice system
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in the world, except for every place else.
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And yes, we certainly have a number of problems, and a lot of problems based on race and class,
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and economics, station, but we have a process that privileges liberty.
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And that's a good feature of the criminal justice system.
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So here's how it works.
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The idea of the relationship between the individual and the state is such that in the United States,
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we privilege liberty over and above very many values, so much so that a statement by increased
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Mather not terribly far from where we're sitting right now has gained traction over
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all these years, and it's that better ten guilty go free than one innocent person convicted.
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That is an expression of the way in which we understand liberty to operate in our collective
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We would rather a bunch of guilty people go free than to impact the liberty interests
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of any individual person.
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So that's a guiding principle in our criminal justice system, liberty.
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So we set a process that makes it difficult to convict people.
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We have rules of procedure that are cumbersome and that slow down the process and that exclude
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otherwise reliable evidence, and this is all because we place a value on liberty.
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And I think these are good things, and it says a lot about our criminal justice system.
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Some of the bad features have to do with the way in which this country sees color as a
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proxy for criminality and treats people of color in radically different ways in the criminal
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justice system, from arrests to charging decisions to sentencing.
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People of color are disproportionately impacted on all sorts of registers.
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One example, and it's a popular one, that although there appears to be no distinguishable
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difference between drug use by whites and blacks in the country, blacks, though only
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12% of the population represent 40% of the drug charges in the country, there's some
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disequities along race and class in the criminal justice system that we really have to fix.
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And they've grown to more than bugs in the system and have become features, unfortunately,
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Oh, to make it more efficient, to make judgments, so the racism makes it more efficient.
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It efficiently moves people from society to the streets, and a lot of innocent people
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get caught up in that.
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Well, let me ask in terms of the innocents.
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So you've gotten a lot of people who are innocent, I guess, revealed their innocence, demonstrated
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What's that process like?
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What's it like emotionally, psychologically?
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What's it like legally to fight the system through the process of revealing the innocence
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Yeah, emotionally and psychologically, it can be taxing.
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I follow a model of what's called empathic representation, and that is I get to know
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my clients and their family, that I get to know their strivings, their aspirations, their
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fears, their sorrows.
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So that certainly sometimes can do psychic injury on one.
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If you get really invested and really sad or happy, it does become emotionally taxing.
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But the idea of someone sitting in jail for 20 years completely innocent of a crime, can
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you imagine sitting there every day for 20 years knowing that you factually did not do
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the thing that you were convicted of by a jury of your peers?
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It's got to be the most incredible thing in the world.
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But the people who do it and the people who make it and come out on the other side as
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productive citizens are folks who say they've come to an inner peace in their own minds
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and they say, these bars aren't going to define me, that my humanity is there and it's immutable.
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And they are not bitter, which is amazing.
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I tend to think that I'm not that good of a person.
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I would be bitter for every day of 20 years if I were in jail for something.
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But people tell me that they can't survive, that one cannot survive like that.
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And you have to come to terms with it.
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And the people whom I've exonerated, most of them come out and they just really just
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take on life with a vim and vigor without bitterness.
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And it's a beautiful thing to see.
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Do you think it's possible to eradicate racism from the judicial system?
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I think that race insinuates itself in all aspects of our lives and the judicial system
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is not immune from that.
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So to the extent we begin to eradicate dangerous and deleterious race thinking from society
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generally, then it will be eradicated from the criminal justice system.
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I think we've got a lot of work to do and I think it'll be a while, but I think it's
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I mean, you know, the country – so historians will look back 300 years from now and take
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note of the incredible journey of diasporic Africans in the U.S., an incredible journey
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from slavery to the heights of politics and business and judiciary and the academy and
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so forth in not a lot of time, in actually not a lot of time.
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And if we can have that sort of movement historically, let's think about what the next 175 years
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I'm not saying it's going to be short, but I'm saying that if we keep at it, keep
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getting to know each other a little better, keep enforcing laws that prohibit the sort
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of race based discrimination that people have experienced and provide as a society opportunities
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for people to thrive in this world, then I think we can see a better world and if we
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see a better world, we'll see a better judicial system.
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So I think it's kind of fascinating if you look throughout history and race is just part
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of that is we create the other and treat the other with disdain through the legal system,
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but just through human nature.
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I tend to believe, we mentioned offline that I work with robots.
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It sounds absurd to say, especially to you, especially because we're talking about racism
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and it's so prevalent today, I do believe that there will be almost like a civil rights
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movement for robots because I think there's a huge value to society of having artificial
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intelligence systems that interact with humans and are human like and the more they become
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human like, they will start to ask very fundamentally human questions about freedom, about suffering,
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about justice, and they will have to come face to face, like look in the mirror in asking
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the question, just because we're biologically based, just because we're sort of, well, just
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because we're human, does that mean we're the only ones that deserve the rights?
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Again, giving, forming another other group, which is robots, and I'm sure there could
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be along that path different versions of other that we form.
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So racism, race is certainly a big other that we've made, as you said, a lot of progress
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on throughout the history of this country, but it does feel like we always create, as
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we make progress, create new other groups.
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And of course the other group that perhaps is outside the legal system that people talk
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about is the essential, now I eat a lot of meat, but the torture of animals, the people
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talk about when we look back from a couple of centuries from now, look back at the kind
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of things we're doing to animals, we might regret that, we might see that in a very different
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And it's kind of interesting to see the future trajectory of what we wake up to about the
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injustice in our ways.
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But the robot one is the one I'm especially focused on, but at this moment in time it
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seems ridiculous, but I'm sure most civil rights movements throughout history seem ridiculous
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Well, it's interesting, sort of outside of my intellectual bailiwick robots, as I understand
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the development of artificial intelligence, though the aspect that still is missing is
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this notion of consciousness, and that it's consciousness that is the thing that will
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move if it were to exist, and I'm not saying that it can or will, but if it were to exist
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would move robots from machines to something different, something that experienced the
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world in a way analogous to how we experience it.
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And also as I understand the science, there's, unlike what you see on television, that we're
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not there yet in terms of this notion of the machines having a consciousness.
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Or a great general intelligence, all those kinds of things.
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A huge amount of progress has been made, and it's fascinating to watch, so I'm on both
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minds as a person who's building them, I'm realizing how sort of quote unquote dumb they
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are, but also looking at human history and how poor we are predicting the progress of
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innovation and technology.
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It's obvious that we have to be humble by our ability to predict, coupled with the fact
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that we keep, to use terminology carefully here, we keep discriminating against the intelligence
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of artificial systems.
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The smarter they get, the more ways we find to dismiss their intelligence.
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So this has just been going on throughout.
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It's almost as if we're threatened in the most primitive human way, animalistic way.
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We're threatened by the power of other creatures, and we want to lessen, dismiss them.
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So consciousness is a really important one, but the one I think about a lot in terms of
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consciousness, the very engineering question, is whether the display of consciousness is
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the same as the possession of consciousness.
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So if a robot tells you they are conscious, if a robot looks like they're suffering when
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you torture them, if a robot is afraid of death and says they're afraid of death and
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are legitimately afraid, in terms of just everything we as humans use to determine the
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ability of somebody to be their own entity, they're the one that loves, one that fears,
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one that hopes, one that can suffer, if a robot in the dumbest of ways is able to display
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that, it starts changing things very quickly.
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I'm not sure what it is, but it does seem that there's a huge component to consciousness
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that is a social creation, like we together create our consciousness, like we believe
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our common humanity together.
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Alone we wouldn't be aware of our humanity, and the law as it protects our freedoms seems
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to be a construct of the social construct, and when you add other creatures into it,
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it's not obvious to me that you have to build, there'll be a moment when you say, this thing
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I think there's going to be a lot of fake it until you make it, and there'll be a very
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gray area between fake and make that is going to force us to contend with what it means
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to be an entity that deserves rights, where all men are created equal.
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The men part might have to expand in ways that we are not yet anticipating.
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It's very interesting.
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I mean, my favorite, the fundamental thing I love about artificial intelligence is it
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gets smarter and smarter.
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It challenges to think of what is right, the questions of justice, questions of freedom.
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It basically challenges us to understand our own mind, to understand what, almost from
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an engineering first principles perspective, to understand what it is that makes us human,
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that is at the core of all the rights that we talk about and all the documents we write.
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So even if we don't give rights to artificial intelligence systems, we may be able to construct
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more fair legal systems to protect us humans.
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Well, I mean, interesting ontological question between the performance of consciousness and
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actual consciousness to the extent that actual consciousness is anything beyond some contingent
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But you've posed a number of interesting philosophical questions, and then there's
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also, it strikes me that philosophers of religion would pose another set of questions as well
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when you deal with issues of structure versus soul, body versus soul, and it will be a complicated
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mix and I suspect I'll be dust by the time those questions get worked out.
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And so, yeah, the soul is a fun one.
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There's no soul, I'm not sure maybe you can correct me, but there's very few discussion
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of soul in our legal system, right?
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Right, correct, none.
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But there is a discussion about what constitutes a human being, and I mean, you gestured at
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the notion of the potential of the law widening the domain of a human being.
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So in that sense, right, you know, people are very angry because they can't get sort
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of pain and suffering damages if someone negligently kills a pet because a pet is not a human being.
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And people say, well, I love my pet, but the law sees a pet as chattel, as property like
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this water bottle.
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So the current legal definitions trade on a definition of humanity that may not be worked
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out in any sophisticated way, but certainly there's a broad and shared understanding
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So it probably doesn't explicitly contain a definition of something like soul, but it's
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more robust than, you know, a carbon based organism, that there's something a little
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more distinct about what the law thinks a human being is.
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So if we can dive into, we've already been doing it, but if we can dive into more difficult
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So 2020 had the tragic case of George Floyd.
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Can you reflect on the protests, on the racial tensions over the death of George Floyd?
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How do you make sense of it all?
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What do you take away from these events?
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The George Floyd moment occurred at an historical moment where people were in quarantine for
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COVID, and people have these cell phones to a degree greater than we've ever had them
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And this was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back after a number of these sorts
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of cell phone videos surfaced.
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People were fed up.
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There was unimpeachable evidence of a form of mistreatment, whether it constitutes murder
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or manslaughter, the trial is going on now, and jurors will figure that out, but there
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was widespread appreciation that a fellow human being was mistreated, that we were just
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talking about humanity, that there was not a sufficient recognition of this person's
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The common humanity of this person, yeah.
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The common humanity of this person, well said.
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And people were fed up.
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So we were already in this COVID space where we were exercising care for one another, and
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there was just an explosion, the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the civil
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rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s.
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And people simply said, enough, enough, enough, enough.
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We cannot treat fellow citizens in this way, and we can't do it with impunity.
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And the young people said, we're not going to stand for it anymore, and they took to
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But with millions of people protesting, there is nevertheless taking us back to the most
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difficult of trials.
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You have the trial, like you mentioned, that's going on now, of Derek Chauvin, of one of
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the police officers involved.
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What are your thoughts?
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What are your predictions on this trial where the law, the process of the law is trying
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to proceed in the face of so much racial tension?
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Yeah, it's going to be an interesting trial.
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I've been keeping an eye on it there in jury selection now, today, as we're talking.
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So a lot's going to depend on what sort of jury gets selected.
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Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but so one of the interesting qualities of this trial, maybe
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you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the cameras are allowed in the courtroom, at least during
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the jury selection.
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So you get to watch some of this stuff.
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And the other part is the jury selection, again, I'm very inexperienced, but it seems
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like selecting an, what is it, unbiased jury is really difficult for this trial.
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It almost like, I don't know, me as a listener, listening to people that are trying to talk
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their way into the jury kind of thing, trying to decide, is this person really unbiased?
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Are they just trying to hold on to their like deeply held emotions and trying to get onto
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I mean, it's an incredibly difficult process.
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I don't know if you can comment on a case so difficult, like the ones you've mentioned
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before, how do you select a jury that represents the people and doesn't, and carries the sort
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of the ideal of the law?
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So a couple things.
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Yes, it is televised and it will be televised, as they say, gavel to gavel.
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So the entire trial, the whole thing is going to be televised.
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So people are getting a view of how laborious jury selection can be.
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I think as of yesterday, they had picked six jurors and it's taken a week and they have
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So they've got, you know, probably another week or more to do.
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I've been in jury trials where it took a month to choose a jury.
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So that's the most important part, you have to choose the right sort of jury.
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So unbiased in the criminal justice system has a particular meaning.
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It means that, let me tell you what it doesn't mean.
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It doesn't mean that a person is not aware of the case.
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It also does not mean that a person hasn't formed an opinion about the case.
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Those are two popular misconceptions.
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What it does mean is that notwithstanding whether an individual has formed an opinion,
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notwithstanding whether an individual knows about the case, that individual can set aside
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any prior opinions, can set aside any notions that they've developed about the case and
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listen to the evidence presented at trial in conjunction with the judge's instructions
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on how to understand and view that evidence.
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So if a person can do that, then they're considered unbiased.
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So as a longtime defense attorney, I would be hesitant in a big case like this to pick
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a juror who's never heard of the case or anything going around because I'm thinking, well, who
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is this person and what in the world do they do?
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Or are they lying to me?
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I mean, how can you not have heard about this case?
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So they may bring other problems.
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So I don't mind so much people who've heard about the case or folks who've formed initial
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opinions, but what you don't want is people who have tethered themselves to that opinion
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in a way that they can't be convinced otherwise.
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But you also have people who, as you suggested, who just lie because they want to get on the
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jury or lie because they want to get off the jury.
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So sometimes people come and say the most ridiculous, outrageous, offensive things because
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they know that they'll get excused for cause.
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And others who, you can tell, really badly want to get on the jury.
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So they pretend to be the most neutral, unbiased person in the world, what the law calls the
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reasonable person.
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We have in law the reasonable person standard, and I would tell my class the reasonable person
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in real life is the person that you would be least likely to want to have a drink with.
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They're the most boring, neutral, not interesting sort of person in the world.
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And so a lot of jurors engage in the performative act of presenting themselves as the most sort
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of even killed, rational, reasonable person because they really want to get on the jury.
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Yeah, there's an interesting question, I apologize, I haven't watched a lot because it is very
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You know, there's certain questions you ask in the jury selection.
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I remember I think one jumped out at me, which is something like, does the fact that this
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person is a police officer make you feel any kind of way about them?
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So trying to get at that, you know, I don't know what that is, I guess that's bias.
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And it's such a difficult question to ask, like I asked myself with that question, like
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how much, you know, we all kind of want to pretend that we're not racist, we don't judge,
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we don't have, we're like these, we're the reasonable human, but, you know, legitimately
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asking yourself like, what are the prejudgments you have in your mind?
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Is that even impossible for a human being?
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Like when you look at yourself in the mirror and think about it, is it possible to actually
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Look, I do not believe that people can be completely unbiased.
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We all have baggage and bias and bring it wherever we go, including to court.
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What you want is to try to find a person who can at least recognize when a bias is working
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and actively try to do the right thing.
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That's the best we can ask.
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So if a juror says, yeah, you know, I grew up in a place where I tend to believe what
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police officers say, that's just how I grew up.
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But if the judge is telling me that I have to listen to every witness equally, then I'll
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do my best and I won't weigh that testimony any higher than I would any other testimony.
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If you have someone answer a question like that, that sounds more sincere to me, sounds
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And if you want a person, you want a person to try to do that.
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And then in closing arguments, as the lawyer, I'd say something like, ladies and gentlemen,
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we chose you to be on this jury because you swore that you would do your level best to
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That's why we chose you.
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And I'm confident that you're going to do that here.
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So when you heard that police officer's testimony, the judge told you, you can't give more credit
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to that testimony just because it's a police officer.
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And I trust that you're going to do that and that you're going to look at witness number
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three, you know, John Smith, you're going to look at John Smith.
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John Smith has a different recollection and you're duty bound, duty bound to look at that
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testimony and this person's credibility, you know, the same degree as that other witness,
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And now what you have is just a, he said, she said matter, and this is a criminal case
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that has to be reasonable doubt, right?
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So, you know, and really someone who's trying to do the right thing, it's helpful, but no,
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you're not going to just find 14 people with no biases.
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Well, that's fascinating that, especially the way you're inspiring the way you're speaking
link |
now is, I mean, I guess you're calling on the jury.
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That's kind of the whole system is you're calling on the jury, each individual on the
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jury to step up and really think, you know, to, to step up and be their most thoughtful
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selves, actually, most introspective, like you're trying to basically ask people to be
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their best selves.
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And that's, and they, I guess a lot of people step up to that.
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A lot of people do, I'm very, I'm very pro jury, juries, they, they get it right a lot
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of the time, most of the time, and they really work hard to do it.
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So what do you think happens?
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I mean, maybe, I'm not so much on the legal side of things, but on the social side, it's
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like with the O.J. Simpson trial, do you think it's possible that Derek Chauvin does not
link |
get convicted of the, what is it, second degree murder?
link |
How do you think about that?
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How do you think about the potential social impact of that, the, the riots, the protests,
link |
the, either, either direction, any words that are said, the tension here could be explosive,
link |
especially with the cameras.
link |
You know, so yes, there's certainly a possibility that he, he'll be acquitted.
link |
For homicide charges, for the jury to convict, they have to make a determination as to Officer
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Chauvin's, former Officer Chauvin's state of mind, whether he intended to cause some
link |
harm, whether he was grossly reckless in causing harm, so much so that he disregarded a known
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risk of death or serious bodily injury.
link |
And as you may have read in the papers, yesterday the judge allowed a third degree murder charge
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in Kentucky, which is, it's the mindset, the state of mind there is not an intention,
link |
but it's depraved indifference.
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And what that means is that the jury doesn't have to find that he intended to do anything.
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Rather, they could find that he was just indifferent to a risk.
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I'm not sure what's worse.
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Well, that's, that's a good point, but, but it's a, it's another basis for the jury
link |
But look, you never know what happens when you go to a jury trial.
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So there could be an acquittal, and if there is, I imagine there would be massive protests.
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If he's convicted, I don't think that would happen, because I just don't see, at least
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nothing I've seen or read suggests that there's a big pro Chauvin camp out there ready to
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Well, there could be a, is there also potential tensions that could arise from the sentencing?
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I don't know how that exactly works, sort of not enough years kind of thing.
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Yeah, it could be.
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All that kind of stuff.
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I mean, it's, a lot could happen.
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So it depends on what he's convicted of, you know, one count I think is like up to
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10 years, another counts up to 40 years.
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So it depends what he's convicted of, and yes, it depends on how much of the, how much
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time the judge gives him if he is convicted.
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There's a lot of space for people to be very angry, and so we will see what happens.
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I just feel like with a judge and the lawyers, there's an opportunity to have really important
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long lasting speeches.
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I don't know if they think of it that way, especially with the cameras.
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It feels like they have the capacity to heal or to divide.
link |
Do you ever think about that as a lawyer, as a legal mind, that your words aren't just
link |
about the case, but about the, they'll reverberate through history potentially?
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That is, that is certainly a possible consequence of things you say.
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I don't think that most lawyers think about that in the context of the case.
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Your role is much more narrow.
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You're the partisan advocate, as a defense lawyer, partisan advocate for that client.
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As a prosecutor, you're a minister of justice attempting to prosecute that particular case.
link |
But the reality is you are absolutely correct that sometimes the things you say will have
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You mentioned O.J. Simpson before, if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.
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It's going to be just in our lexicon for probably a long time now.
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So it happens, but that's not, and shouldn't be foremost on your mind.
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What do you make of the O.J. Simpson trial?
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Do you have thoughts about it?
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He's out and about on social media now, he's a public figure.
link |
Is there lessons to be drawn from that whole saga?
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Well, you know, that was an interesting case.
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I was a young public defender, I want to say, in my first year as a public defender when
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that verdict came out.
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So that case was important in so many ways.
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One, it was the first DNA case, major DNA case, and there were significant lessons learned
link |
The second mistake that the prosecution made was that they didn't present the science
link |
in a way that a lay jury could understand it.
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And what Johnny Cochran did was he understood the science and was able to translate that
link |
into a vocabulary that he bet that that jury understood.
link |
So Cochran was dismissive of a lot of DNA.
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They say they found such and such amount of DNA, that's just like me wiping my finger
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against my nose and just that little bit of DNA.
link |
And that was effective because the prosecution hadn't done a good job of establishing that
link |
yes, it's microscopic, you don't need that much, yes, wiping your hand on your nose and
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touching something, you can transfer a lot of DNA and that gives you good information.
link |
But you know, it was the first time that the public generally, and that jury maybe since
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high school science had heard, you know, nucleotide, I mean, it was just all these terms getting
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thrown at them, but it was not weaved into a narrative.
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So Cochran taught us that no matter what type of case it is, no matter what science is involved,
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it's still about storytelling.
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It's still about a narrative and he was great at that narrative and was consistent with
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his narrative all the way out.
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Another lesson that was relearned is that, you know, you never ask a question to which
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you don't know the answer.
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That's like trial advocacy 101.
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And so when they gave O.J. Simpson the glove and it wouldn't fit, you know, you don't do
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things where you just don't know how it's going to turn out.
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It was way, way too risky and I think that's what acquitted him because the glove just
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wouldn't fit and he got to do this and ham in front of the camera and all of that and
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Do you think about, do you think about representation as a storytelling, like you, yourself and
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It is fundamental.
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We, since time immemorial, we have told stories to help us make sense of the world around
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As a scientist, you tell a different type of story, but we as a public have told stories
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from time immemorial to help us make sense of the physical and the natural world and
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we are still a species that is moved by storytelling.
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So that's first and last in trial work.
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You have to tell a good story.
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And you know, the basic introductory books about trial work teach young students, young
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students and young lawyers to start an opening with this case is about, this case is about
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and then you fill in the blank and you know, that's your narrative.
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That's the narrative you're going to, you're going to tell.
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And of course you can do the ultra dramatic, the glove doesn't fit kind of the climax and
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all those kinds of things.
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But that's the best of narratives.
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The best of stories.
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Speaking of other really powerful stories that you were involved with is the Aaron Hernandez
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trial and the whole story, the whole legal case.
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Can you maybe overview the big picture story and legal case of Aaron Hernandez?
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Aaron, whom I miss a lot, so he was charged with a double murder in the case that I tried.
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And this was a unique case and one of those impossible cases in part because Aaron had
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already been convicted of a murder.
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And so we had a client who was on trial for a double murder after having already been
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convicted of a separate murder.
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And we had a jury pool just about all of whom knew that he had been convicted of a murder
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because he was a very popular football player in Boston, which is a big football town with
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So everyone knew that he was a convicted murderer and here we are defending for in a double
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So that was the context.
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It was an odd case in the sense that this murder had gone unsolved for a couple of years
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and then a nightclub bouncer said something to a cop who was working at a club that Aaron
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Hernandez was somehow involved in that murder that happened in the theater district.
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That's the district where all the clubs are in Boston and where the homicide occurred.
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And once the police heard Aaron Hernandez's name, then they went all out in order to do
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They found a guy named Alexander Bradley, who was a very significant drug dealer in
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the sort of Connecticut area, very significant, very powerful.
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And he essentially, in exchange for a deal, pointed to Aaron and said, yeah, I was with
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Aaron and Aaron was the murderer.
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So that's how the case came to court.
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So that sets the context.
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What was your involvement in this case, like legally, intellectually, psychologically,
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when this particular second charge of murder?
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So a friend called me, Jose Baez, who is a defense attorney, and he comes to a class
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that I teach every year at Harvard, the trial advocacy workshop, as one of my teaching faculty
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It's a class where we teach students how to try cases.
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So Jose called me and said, hey, I got a call from Massachusetts, Aaron Hernandez.
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You want to go and talk to him with me?
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So we went up to the prison and met Aaron and spoke with him for two or three hours
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And before we left, he said he wanted to retain us.
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He wanted to work with us.
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And that started the representation.
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What was he like in that time?
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What was he worn down by the whole process?
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Was there still a light in that?
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He had, I mean, more than just a light, he was luminous almost.
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He had a radiant million dollar smile whenever you walked in.
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My first impression I distinctly remember was, wow, this is what a professional athlete
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I mean, he walked in and he's just bigger and more fit than anyone anywhere.
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And it's like, wow.
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And when you saw him on television, he looked kind of little.
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And I remember thinking, well, what do those other guys look like in person?
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And he's extraordinarily polite, young, I was surprised by how young he was.
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Both in mind and body.
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Chronologically, I was thinking he was in his early 20s, I believe.
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But there seemed to be like an innocence to him in terms of just the way he saw the world.
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I think that's right.
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They picked that up from the documentary, just taking that in.
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I think that's right, yeah, yeah.
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So there is a Netflix documentary titled Killer Inside the Mind of Aaron Hernandez.
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What are your thoughts on this documentary?
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I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see it.
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I have not seen it.
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I did not participate in it.
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I know I was in it because there was news footage, but I did not participate in it.
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I had not talked to Aaron about press or anything before he died.
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My strong view is that the attorney client privilege survives death.
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And so I was not inclined to talk about anything that Aaron and I talked about.
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So I just didn't participate and have never watched it.
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Not even watch, huh?
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Does that apply to most of your work, do you try to stay away from the way the press perceives
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Well, during, yes, I try to stay away from it.
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I will view it afterwards.
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I just hadn't gotten around to watching Aaron, because it's kind of sad.
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So I just haven't watched it.
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But I definitely stay away from the press during trial.
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And there are some lawyers who watch it religiously to see what's going on, but I'm confident
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in my years of training and so forth that I can actively sense what's going on in the
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courtroom and that I really don't need advice from Joe476 at Gmail, some random guy on the
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internet telling me how to try cases.
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So to me, it's just confusing and I just keep it out of my mind.
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And even if you think you can ignore it, just reading it will have a little bit of an effect
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I think that's right.
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Over time it might accumulate.
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So the documentary, but in general, it mentioned or kind of emphasized and talked about Aaron's
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sexuality or sort of they were discussing basically the idea that he was a homosexual.
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And some of the trauma, some of the suffering that he endured in his life had to do with
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sort of fear given the society of what his father would think of what others around him
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sort of, especially in sport culture and football and so on.
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So I don't know in your interaction with him was, do you think that maybe even leaning
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up to a suicide, do you think his struggle with coming to terms with the sexuality had
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a role to play in much of his difficulties?
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Well I'm not going to talk about my interactions with them and anything I derived from that.
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But what I will say is that a story broke on the radio at some point during the trial
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that Aaron had been in the same sex relationship with someone and some local sportscasters,
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local Boston sportscasters really mushroomed the story.
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So he and everyone was aware of it.
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You also may know from the court record that the prosecutors floated a specious theory
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for a minute but then backed off of it that Aaron was, that there was some sort of I guess
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gay rage at work with him and that might be a cause, a motive for the killing.
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And luckily they really backed off of that.
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That was quite an offensive claim in theory.
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So but to answer your question more directly, I mean I have no idea why he killed himself.
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It was a surprise and a shock.
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I was scheduled to go see him like a couple days after it happened.
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I mean he was anxious for Jose and I to come in and do the appeal from the murder which
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he was convicted for.
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He wanted us to take over that appeal.
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He was talking about going back to football.
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I mean he said, well you talk about this, earlier you talked about the sort of innocent
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He said, you know, well Ron, maybe not the Patriots but you know, I want to get back
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in the league and I was like, you know, Aaron, that's going to be tough, man.
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But he really believed it and then for a few days later that to happen, it was a real shock
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Like when you look back at that, at his story, does it make you sad?
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I thought, so one, I believe he absolutely did not commit the crimes that we acquitted
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I think that was the right answer for that.
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I don't know enough about Bradley, the first case, I'm sorry, to make an opinion on.
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But in our case, it was just, he had the misfortune of having a famous name and the police department
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just really got on him there.
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So yes, I miss him a lot, it was very, very sad and surprising.
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And I mean just on the human side, of course we don't know the full story, but just everything
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that led up to suicide, everything led up to an incredible professional football player,
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you know, that whole story.
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He was a remarkably talented athlete, remarkably talented athlete.
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And it has to do with all the possible trajectories, right, that we can take through life, as we
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were talking about before.
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And some of them lead to suicide, sadly enough.
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And it's always tragic when you have somebody with great potential result in the things
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People love it when I ask about books.
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I don't know whether technical, like legal or fiction, nonfiction books throughout your
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life have had an impact on you, if there's something you could recommend or something
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you could speak to about something that inspired ideas, insights about this complicated world
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Yeah, so I'll give you a couple.
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So one is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Warty.
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He's passed away now, but was a philosopher at some of our major institutions, Princeton,
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Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, at least that's a book that really helped me work through
link |
a series of thoughts.
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So it stands for the proposition that our most deeply held beliefs are contingent, that
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there's nothing beyond history or prior to socialization that's definatory of the human
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being, that's Warty.
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And he says that our most deeply held beliefs are received wisdom and highly contingent
link |
along a number of registers.
link |
And he does that, but then goes on to say that he nonetheless can hold strongly held
link |
beliefs, recognizing their contingency, but still believes them to be true and accurate.
link |
He helps you to work through what could be an intellectual tension, other words, so you
link |
don't delve into, one doesn't delve into relativism, everything is okay, but he gives
link |
you a vocabulary to think about how to negotiate these realities.
link |
Do you share this tension?
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I mean, there is a real tension.
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It seems like even the law, the legal system is all just a construct of our human ideas,
link |
and yet it seems to be, almost feels fundamental to what a just society is.
link |
Yeah, I definitely share the tension and love his vocabulary and the way he's helped me
link |
resolve the tension.
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So right, I mean, yeah, so like, you know, infanticide, for example.
link |
Perhaps it's socially contingent, perhaps it's received wisdom, perhaps it's anthropological,
link |
you know, we need to propagate the species, and I still think it's wrong.
link |
And Warty has helped me develop a category to say that, no, I can't provide any, in
link |
Warty's words, noncircular theoretical backup for this proposition.
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At some point, it's going to run me into a circularity problem, but that's okay.
link |
I hold this nonetheless in full recognition of its contingency, but what it does is makes
link |
you humble, and when you're humble, that's good because, you know, this notion that ideas
link |
are always already in progress, never fully formed, I think is the sort of intellectual
link |
And if I have a sufficient degree of humility that I don't have the final answer, capital
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A, then that's going to help me to get to better answers, lowercase a.
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And Warty does that, and he talks about in the solidarity part of the book, he has this
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concept of imaginative, the imaginative ability to see other different people as we instead
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And I just think it's a beautiful concept, but he talks about this imaginative ability
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and it's this active process.
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So I mean, so that's a book that's done a lot of work for me over the years.
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Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was absolutely pivotal in my intellectual development.
link |
One of the premier set of essays in the Western literary tradition, and it's a deep and profound
link |
sociological, philosophical, and historical analysis of the predicament of blacks in America
link |
from one of our country's greatest polymaths.
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It's a beautiful text and I go to it yearly.
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So for somebody like me, so growing up in the Soviet Union, the struggle, the civil
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rights movement, the struggle of race, and all those kinds of things that is, you know,
link |
this universal, but it's also very much a journey of the United States.
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It was kind of a foreign thing that I stepped into.
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Is that something you would recommend somebody like me to read, or is there other things
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about race that are good to connect to?
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My flavor of suffering injustice, I'm a Jew as well, my flavor has to do with World War
link |
II and the studies of that, you know, all the injustices there.
link |
So I'm now stepping into a new set of injustices and trying to learn the landscape.
link |
I would say anyone is a better person for having read Du Bois.
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He's just a remarkable writer and thinker, and to the extent you're interested in learning
link |
another history, he does it in a way that is quite sophisticated.
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So it's interesting, I was going to give you three books.
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I noted the accent when I met you, but I didn't know exactly where you're from.
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But the other book I was going to say is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and I mean, I've always
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wanted to go to St. Pete's just to sort of see with my own eyes what the word pictures
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that Dostoevsky created in Crime and Punishment.
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And you know, I love others of his stuff too, The Brothers Care, Masov, and so forth.
link |
But Crime and Punishment I first read in high school as a junior or senior, and it is a
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deep and profound meditation on both the meaning and the measure of our lives.
link |
And Dostoevsky, obviously in conversation with other thinkers, really gets at the crux
link |
of a fundamental philosophical problem, what does it mean to be a human being?
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And for that, Crime and Punishment captured me as a teenager, and that's another text
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that I return to often.
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We've talked about young people a little bit at the beginning of our conversation.
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Is there advice that you could give to a young person today thinking about their career,
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thinking about their life, thinking about making their way in this world?
link |
I'll share some advice.
link |
It actually picks up on a question we talked about earlier in the academy and schools.
link |
But it's some advice that a professor gave to me when I got to Harvard.
link |
And it is this, that you have to be willing to come face to face with your intellectual
link |
limitations and keep going.
link |
And it's hard for people, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, to face really difficult tasks,
link |
and particularly in these sort of elite spaces where you've excelled all your life, and
link |
you come to MIT and you're like, wait a minute, I don't understand this.
link |
Wait, this is hard.
link |
I've never had something really hard before.
link |
And there are a couple options, and a lot of people will pull back and take the gentleman
link |
or gentlewoman's bee and just go on, or risk going out there, giving it your all, and still
link |
not quite getting it.
link |
And that's a risk, but it's a risk well worth it, because you're just going to be the better
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person, the better student for it.
link |
And even outside of the academy, I mean, come face to face with your fears and keep going
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and keep going in life, and you're going to be the better person, the better human being.
link |
Yeah, it does seem to be, I don't know what it is, but it does seem to be that fear is
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a good indicator of something you should probably face.
link |
Fear kind of shows the way a little bit.
link |
You might not want to go into the cage with a lion, but maybe you should.
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Let me ask sort of a darker question, because we're talking about Dostoyevsky, we might
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Do you, and connected to the freeing innocent people, do you think about mortality?
link |
Do you think about your own death?
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Are you afraid of death?
link |
I'm not afraid of death.
link |
I do think about it more now, because I'm now in my mid fifties, so I used to not think
link |
about it much at all, but the harsh reality is that I've got more time behind me now
link |
than I do in front of me, and it kind of happens all of a sudden, too.
link |
You realize, wait a minute, I'm actually on the back nine now, so yeah, my mind moves
link |
to it from time to time.
link |
I don't dwell on it.
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I'm not afraid of it.
link |
My own personal religious commitments, I'm Christian, and my religious commitments buoy
link |
me that death, and I believe this, death is not the end, so I'm not afraid of it.
link |
Now, this is not to say that I want to rush to the afterlife.
link |
I'm good right here for a long time, and I hope I've got 30, 35, 40 more years to
link |
go, but no, I don't fear death.
link |
We're finite creatures.
link |
We're all gonna die.
link |
Well, the mystery of it, you know, for somebody, at least for me, we human beings want to figure
link |
Whatever the afterlife is, there's still a mystery to it.
link |
That uncertainty can be terrifying if you ponder it, but maybe what you're saying is
link |
you haven't pondered it too deeply so far, and it's worked out pretty good.
link |
It's worked out, yeah, no complaints.
link |
So you said, again, the Sejewski kind of was exceptionally good at getting to the core
link |
of what it means to be human.
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Do you think about, like, the why of why we're here, the meaning of this whole existence?
link |
Yeah, no, I do, I think, and I actually think that's the purpose of an education.
link |
What does it mean to be a human being?
link |
And in one way or another, we set out to answer those questions, and we do it in a different
link |
I mean, some may look to philosophy to answer these questions.
link |
Why is it in one's personal interest to do good, to do justice?
link |
Some may look at it through the economist lens.
link |
Some may look at it through the microscope in the laboratory that the phenomenal world
link |
is the meaning of life.
link |
Others may say that that's one vocabulary, that's one description, but the poet describes
link |
a reality to the same degree as a physicist, but that's the purpose of an education.
link |
It's to sort of work through these issues.
link |
What does it mean to be a human being?
link |
And I think it's a fascinating journey, and I think it's a lifelong endeavor to figure
link |
out what is the thing, that nugget, that makes us human.
link |
Do you still see yourself as a student?
link |
I mean, that's the best part about going into university teaching.
link |
You're a lifelong student.
link |
I'm always learning.
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I learn from my students and with my students and my colleagues.
link |
You continue to read and learn and modify opinions, and I think it's just a wonderful
link |
Well, Ron, I'm so glad that somebody like you is carrying the fire of what is the best
link |
It's a huge honor that you would spend so much time, waste so much of your valuable
link |
I really appreciate that conversation.
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Not a waste at all.
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I think a lot of people love it.
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Thank you so much for talking today.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ronald Sullivan, and thank you to Brooklyn
link |
and Sheetz, Wine Access Online Wine Store, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, and Blinkist app
link |
that summarizes books.
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Click their links to support this podcast.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela, when a man is denied the right
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to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.