This effort to try to extradite Roman Polanski seems like a bad idea. However bad what the Polanski of 1977 did may be, you cannot punish him. He no longer exists, worn away by half a lifetime of subsequent experiences and choices. Moreover, at least one of the traditional reasons for imprisoning people, to […]
To Be A Lawyer and A Believer: A Two-Part Series Part 2: Believer Originally Published in the Maryland Daily Record Last time I wrote about the impact of religious belief on the professional lives of lawyers, from the perspective of one who professes to be both a believer and a lawyer. Now I want […]
SUBCREATION: FROM EDEN TO THE NEW JERUSALEM: Genesis Chapters 1 through 3 Easter 2007 The wonderful first three chapters of Genesis — two of which we have just read — attempt to grapple with some huge questions: among them where everything that is came from, including but not limited to us; the role of […]
Easter 2006 Abraham and Isaac: Deciding About Sacrifice I start with a quote from Bob Dylan that makes light of a horrible dilemma: Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son” Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on” God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?” God say, “You can do what […]
To Be A Lawyer and a Believer: A Two-Part Series Part 1: Lawyer Originally Published in the Maryland Daily Record After we leave our places of worship, we lawyers don’t usually talk about our faith much. There are lots of reasons why. Maybe the biggest is the disconnect between the way the faithful think […]
The Peter Bell Phenomenon In the midst of graduate school at Hopkins, I discovered that I had one set of reasons for being there, and my professors had an altogether different set of reasons for asking me to be there. My dissertation, on the novelist Kingsley Amis, was an effort to fulfill my own objectives […]
Richard II: Shakespeare’s Legal Brief This paper, produced as a term paper in an independent study course in law school, was published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 1982. To my great pleasure, other scholars still cite it from time to time. Let me again thank my supervisor, Professor Alice Brumbaugh, Emerita of the University […]
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass In 2008, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra mounted a grand new production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, performed in Baltimore, at Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center, among other places. I was commissioned to write four pieces about this masterwork for the BSO’s website. (The recording won a deserved Grammy.) As the Orchestra has […]
Next Literary Writing Kingsley Amis As recounted in About the Author, I did my doctoral dissertation on Kingsley Amis. When Zachary Leader published his biography of Amis in 2007, Mark Lasswell of the Wall Street Journal tracked me down, and asked me to write a review and to be sure to incorporate my personal experiences of […]
Ants Published in the Maryland Daily Record in 2006 I take a detour this month from talk of war and lies, to offer some thoughts about another aspect of humanity’s Big Picture: death and its inevitable corollary, survival. When one of us dies, others are left to carry on. Having recently experienced the passing […]