You know how some people entertain themselves with crack and porn?

Here's what was in the package I eagerly opened when I got home tonight after an insanely busy day that included, among other things, trying to pull the iron out of the fire for a guy who really needed help and quickly, plus two courthouse trips and the successful acquisition of a TRO for my client:



The item on the right is the entire West Wing series on DVD. Simply put, I have fallen in love with this series, and watching the episodes as they trickled in three discs at a time through my Netflix subscription was wholly unsatisfactory in the face of the miniscule amount of patience I possess. I rationalized this extravagance by telling myself I will watch it again and again, and I know that is true.

The Constitutional Law book is my crash course to prepare for the days ahead, whatever they may hold. I chose Chemerinsky's book because my Constitutional Law professor in law school felt Chemerinsky was the best. If I'm not going to follow the advice of Dan Rotenberg, the man who bestowed upon me my best grade I ever received in law school and, more significantly, who taught me to love the Constitution, then whose advice could I follow? Another of my favorite professors wrote this about Professor Rotenberg after he died nearly six years ago:

There is no way to say what I am about to say decorously. I have been allotted three minutes to talk at this memorial, and that is a good thing because it means that there is no time for me to engage in bullshit, and Dan detested bullshit.
. . . . .

Dan detested intellectual shallowness and moral cowardice. He reserved especial disdain for expedience masquerading as principle. On those occasions when Dan was the only person to vote “no” on some proposition at a faculty meeting, it was not because nobody else agreed with him, but rather because Dan was the only person courageous enough to speak out against some folly.

His students referred to him affectionately as “C+ Dan”; the reason is that if the exam was not excellent Dan would not give it an “A” and if it wasn’t very good he wouldn’t give it a “B.” He was one of the most demanding faculty members the law school has ever had; yet he managed to be so demanding without ever being cruel.

He was brilliant without being pretentious. I do not know if I would have believed what I am about to tell you if I had not witnessed it myself. Most faculty members that I know, when they write an article, try to use offers of publication from one journal to extract a commitment from another journal. Dan did not believe in that. His work was first-rate, as anybody who has read it will tell you, but it was not always in first-rate journals because Dan’s practice was to publish his work in whichever journal called him first. He did not believe in playing students from one school against students from another, and he did not view his scholarship as a means to better his own position in the world.

The last quality of his that I’ll mention is his passion. Dan quite simply believed in the difference between good and bad and the difference between right and wrong, and he believed as well in the difference that a single voice could make. He believed all this, passionately, yet entirely free of pretense or haughtiness. He had greatness and modesty in equal proportions.

All of us have our own memories of Dan. I have something more. This is the book with the essay “On Bullshit” [which Professor Rotenberg loved]. This is the coffee stain that Dan caused and for which he was profusely and excessively apologetic. And this is the piece of paper he used as a bookmark to mark a passage from the essay that he read at a faculty meeting one day when most of the rest of us were intent on doing something stupid.

In the Paradisio Dante says something along the lines of how the flame of a good man burns forever. That observation is truer of no man than it is of Dan Rotenberg. The way he lived his life has touched all of us who knew him, and in turn it touches all whom we know. Dan might say that this is bullshit but he would be wrong. Because of how he lived and because of the example he set, Dan is just now beginning to change the world.

Having read this, you will understand why I ordered Chemerinsky's book, and maybe a bit more than that. Dan Rotenberg's classroom was the place where my eyes first lit up at the idea of using this grand old document, in all of its short but powerful glory, to preserve the basic human rights of people. One of my colleagues told me the other day that I am a "true believer." I think that's something to be proud of, whether he intended it that way or not.