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CHAPTER 19 Teaching and Practice I LEFT THE COMMISSION AT THE END OF 1970, and when I left, I found myself for the first time of my life adrift and uncertain as to what I should do with myself. Before then I'd always been taken care of by a benevolent providence, assisted by some good friends who felt I could not take care of myself and needed a little help. Well, in a way I was taken care of when I left. I shouldn't say that I was on my own. MyoId and good friend, Adrian Fisher, known as Butch Fisher, was dean of the Georgetown Law School at that time. Remember him? He had been Frankfurter's law clerk the first term that Frankfurter was on the Court. Fisher was Brandeis's law clerk when Brandeis retired in the middle of the term, and finished up the term working for Frankfurter. Fisher called me and we had lunch, and he said, "I want you to come to Georgetown and be our Felix Frankfurter." How could I say no to that? So I went to Georgetown as a half-time professor, and I gave a Supreme Court seminar which was modeled after Frankfurter's seminar in federal jurisdiction at Harvard that I had gone to thirty-two years earlier. And the advantage at Georgetown was that we were just a few blocks from the Supreme Court. And what I did was, just like Frankfurter , I picked the best students I could get from the Law Review. And we had about fifteen students. I got briefs in pending cases before the Supreme Court, and I had them Xeroxed. So when the case was argued, we all trooped up to the Supreme Court just a few blocks away and we listened to the oral argument. It was not easy to get them into the courtroom. With the help ofthe chiefjustice, I arranged with the marshal for me Teaching and Practice to give each student an ID, certifying that he was a member of the Supreme Court Seminar at Georgetown and that enabled him to go to the head of the line and go right into the courtroom. That didn't work out too well because a lot of my students turned their IDs over to other students, and they went up there to hear cases other than the ones that we were supposed to hear, and these students -you know this was the early 197os-they dressed like hippies, and they would go into the courtroom and they'd sit in the back. But Warren Burger didn't like it and the marshal didn't like it. I did this for two or three years, and I finally gave up. There was too much of a hassle at the Court. We would hear the arguments in these cases, and we would come back to the law school and meet on Friday of that week, the same day and hour the Supreme Court was having its conference. We would be the Supreme Court, we would be the justices, and we would go around the table expressing our opinions as to how that case should be decided. We would take a vote, and I would assign the writing of the opinion to one ofthe students. Everyone else in the seminar would be free to write a dissent or a concurrence after that student circulated his draft opinion for the Court. So we were writing Supreme Court opinions. And we were also reading U.S. Law Week and seeing what the Court did, studying orders in pending cases, et cetera. It was a seminar on what the Supreme Court was doing this week, and it was great fun. I enjoyed it. At the same time I was invited by a friend of mine, Wallace Cohen-no relation to Fletcher Cohn-senior partner of the firm called Landis, Cohen et cetera, Jim Landis' old firm. Jim Landis of course was dead by then; he had a very tragic end. Wally Cohen said, "I've got plenty of room here." This was on Sunderland Place, just across the street from here, a block away. And he said, "Why don't you come here?" My friends knew I wanted to be a public interest lawyer the half time that I wasn't teaching at Georgetown. Wally said, "You won't have to pay any rent until you start making money. You can have an office. We...

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