where the course was taken and appropriated and patriotic affirmation and told the story of a downtrodden vietnam that. so there is a lot of commentary on that. that is part of the story that is pretty well known. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> walter olson, author of "schools for misrule" lead and argues that for policy ideas have migrated to the status of national policy. the discussion takes place at the heritage foundation in washington d.c. and runs about

an hour. >> what is taught in law schools in one generation will be widely believed by the bar in the following generation said one great law professor and he might have added that it will also because it is widely believed by the bar will be believed by much of the public. this was not a new story to me. i have written several books about the litigiousness of our legal system and in more cases than not, that can be traced back to academic origins. if you have a beef with the court system in the united states you should take it up with a professor at berkeley. if you think our system of sexual harassment law is less than ideal your problem is with professor mackinnon. so it is for a class-action law

and civil procedure and employment law and many others. this can be traced big and small. i tell a story in my book about workplace law, of the novel idea that the law to -- those you are not good at that, is the type of improper bias by which employers are constantly hiring really great looking people and paying them more and promoting them farther in preference to the rest of us who are more homely. it is unfair but not until around the time the harvard law review rand and indeterminable 90 page student note on the need for the law to combat -- it was

much of an issue for the law. but in the year 1999 there appeared this extremely long harbored law review student note ended didn't take long before looksisn't became an industry judges. the district of columbia asked one ordinance banning looksis an and other municipalities leading to cases like the one reported a couple of years back of the gentleman who was finding it hard to keep his job at a retail outlet because of his multiple tongue piercing as had inflicted on him a speech impediment. he said this is what got me fired. he called a lawyer and was going

to contest this. the harvard law review went to the extent of proposing a wider use of telephone interviews for applicants's new jobs, interviews behind screens. we know this is serious because the author of that piece went on to write the law editorials for the new york times in later years. he has left that and is teaching law at yale. so the original title for my book was ten bad ideas and how they changed the world. at least that is how i started out. as you can tell i abandoned that somewhat jaunty title and the framework for it because i couldn't answer the question, only 10?

where are you going to stop? how long will this book be any way? so i realized i needed to turn in part to why we get so many of these bad idea is. why law schools keep turning out certain kinds of bad ideas and is not just that they are randomly generated bad ideas. will lease some of it is ideological. todd mentioned that the law school's are not exactly hotbeds of libertarian and conservative thinking these days. despite the best efforts of randy burnett and john mcginnis, they are outnumbered and it depends on which study look at. some have only at 6-1 ratio. another found 28-1 at stanford.

that must be exaggerated. those figures may be exaggerated and yet harvard according to people who should know did go forward 30 years without hiring a single republican. and this is my favorite part. for much of that time harvard made change a fret over its lack of diversity. john mcginnis of northwestern put it this way. even as the tory party or the anglican church in great britain has been described as the tory party, the legal professoriate in most law schools can be described as the jammer track party at the lectern. that has been changing at harvard and indeed most schools

that have any self-respect will house a libertarian or conservative law professor. they may hesitate to have more than one for fear that they will breed but they do tend to have one these days. so things are changing. this is not new. this ideological -- goes back a good long way and if you wanted to you could trace it back to a century ago, that law should be conceived as social engineering which means law schools might think of themselves as schools of engineering but it really began picking up momentum during and after the new deal. various law professors joint fdr's administration. more notably, people in fdr's administration went to law

schools and became professors. the stage was set in 1943 for the publication of the most widely cited and influential article ever published about legal education, legal vegetation and public policy in the law journal. let me set the stage for just a moment. roswell was a very influential new deal official sometimes described as the modern -- father of modern propaganda of political slant. at the time he wrote this the law itself had just changed in a tektronix 9.0 richter scale wave because the supreme court had given him -- had decided after all the u.s. constitution did not prevent the government from

running the economy. it would agree to strike down those regulatory programs. so we were clearly launched on a school of thought were the government would be doing more than it ever did and yet here we have law schools still teach in the same old curriculum. this was the beginning of the article's argument. in particular the law schools were still teaching mostly about the so-called private lot contracts and property and various other topics that were indeed typically thought of as necessary training for mainstream private lawyers who were going to go out and began arranging business deals that resolve disputes on main street advisory affluent clients how to keep their money out of the government's hands. but this was not what lawyers of tomorrow should be learning

about or do. he said that instead of drilling students in such outdated matters the new curriculum should be determined, quote, in reference to social objectives and achievement of democratic values. then you know you are in trouble. he went on with some specifics. often identified as the key author here, emphasizing in a private law has contracting property which are much favored instruments of society. if you had to have a course in property law why not take public housing projects or a proper jumping off point? worse yet was the public law. constitutional law. those in the supreme court made clear it was now going to change

to accommodate a new government. they complained, quote, so-called public law courses are organized with too much difference to separation of power, jurisdiction, due process leaders will interstate commerce, etc.. schools should recognize private inheritance would be kept to a minimum in the new society. local government law should realize what lawyers need to be trained in new forms of regional development had howard has been set up and on and on. law schools interested -- the mission of systematic training for policymaking. part of the ingenuity was schools would train you how to be a private lawyer that whole segment of society would stop being so important and it was so

terrible and it was terrible on a number of levels but let me stress how terrible it was at prediction because even a policy lawyer and the alone amy street lawyer, the last thing you would want to do was substitute tennessee valley authority organization approval. if you turn to public law every single one of these concepts turned out to be vitally important and remained in how lawyers practiced law and how the supreme court applies it. valid as a prediction -- i would ask parenthetically that every time you hear someone from law school predicting what area will boom in the future so we should train more lawyers, ignore them because they are all withdrawn. in the 70s they fought energy

law was going to build. no one predicted trademark licensing law was going to. which it did and group legal services would boom which they didn't and the force would shrink and on and on. always ignore them. it wasn't just a matter of prediction. they were being ideological about it. as i will mention in a moment no one adopted the program hole. a number of atmospheric influences, students will be running the world in policy sanders in business deals and tax planning. they might be shaping world. as it is in prestige, as it should be was up in prestige

from then on and some might say there was a possible problem of indoctrination they had the answer to that which is when you teach the old curriculum you are indoctrinating them in a different way. behalf heard a lot of that in later years since. no one adopted the program because to drop the old curriculum entirely, ten years later something very noteworthy happened which got a lot of attention which is the law school dropped property as a required course and and this was almost unheard of because it is terribly important in all sorts of areas of legal practice. yale students then as now were

so smart. they could cram for that stuff when it came time to prepare for the bar exam. think of the time you would free up for philosophical discussions, truly stimulating and interesting friends. yale was the most prestigious law school and this was intimately related to the fact that yale was most impractical and philosophical of all law schools. yale professors, came to the kind of famous that they would be clueless to actual legal property to solve and someone you need to bailout of jail. it was as if they most admire medical schools were the ones that losses when confronted -- this got transmitted to other law schools through the

competitiveness that so characterizes the law school world and there's an irony here. they talk this egalitarian name of everyone being on the same footing in society and yet there are no devito that are half as jealous of each other as law schools are. between that and accreditation there is enormous pressure for them to become more yale like. there is an interesting article in one of last month's new yorker in which he talks about the many failings of university rankings systems and points out with respect to undergraduates that all schools are cf1 o tnder pressure to pretend to be more research oriented and have

interdisciplinary this, philosophically grounded professors and yet this is not what actuadery woryor for most schools. i compare it to someone who looked at the entertainment world and noticed the most successful act was lady gaga and recommend that all entertainers become more lady gagalike a. she is the only one who can get away with that stuff and so it is with yale and highway policy oriented instruction. it did work for yale because without as much time spent on boring old fields like the old property law they were able to generate ader sorts of influential new ideas.

i will brieropy summarize becaue business schools and education will schools every five or ten years some new ideas sweeps through so you have charles with the nicl ideas that the rise to welfare payments and government jobs and rights to teacher tenure or some regulatory favors from government was a new property should be entitled to keep as much preferable to the old property. this is credited with touching off the revolution of the 70s in which courts began creating various nicl substantive rights with consequences we see today in the difficulty of gettingymid of badly functioning public and voice and other consequences. on the ettblic interest law in the 1970s, a project of giving law schools -- through the nicl conception of constitutional law in which was believed the cf1 o

t.s. constitution properly read would allow institution of more or less the entire aineen wi of the new york times op-ed page and through identity politics with its notion that everything is the law should be thought of as charged withymace and gender and every other personal category. some are more successful than others. i trace in the book the suotheesses and failures with operations and other areas. the ideas were so impractical that they fell on their face. but the story culminates, at least the latest episode, the rise of internatioted al human-rights. there is no area faster growing in the law school than interest in international cumin right.

there are dozens of new centers and clinics and entities in the law school's and if you are still thinking of international she writes as something that is primarily meant for dissidents and against the sort of newspapers orymegimes where they close on the opposition newspapers you are much behind the times. that is stider part of the agena and there's much more as you can see if you go to many of these universities sites. you are just as lspeely to see artit changes in domestic violence or sexual harassment law as the need for the right to health care and minimum income and collective bargaining, theymight to be free of hate speech depending on which group you go

to. this has been a creeping into american discourse in a variety of ways, primarily the influence of legal academia. some of youymursursber when a united nations panel criticized the united states has whacking and international she would write and violating human rights and it went on and on with dozens of different things the u.s. was doing wrong often by not having a big enough government and the obama administration'symesponse was fascinating because prominent in their response was is so cf1 o tnfair t or the cf1 o tn97- systematically violating human rights because last year we passed obamacare and took a step toward -- this falls into the categ find it bo.

i wish i had a dollar for every one who said that it was a violation of human rights. there is a pattern here. as it was preached in the 1970s, the u.s. constitution required the enforcement of the agenda of the new york times editorial page. it is increasingly argue that international human-rights -- somewhat vague as to how this will happen -- required the new york times editorial page addendum. give the government more to do

and it is like most of the other ideas i talked-about. up to that point it just sounds like giving more to do to the government. but typically lawyers and judges more to do which was not always -- was not always fdr's view that litigation should have a bigger role in society. it does legal intellectuals more to do because they will be listened to when we decide to resolve everything through litigation rather than legislature or other ways of doing things. frederick hayek would have understood the will power of yet another genre of intellectuals who arrange things in such a way as to make their own judgment more influential and important. is good news for graduates of the law school. it is even better news for the in demand faculty. i am not sure it is good news

for the rest of us. thanks. [applause] >> i will ask the first question and we will let walter choose his own in inquisitors but i will remind you all to wait for the microphone especially since we are reporting this for heritage and our c-span audience. state your name and identify any affiliation before you ask your question and keep it to a question. i said i would mention my one criticism and walter touched upon it. the title wasn't the best tea there, ten bad ideas for law schools. i am not thrilled with the title he shows so i will ask a very pragmatic question. it doesn't deserve the street

title. one title that might sell but be misleading is how law schools are destroying america. that wouldn't have worked. >> i did not want to write a screech. it is not easy to come up with titles but i would focus group because it would wear off all of the edges. i was thinking i am afraid in part of school for scandal as a phrase from restoration in part of -- public festivals to make fun of the high and mighty.

i wanted to make fun of the high and mighty. partly i was looking for words that had not been overused and how something is destroying america have lost all shock value. it word people have not been using is this tool. that is as unfocused that i could think of. >> i haven't read the book so i may have missed something. you make a very good case that the in the electoral self-addressed will be pursued because of the ability over the greek capital as and power in government and the private sector. given the threat this poses 2

entrepreneurial business, why it was served has said over great demand over legal resources, and yet business in this area and so many other areas is waiting for the choice to be ripped out? >> good question. why those interested in the system, why pay particular attention to law schools? you could ask more pointedly after reading the book because i tell at considerable length a different group, the ford foundation starting in the 1940s and 50s and joined by other liberal philanthropies, they were plowing best amounts of money and a great deal of clever organizational skills into making the law schools face thaw

were more socially conscious introducing various activist seems. they were working more or less on their own. i suppose if more conservative or libertarian voters were making a similar effort you would have seen where university administrations would have let it in. 4 one economics movement, did spring considerable influence as a counterweight to thinking in some areas. that is only a partial -- it is ideologically mixed for many different directions. it would make sense for people who disagree with the directions to spend more time thinking about it because their forces

are not seriously hurt at all. i mentioned richard epstein in six eight areas. there isn't anyone else. he is great at doing it but give them a break. yes? >> my question is a i assume this isn't going to fall of its own wage. unlike to figure it was but the commentary article sounds like forces to perpetuate this are very powerful. it is not going to fall of its own weight. can it be influenced -- can lawyers, graduates of law school use their economic weight to collaborate with other like-minded alums? what is to be done in? >> there are several -- as far

as the influence of the outside we are at a moment of crisis for economics of law school causing some rethinking of what they should do. not necessarily ideological rethinking but rescinding of why is there such a gap what they have been trained to do and wind up needing to know. that serves a significant break against the pursuit of fruitless theory and one of my themes in the book is we hit bottom years ago. law schools in tending to improve in ideological diversity and the extent to which they are connected with real-life legal problems. if you can't get people to -- you will emphasize those

courses. if you see very is actually many in this room, they are more successfully policy oriented, more successful influence 15 years ago. and people like elizabeth warren and many of us disagree with. increasingly through real world oriented scholars and more effective liberal forms of styles of being a law professor then back in the day of critical studies. there is the second and not closely related question of where should a student want to go, along the faculty. they're confident in their

ideas. the george mason's full of law which has a brilliant market strategy scooped up a lot of conservative and libertarian faculty, in the rankings, by any standard they have done well at acquiring batting beyond their weight. it is easy to get discouraged about some of the trends but they're all self correcting to some extent. alan dershowitz with who led disagree on many things, getting more of themselves. it is like a club in which you get hired by -- that has been

said and there's no comparison. had you did it for 13 years ago there is no comparison. >> following up on that response, do you thing one avenue of counter to the dominance of the left, to come from the elite themselves, in order to get hired at any law school you have to come with the rod agree. and other people from the elite school, is that essentially the only front that is open to

countering this trend? >> the problem of bad ideas at harvard or yale, with other ideas has been happening. it is a matter of where you arrange ten more ordinary law schools together that will balance -- ideas have consequences. we always find different ways of getting to the same point. one must have ideas that are -- we have a great organization there. may help people who deserve it from falling by the wayside.

christine? >> i am wondering what your thoughts might be on whether some of these wrongheaded ideas translate to lawmakers for example state attorneys general or members of congress or state legislators? do these ideas have influence? >> i think they do. i give various examples. i could have killed several books with other examples. in areas that c e i interested in, whether it is the proper role of state attorneys general or the statute of limitations which became unpopular in the academic literature and without the overthrow we would not have

had -- when it ceases to be respectable to defend the ocean like strict application for stopping unity or various other old limits on liability, there will still be some who resist because there are strong minded judges especially on the supreme court but most are somewhere in the middle edge if they aren't pulling either way. they don't have a law review articles, and citizens united, we have a really strong minded bunch of supreme court justices replaced -- about this point of view and more susceptible to

academic and editorial opinions. yes? >> one thing you pointed out, which i agree with that has not happened in political science or sociology, and so forth in part because judges appointed by republicans for seriously, faculties can't just write you up but if you have -- i would be interested in and why law has had a share for other disciplines -- ideological diversity? >> interesting question. on the tendency of law schools to not be as ideologically

extreme as anthropology or sociology that is well blowout in the surface that was done with disciplines and others that are more lopsided than law. it has been the most influential and you propose an interesting look at why professors who intend to specialize in national issues or constitutional law if they can't predict what the u.s. supreme court will do because they can't make themselves think in a hypothetical way, they are not going to be terribly good at entertaining of the court's doing this. it has tended to reward professors who may be of liberal promises but at least take the time to treat seriously the ideas that differ from their

own. you have seen quite a substantial body of liberals who try to understand conservatives to many other institutions as well. i am not sure -- there may be some feeding in from the fact that lots of very bright people go into law for many reasons other than changing the world of politics and they need to be catered to. the views of lawyers generally after they get out of law school are more democratic than -- not merely -- there are a number of influences on them because law is inevitably more real-world constrained than sociology or anthropology. in the back row, the federalist

society. >> i was wondering what reaction you have been getting from people in the islam schools? >> i just began a few weeks ago, i have been to indiana, illinois and minnesota so far. the response has been wonderful. maybe it is self selecting. maybe someone who hates my guts would not be seen in the same room. faculty very often agrees with much more than we might expect of the critique and possible ways of improving things. the students -- maybe they are mistaking my talk for talks about the general law school crisis and why it is so hard to find jobs. maybe in larger numbers than

what i expected. we are at a moment economically where people are right for retaining the things. there is a lot of doubt how that will be done. the ranking system got shaken because of law firms that hire -- sometimes do better hiring higher up. possibly the fact that law schools are so expensive and some charge much less. one way or another there are a lot of people who come up with a better method. an issue that has come up for debate is would it help to blow up the accreditation system? i complained in the book that a lot of trends that i dislike are reinforced by the accreditation agencies which require a

commitment to clinical education whether or not it would work at a particular school. it requires certain research orientation. it has been argued by people i respect that blowing up accreditation will present us with a different set of problems but at least they will be different ones. one way or another they are not working well. there was another one in the back row. >> this week the weekly standard has an article about the declaration of principles of academic freedom. are you familiar with that? >> not very. >> what the declaration does is lays out standards and principles for what academic freedom looks like and guidance on how to make decisions on

tenure and accept what articles should provide those things. we think about standards where the academic community adopt those standards voluntarily and is used by faculty and other members that point to and say i am not being afforded the academic career i should be afforded whatever it might be. that would be helpful to comment on. >> i have considerable skepticism about efforts to promulgate general principles. one of the earlier questions was what can outsiders do? it quickly becomes at odds with the freedom academics expect if it winds out being state legislature putting pressure on a state law school. that has happened in some

instances. and the general set of rules will be used as a shield to be used by some people to say you see principles of law -- will also be used aggressively by people who want to defend proper roles and so forth. my general sense of the principle of academic freedom is we are better off if they don't change rapidly and if they remain decentralized enough that a variety of institutions where different academic flourish, some of which are impossible to pressure in any direction and others of which are more open to signals from public opinion that go off in the wrong direction. not a very useful answer but i never claimed to have one.

>> let me mention being at heritage, it seems about international human-rights law as a flavor of the decade, heritage has a tremendous program calling attention to the latest developments. yes in the back row? >> 9 name is bill and i am an adjunct professor of law at a right winfrey show. my question is related to something you have asked later and it is in three parts. how do you notice among the dunes at any of the top law schools a recognition on their part that there is an imbalance or extent of the imbalance? do they regard that as a problem? ..

>> we're going to keep coming up with people who think like me. there was some recognition, and certainly there are individual themes that we all know have, you know, done wonders to make their faculties more diverse often at the price -- if it is a price -- of bringing in people that they disagree with. but the way i think of deans is they don't agonize about anything any more than they have to because their time is to spoken for by meetings and fundraising. and so until there is discontent

on the outside that they have to pay attention to, it's easy to move on to the ten things they know they have to worry about instead of adding the 11th one that no one has pestered them for months about. and i think that's probably how a plurality of deans treat the intellectual diversity issue. um, fred again. fred smith. >> a follow up to dave's earlier question. the anthropolses and sociologists are less connect today the world, so less reality checks. and yet you see a dramatic asymmetry between the way the private law part of the economic sphere and the allies and federalists -- heritage, cato, aci, others -- respond to the issues of trial lawyers, human rights lawyers and so on and

their intellectual allies, the ones you've talked about, where one seems to be strategic, looking for precedents, the other seems to be winning cases. is there some way of raising the strategic awareness of our side to recognize we're in a cultural war, and we are fighting it tactically and defensively -- >> well, fred, where you get me going is the talk about cultural war as a metaphor. i'd prefer cultural peace. but the question is, why the asymmetry. and let me pursue that for a moment because i spend a fair bit of time in the book talking about how if you move from groups like the american civil liberties union to law school clinics and programs in adjacent areas, you find a whole lot of overlap. you find cooperation, you find sometimes a revolving door of highly-qualified personnel, you

find that the publications and the round tables and so forth are constantly informing many of the key academics as to what the aclu has been thinking this week and vice versa. you have tremendous cooperation. would we actually want that cooperation between groups that are the ideological opposite members of the aclu, or would that just make law schools yet more polarized and ideological? i have my doubts that they should jump headlong into an equally cozy relationship with conservative or libertarian think tanks or much less with groups that might have lobbying agendas which would really be potentially disastrous. and, so the question is, therefore, should we tell them, you know, stop seeing the aclu four times a month, at least date around. [laughter] i don't want them to feel

married to any of them, though, if you see what i mean. yes. >> let me ask the concluding -- why don't you stand up here or stay up here -- the concluding question. since i didn't know why john who introduced me was needed to mention my service on the u.s. commission on civil rights, but then you explained the answer. i see a few of my colleagues here. there have been several who have been agitating to abolish the u.s. commission on civil rights, apparently, because we no longer -- american civil rights is passe, and they want to replace it with a human rights commission. so if you wouldn't mind explaining, what is it that is so attractive to the so-called progressives about human rights? i'll suggest one or ask you one is, you know, civil rights law actually has some limits, but there are no limits to what you can dream up in the human rights realm. >> yeah. and i, i'm also highly alarmed

by the effort to rename and rebadge things from civil right to human rights. as you hint, civil right we conceive of as a bunch of categories having to do with minorities or others in potentially oppressed groups. not a member of that group, it's probably not a civil rights issue. human rights is meant to encompass that plus rights of health care, labor, welfare and many others. once rebadged as human rights, it is much easier to bring in the literature and a pronouncement of the various international groups that follow this. one thing that wouldn't change is the tremendous influence of legal academia because in both the civil rights and human rights area, basically every new idea that comes along has been vetted to a long literature. civil rights is a classic area where the body of opinion represented so wide hi in the

country -- widely in the country and in this room which is that yen win equality of -- genuine equality of opportunity means not discriminating by race or gender. this is not -- this has not got its large body of academics behind it. they are almost unanimously, as one who writes heavily in the area, it's one of the reasons civil rights law is so incredibly hard to reform. it becomes even worse if you rebadge it as human rights law. >> i'd like everyone to join me in thanking walter. [applause] >> for more information visit walter olson's web site, overlawyered.com. >> this weekend on booktv on c-span2 the gaithersburg book festival live with authors on the gulf oil spill, wall street, the universe, america's largest slave revolt, india and the

middle east. plus a panel discussion on the book industry. also former ambassador to yemen on the u.s.' counterterrorism efforts in that country. and on after words, frederick kempe. look for the complete schedule at booktv.org and get our schedules directly e-mailed to you. sign up for our booktv alert. >> i am a very hopeful person, an unrepenitent idealist. and i've come to understand hopefulness and idealism as strength, as real blessings. and this book, a much as anything, is a gesture of gratitude to some of the people who have given me those gifts of hopefulness and idealism, the teachers who gave me a reason to believe in a brighter future, a family and strangers too who gave me a reason to believe in the power of kindness. the church ladies on the south side of chicago who gave me a reason to believe in the essence of faith, the voters for that

matter, who have given me a reason to believe in the politics of conviction and many, many others. a friend of mine described this book recently as a love story which for me was the most powerful compliment i could be given. i wanted to write about these people and the lessons they taught me for two reasons. first, because they've done more than help me succeed, they've helped me want to be better, to be a better leader, a better husband and parent, a better citizen. and, secondly, because it's within each of us to pass these kinds of lessons on to others. in fact, i think we have a generational responsibility to do just that. as some of you know and as bea was alluding in the introduction, i grew up on the south side of chicago in the '50s and the '60s, most of that time on welfare. my mother and sister and i share add two bedroom tenement with our grand parents and various cousins who came and went. my mother and sister and i actually live inside one of those bedrooms and shared a set

of bunk beds. so you'd go from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor. i went to big, broken, sometimes violent public schools. but we had a community. because those were days when every child was under the jurisdiction of every sickle adult -- single adult on the block. remember that? you messed up in front of ms. jones, she would straight p p -- straighten you out and then call home! laugh i think what they were trying to get across to us was they had a stake in the us. membership in a community is understanding the stake each of us has in our neighbors' struggles. given the expectations that much of society has for poor black people in circumstances like mine, i am not supposed to be where i am today. my story isn't probable. but it's at the same time a distinctly american story. and it may not get told as often as we'd like in this country,

but it gets told more often in this country than any other place on earth. it is a defining story. in 1970 i got a breakthrough a program called a better chance to go to milton academy. and for me that was like landing on a different planet. i saw it for the first time the night before classes began in 1970 all by myself. my family didn't see it until graduation day. i remember they had a dress code in those days, the boys wore jackets and ties to classes so when the clothing list arrived, my grandparents splurged on a brand new jacket to wear to class. but a jacket on the south side of chicago was a windbreaker. so the first day of class the boys were putting on their blazers and tweed coats, and there was i in my windbreaker. i want to point out that i have figured it out. [laughter] again, there were teachers and other adults who reached out and helped.

i went on to harvard college, the first in my family to go to college, to harvard law school. i've lived in chicago and boston and los angeles and new york, here in d.c., in atlanta, in the sudan. i've done business all over the world. i've had some remarkable experiences, improbable ones in the eyes of many. i've argued in the supreme court, i've hitchhiked from cairo to khartoum, i've counseled two prime ministers. i've served as the first black governor of massachusetts on my first time running for office. but as i reflect on each of these experiences, each has its roots in the lessons i try to write about in this book. these lessons have given me a sense of the possible, and that has made all the difference. i write in the book about the transition from the south side of chicago to milton academy, about the experience of trying to bridge these very different worldses where each one seemed to demand that you reject the other as the price of acceptance in the one.

and how important it was for me to understand, ultimately, that that was a false choice. i write about the way the old ladies in big hats in church back home taught me to see that faith is not so much what you say you believe, but how you live. i write about the extraordinary courage and strength of my wife, diane, through her first marriage to an abusive husband and the toll my early days in public office took on her and how her triumph has strengthened not just me, but thousands of others. time and time again experiences of great trial and even turmoil have produced transcendent powers, and they have contributed to my idealism. i want to defend and encourage that kind of idealism because i think it is what motivates people to make what seems improbable possible. that may sound corny to some of you especially in the

hard-bidden washington, d.c., but, in fact, there is nothing at all corny about hope. and there is nothing at all empowering or ennobling about the alternative. about pessimism. in fact, as governor it has been a sense of the possible that has helped us achieve many remarkable things against more than customary odds. in these exceptionally cynical times, i think people are hungry for something more positive and affirming than the steady diet of no that they get. it has implications on both a policy level and a personal level. on a policy level, without a renewed sense of idealism, without -- with all the risk of failure and disappointment that that entails, an essential part of the national character, our can-do spirit will be in jeopardy. and none of the big challenges facing this country will successfully be faced.