Dick Fallon RIP

I saw yesterday the sad news that Harvard Law Professor Dick Fallon had passed away from cancer at age 73. Apparently the cancer diagnosis came relatively suddenly; most people did not know he was sick.

I certainly did not know Dick as well as many of those eulogizing him. But I did have one significant occasion to interact with him. 

In 2019, I was writing my "Sadomasochistic Judging" article technically as a book review of Fallon's "Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court", though a review in the "law journal" style of book review where the book is a thinly-veiled excuse to talk about things I already wanted to talk about.

Anyway, that fall he happened to be keynoting the Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium, which I attend each year and where I was going to be presenting a draft of my article. I was a total nobody at the time -- still in grad school at Berkeley -- but Dick attended my talk and gave warm feedback. Since it was technically a review of his book, I remember specifically asking him whether he felt I had presented his views fairly, he responded by saying that as a rule he tries "to avoid comment on other people’s readings of [his] work," because once "it is out in the public domain, I have no more expertise than anyone else about how my words ought to be read or interpreted." It was, I told him, a genuinely principled non-originalist position!

Non-comment notwithstanding, he was very complimentary about the project and clearly just a warm and inviting figure. I'm sorry I didn't get to know him better. May his memory be a blessing.

Making ... Friends ... Is .... Important

Jill and I made new friends recently.

This was a big deal because, if I'm being honest, I had kind of given up on making new friends.

That's a slight exaggeration. A closer truth was that I was kind of waiting until Nathaniel started going to school and/or daycare, where we'd presumably make friends with other parents. But relying on your six-month-old to make friends for you seems kind of pathetic.

Although, effectively, that's what happened anyway. We were out on a walk with Nathaniel where we serendipitously ran into some neighbors doing the same thing with their kiddo. She is a little older than Nathaniel is, but still in his basic age range, and in a rare burst of extroversion I decided I was not going to let this opportunity go to waste. We made small talk, exchanged numbers, and invited them over to our house for dinner and board games. And fortunately, we seem to have hit it off. Friendship unlocked.

I am not the first to observe that\ making friends as an adult is hard. You're playing the game on easy while in school -- surrounded by people around your age and chock full of common experiences. Out in the real world, you have to put some elbow grease into friendship. Work can be a substitute, but for someone like me whose workplace doesn't include many age peers, it's not really a parallel. What you really need to do is go out and do activities, which never was really my jam (here marrying my best friend is a disadvantage -- why would I expend time and effort into going out to do things with other people when my favorite person is already next to me on the couch?).

Nonetheless, friends are important. I am worried about social isolation and the decaying of social bonding opportunities. I don't have macro-solutions for it, so I'll just pat myself on the back for actually going out and making friends.