Judge Guido Calabresi : The Future of Law and Economics [5:00-10:03]

And there were people who were making mistakes, but knew where they were going. And they were mathematicians, I was not. So I turned to something I loved, history. And I thought it'd be a historian. The problem was, I didn't like primary sources. I'm a consumer of history, it's still my hobby. I read biography, I read other people, but I'm not a person who wants to do. So I thought history, math, together, what does that mean? Economics. So I majored in economics and analytical economics. I had a lot of math and I had the advantage of having as a first teacher in economics, a guy who was to the right of Chicago, Warren Nutter, who started the Virginia school, a wonderful guy, died young. And he and I argued through the whole term that he loved me and I loved him. And he made me make sure that I understood the whole thing of that way of doing things. And then I had Jim Tobin as a tutor. And a guy named Willie Felner, who was a classic great Viennese. He was a Viennese refugee and he knew more about everything in any way. In England, I continued doing primarily economics. I did some philosophy and politics, but basically I played in economics. And again, I had his tutors, two Nobel laureates, Jim Tobin was one before, but Larry Lawrence Klein and their John Hicks as tutors. So I came back from England really knowing economics. I didn't stay with economics because of a part of economics that I liked most was the most theoretical and I thought that that was really useless. And we're coming to the same sort of thing in football. So I tried law really fought the Muir. I didn't know what and I loved it. From the first day I got that sense of it there, I knew where things were going. The opposite about math. And I loved the fact that we had to be rigorous in law, but it always had to do with human beings and real situations. And then I took torts, the first term, with Fleming James, who didn't know any economics, was a great, great teacher, but was teaching out of materials that had been put together to a shulman in James, but originally by a guy named Hamilton, who was an economist, who had put them together with shulman and saw all of these questions were being asked in torts by James because they were there in the materials and he didn't quite know what the answers, but somebody who had the economics background that I had could say, but the answer is obvious. Here's what it is, or here's a problem and that's how I got into law from economics. And of course there's something else you've brought to the table in your academic career as well as your initial studying of both economics and law. And that is how you came into this country. Yes, I would describe that and talk about its importance. I often say that the most important part of my legal education is that I'm a refugee and an immigrant. My father, I mean, we were very well off in Italy, very, very well off, but my father and his father were fiercely anti-fascist. And my grandfather was an industrialist, my grandmother was a the largest land-owning family in Ferrara of the area between Bologna and Venice. And my grandfather was exiled from Ferrara because the fascists did not want somebody who with his wife was so powerful in a small town like that. They were exiled to wherever they could want it to go so they went to Florence, not a bad exile. And that's where my father was going to school and he became an active anti-fascist at the very beginning of his life. How? I asked him once, you know, it's easy to be anti-fascist, but how did you become actively anti-fascist? And he said everybody talks about the banality of evil, very few people talk about the banality of good. Here's how I became an anti-fascist. The fascists had kicked out the president of our university because he was tough.