Judge Guido Calabresi : The Future of Law and Economics [10:03-15:10]

And they had substituted a guy who was our teacher, anatomy teacher, physiology teacher, something, who was a nice man but weak. He was installed as president, we went to the installation because he was our teacher. And he gave a perfectly good speech. And then the fascist minister of education got up and gave a terrible speech, just an awful, awful speech. And in the middle he stopped his politicians will for applause. And he said, I didn't applaud. There was nothing to applaud. He said, I didn't his or Boo, I was much too well brought up to do anything like that. And some people tapped me on the shoulder and said the next time he stops applaud because they're taking your name down. There were some thugs in the back who were doing it. He said, I was 22 years old. If they had told me that I'd get into trouble, if I went and didn't applaud, I would have stayed home. I might even have gone and applauded. But I hadn't applauded before. And now at 22, somebody tell me you have to applaud or we'll beat you up. I couldn't do it. And so I didn't applaud the next time. And when we went out, two or three of us who did not applaud, they picked us up and beat us up. And there we were, all bloody. And I said, what did you do then? We washed. And I said, we're in the fountain in the middle of the square. And I said, why did you wash there? Well, we lived at home. We didn't want to go home all bloody and scare our parents. And I said, were you doing it to show that you'd been beaten up? And he said, no, no, I don't think so. But the fascists did. So he picked us up again and this time beat the tar out of us and much more and threw us in jail. I then was an active antifascist. I was marked. So he became part of a small group of people who were Democrats with a small D. And helped distribute the first underground newspaper and so on. By the 1930s, he had decided to leave. But my grandfather said, one stays in fights. He was a real patriot. You don't leave your country. So my father said he'd stay. My grandfather died at the end of 1937. At the same time, the two people, my father's closest friends, brothers, who had become heads of this small group of antifascists were murdered by the fascists. So my father said it's coming too close and his father having died, he didn't feel the obligation to stay and we decided to leave. Getting out wasn't easy. It's a long story how we got out and who helped us and so on. But the fact is that we finally were able to get out in the fall of 1939 and arrived in America. After the war had broken out in Europe, but not yet with Italy and arrived in New York on September 16, 1939. I was sworn in as a judge 55 years to the day when I arrived. We arrived without a penny, having been very rich, outsiders. Lucky to have gotten out because I have many Jewish ancestors, Italian Jewish ancestors, going back to before to Roman times. Had we stayed, it would have been much worse for other reasons. But we didn't leave for that reason. Many people did, but we left because we were antifascists. When we came proud of both, we had that tradition, the ancient Jewish tradition, but also we had come because we were antifascists. And we came and I knew three words of English, yes, no one briefcase. And it was a story about how that takes too long. And that's as important a part of my being a judge and what I do. In this book, of course, which is focusing on law and economics, the strands of much of what you talk about reflected here. And I want to, of course, begin to zero in on the law and economics work that you've done, which begins quite early in your career. Your very first article entitled Some Thoughts on Ristus Distribution in the Law of Torts is probably the kind of article we law professors all would love to think we all kind of written, which is literally to have founded a movement in academia. But let's go back to that article and talk about what you were trying to argue there and why it remains important. You know, the funny thing about that article is it was written for a law journal competition to become an officer in those days to become an officer of a Yale law journal.