José A. Cabranes, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit, Portrait Dedication [76:03-79:57]

And I'm forever grateful to Mark Irish. Jesse too is special to me in many ways. He came to my attention as a possible future clerk when he was merely a sophomore at Harvard College. I take the search for law clerks very seriously. And I begin early, I had read with amazement and appreciation a long article in the New Republic on the now forgotten political conspiracy theory known as the October surprise of the 1980 election. The reason you may not know much about the alleged October surprise of 1980 is that the investigative work of Jesse and his co-author for the New Republic proved it to be a political myth if not a fraud. I first met Jesse in 1992 at the Harvard commencement where his brother Jason and my daughter Amy were graduating from Harvard College. I aggressively pumped his hand and expressed my admiration for his great article. I believe I may actually have encouraged them then and there at his brother's college graduation to go to law school with the ulterior motive or at least the hope that he could clerk for me afterward. As I said, I do take the search for law clerks very seriously. The rest is history. Jesse did go on to Yale law school and an in an intradudicial conspiracy. He clerked first for Judge Michael Mucasey in New York where he observed that close hand a truly great federal trial judge at work. I know that his experience in Judge Mucasey's chambers will continue to inspire Jesse's service to our country. Jesse from an especially to me in another way as in the case of Bob Shotney, whose wife Stacy clerked for me the year after Bob. I was fortunate that Jesse's wife, Aurela Dubler, now a distinguished professor of law at Columbia, came to clerk for me the year after Jesse. The seven Shotneys and the Dubler Firmens are doubly special to me. The central figure in our ceremony today is the artist Daniel Mark Duffy, to whom you've just been introduced to his work. You've been introduced several distinguished emeritus faculty members of the Yale law school have been painted by Dan Duffy, including some of my favorite teachers and their portraits grace many walls in this building. So it's especially gratifying to be a part of Dan Duffy's Yale portfolio. I confess to you that in approaching this project, I did not have the courage of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who famously rejected flattery by instructing the painter Peter Lele to paint him warts and all. Cromwell has no favorite of mine. On Cromwell, I hasten to say, I stand with the Irish Catholics, whose ancestors he crushed without mercy and who understandably despised his memory. In the matter of portraits, the Lord Protector is not my guide. I don't want it warts and all. Now, it would be passing strange to suggest an alternative course to an honest artist. How exactly do you tell an artist that you don't want warts and all? I think Kate was of help here, as always. At lunch with Dan Duffy, she jokingly recalled the finger-wagging admonition of our former Secretary of State, Madeline Orbrite. When she first met her projected portraitist, what Kate calls Madeline Orbrite's 2020 solution, lose 20 years and 20 pounds.