Harvard Would Not Renew Him. Ronald Sullivan Would Not Resign.

A colleague at Harvard Law School asked Ronald Sullivan whether he would take a call from Harvey Weinstein. Sullivan said yes, drove to Connecticut, sat with Weinstein and his advisers, and a day or two later took the case. It was January 2019. Most of his time is teaching and writing; the private practice is small, and the filter is simple. He tends to take the cases most people deem impossible, and this one qualified: the public had already prejudged it, even though the specific allegations, he notes, were not the ones in the New Yorker exposé that had set the story on fire.

The philosophy is not a taste for celebrity. Unpopular clients, he argues, determine what kind of criminal justice system a country actually has. If lawyers will not protect the rights of “the least and the last,” that is the camel’s nose under the tent: short-circuit Weinstein’s process today, and tomorrow someone is kicking down an ordinary door. These are the cases that test whether the state will still respect civil rights when the defendant is despised.

He reaches for Ernesto Miranda, by all accounts an unlikable three-time knife thief, whose lawyer stepped up anyway. Because of that case, officers now have to recite the warnings that begin “you have the right to remain silent.” Through such representations, Sullivan says, the system expresses some of its best values, vindicating not only the client but the millions of citizens who will never see a courtroom. The rules established in ugly cases are the rules that later protect everyone else.

Fridman asks whether the anger of millions is frightening. It does not stress him out, particularly; it comes with the territory. A large part of the practice is wrongful convictions: he has gotten more than 6,000 people out of prison who were wrongfully incarcerated, some after 20 or 30 years, and those are the cases that draw praise. He describes himself as a part-time Daoist. Reversal is the movement of the Dao. He does not get too high or too low. He tries to do the work and represent people as well as he can.

The blowback did not land on his law-school appointment. It landed on a separate administrative post at Harvard College, where after freshman year undergraduates live in houses modeled on Oxford and Cambridge. Sullivan had been master, later faculty dean, of Winthrop House. A few students who disliked Weinstein began to protest the representation. From there, he says, it mushroomed into “one of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university in modern history,” a repudiation of academic freedom that Harvard would live to regret.

He expected students to protest. That is what students do, and he wants their voices heard. What vexed him were the adults. Claudine Gay, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Rakesh Khurana, dean of the college, “capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19-year-olds.” They so desired student approval, he argues, that they would not make the tough decision. It could have been a teaching moment about the Sixth Amendment. Instead it became an embarrassment.

Fridman uses the language of a forced step-down. Sullivan pushes back. He did not write the headlines, and he did not resign. Harvard declined to renew the contract. He made clear he would not resign as a matter of principle, and he forced the university to do “the cowardly act that they, in fact, did.” National coverage mostly wagged a finger at Harvard; some writers compared him to John Adams. Fifty-two Harvard Law professors had already signed a letter of support in the Boston Globe. None of it changed the outcome.

The worst detail, for him, is a survey Gay and Khurana commissioned: how did students feel at Winthrop House? Harvard had never done that before, and then never released the results. Students demanded the data. Sullivan demanded it. Silence. He would bet his salary the numbers came back positive, that a supermajority felt fine or simply did not care, and that a minority had weaponized the word “unsafe.” When the data did not fit the narrative, the narrative kept the data. He still challenges them to release it.

The larger diagnosis is the consumerization of education: feckless administrators making policy from whatever students say. Sullivan is not arguing that students should have no voice. He is arguing that faculty exist for a reason. At Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the people in those chairs may quite literally be among the greatest minds on earth in their fields. Curriculum belongs to them. Input and critique are fine. Ultimately the grown-ups in the room have to direct a student’s education, including when the direction is unpopular.

His own case, he thinks, could have been an excellent lesson in what the Sixth Amendment requires and how to treat someone in the crosshairs of the criminal process. The university chose noise-and-reaction instead. Higher education has been commodified in other ways that hamper free and robust dialogue. To the degree academic freedom does not sit squarely at the center of the mission, any school is in trouble. He still expects Harvard to adapt. It has been around four hundred years for a reason, and one reason is that it does not understand itself as static.

The vocabulary of “unsafe” comes from research on psychological disquiet that can impede learning. Grant the feeling, he says, and then notice the irony: an elite campus is probably the safest space those students will occupy in their lives. The duty of a university is to challenge people so they do not leave as the same person who arrived. Education means rigorously, fairly, and civilly interrogating the assumptions that have guided you. You may keep them. You do not get to skip the interrogation. The line he would draw is not between safe and unsafe topics but between civil and uncivil discourse: yell and curse on your own time.

The presumption should be that the hardest topics belong at a university. There is a narrow exception for ideas so contrary to present scientific and cultural thinking that a school need not lend its imprimatur — he uses a flat-earth lecture as the example. Contested theory is what universities are for. If you dislike an idea, present a better one. Cancel culture, he adds, has gotten out of control: an offhand comment or a mistake now triggers a reflexive move to erase someone, forcing people to be robotic and scaring decent people out of public life. Fridman, who has been humbled by martial arts and by math, misses a mechanism that can humble a 19-year-old with ideas rather than with fear.

Fridman asks whether evil exists, or whether everyone is good and circumstances do the rest — and whether anyone is too evil for the law to defend. The category does intellectual work for Sullivan. He believes there is evil in the world as conventionally understood. He does not think people are born that way. Conditions of upbringing create what we later name as evil; some studies find brain abnormalities more prevalent among serial killers, so a biological predisposition is possible. He is not a determinist, and he still puts responsibility on the individual. We all make choices.

What saddens him is the culture in which many people grow up staring at a constellation of bad choices. That unfairness, he says, is on all of us. Fridman pushes the image into an optimization problem: life is a set of trajectories under imperfect information, and the fraction that run toward harm matters more than a myth of pure origin. He has been reading too much about Hitler, including the turns from a conquering leader into someone ruled by anger, and the fact that Hitler was not a terrible painter. Millions of people like him never came to power.

Then the hypo: after the war, Hitler survives, there is a war-crimes trial, the phone rings. Sullivan splits the question. In the United States, everyone charged criminally has a right to a defense. He does not believe anyone is so evil they do not deserve process. Process helps courts reach more accurate results, and it is vitally important — more important, not less — that someone deemed evil receive the same quantum and substance of process as anyone else. The health of the system depends on it. Hitler included, if charged in the United States for a crime that occurred there.

Would *he* take it? As a public defender he represented whoever was assigned; that was the duty, and he started his career that way. In private practice he has choices. On Fridman’s hypo he would likely pass, unless nobody else would represent the man. Then he would feel an obligation. Everyone, he says, deserves competent counsel. The ideal is beautiful and, Fridman notes, terrifying to watch in a year when crowds decide before the evidence is in.

The old joke, Sullivan says, carries a lot of truth: the United States has the worst criminal justice system in the world, except for every place else. What works is a process that privileges liberty over many other values. Not far from where they are sitting, Increase Mather’s line has stayed alive for centuries: better ten guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted. That is how liberty operates in the country’s collective consciousness. Procedure is cumbersome on purpose. It slows the state down and excludes even some reliable evidence, because convicting the innocent is treated as the greater horror.

What does not work is the way the country uses color as a proxy for criminality. From arrest through charging to sentencing, people of color are disproportionately hit. One familiar statistic: there appears to be no distinguishable difference in drug use between white and Black Americans, yet Black people are about 12 percent of the population and about 40 percent of drug charges. Those inequities have grown from bugs into features. Fridman suggests racism makes the system more “efficient.” Sullivan takes the word and turns it: it efficiently moves people from the street into prison, and a lot of innocent people get caught in that machinery.

Getting them out is emotionally taxing. He practices what he calls empathic representation: he gets to know clients and their families, their fears and sorrows, which can do psychic injury. Then he asks the listener to imagine twenty years in a cell knowing you did not do the thing a jury said you did. The people who make it to the other side often say the bars will not define them, that their humanity is immutable. They are not bitter. Sullivan does not think he is that good a person; he would be bitter every day. They tell him you cannot survive that way. Most of the people he has exonerated take on life with vim and without bitterness. He finds that beautiful.

Can racism be eradicated from the judicial system? He thinks so, because race insinuates itself everywhere, and the courts are not immune. Clear the dangerous race-thinking out of the society and it leaves the courts too. It will take a while. Historians three hundred years from now, he says, will notice the speed of the African American journey from slavery to the heights of politics, business, the judiciary, and the academy. If that movement was possible, think about the next 175 years: keep getting to know one another, keep enforcing anti-discrimination law, keep building chances to thrive. A better world yields a better judicial system.

Fridman works with robots, and he knows the comparison sounds absurd next to racism that is still present. He believes there will eventually be something like a civil rights movement for machines. Humanlike AI has social value; the more those systems resemble us, the more they will ask about freedom, suffering, and justice. History keeps manufacturing an “other” and treating it with disdain. Race is one such construction, and the country has made progress. Animals are another: he eats a lot of meat, and he suspects that a few centuries from now people will look back at industrial animal suffering with regret. Most civil rights movements looked ridiculous at the start.

Robots are outside Sullivan’s field, but he offers the observation he has: what is still missing is consciousness. If it existed, it would move a robot from machine to something that experiences the world analogously to us. As he understands the science, television is ahead of the lab. Fridman, who builds the systems, knows how “dumb” they still are, and also how bad humans are at forecasting technical progress. He watches a pattern he does not like: the smarter the artifacts get, the more ways people find to dismiss their intelligence, a primitive threat response. The engineering question that haunts him is whether the *display* of consciousness is enough.

If a robot says it is conscious, looks as if it suffers when tortured, and claims to fear death, the markers people use to grant someone standing — love, fear, hope, the capacity to suffer — start to move. Consciousness, Fridman suspects, is partly a social creation: we believe our common humanity together; alone we would not notice it. Law is a social construct too. There will be no clean instant when a machine “is now conscious,” only a long fake-it-until-you-make-it gray zone. “All men are created equal” may have to stretch the word *men* in ways no one is anticipating. Even if machines never get rights, designing them may force a first-principles account of the human mind that makes legal systems fairer for actual people.

Sullivan calls the gap between performed and actual consciousness an interesting ontological question, and notes that philosophers of religion would add structure versus soul, body versus soul. He suspects he will be dust before those questions are worked out. The law, both men agree, barely discusses souls, but it does discuss what counts as a human being. You generally cannot recover pain-and-suffering damages for a negligently killed pet, because a pet is chattel, like a water bottle. Current definitions trade on a shared picture of humanity that is more than “carbon-based organism” and less than a worked-out metaphysics. Widening that picture is the live legal problem, whether or not anyone is ready for robots.

George Floyd’s killing, Sullivan says, arrived in a specific historical weather: Covid quarantine, more cell phones than the country had ever had, and a stack of earlier videos. This one was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The evidence of mistreatment was, in his word, unimpeachable; whether it was murder or manslaughter was for a jury. What spread was a recognition that a fellow human being’s common humanity had not been acknowledged. People were already practicing care for one another in the pandemic, and then came an explosion of protest on a scale the country had not seen since the 1950s and 1960s. Young people said they would not stand for it anymore. Millions went into the streets.

Derek Chauvin’s trial was being televised gavel to gavel, including the slog of jury selection — six jurors after a week, fourteen needed, sometimes a month in Sullivan’s own experience. “Unbiased” in criminal law does not mean you have never heard of the case, and it does not mean you have never formed an opinion. It means that, notwithstanding those things, you can set them aside, listen to the evidence, and follow the judge’s instructions on how to view it. As a longtime defense lawyer, Sullivan would be hesitant in a case this famous to pick someone who claimed never to have heard of it. Who is that person, or are they lying? Hearing the case is fine. Tethering yourself to a verdict in advance is not.

People also lie to get *off* a jury, saying the most outrageous things so they will be excused for cause, and they lie to get *on* one, performing the law’s “reasonable person.” Sullivan tells his class that the reasonable person in real life is the last person you would want to have a drink with: boring, neutral, not interesting. He does not believe people can be completely unbiased. Everyone brings baggage into court. What you want is someone who can recognize a bias at work and try to correct it. A juror who admits he grew up trusting police, and then says he will follow an instruction to weigh every witness equally, sounds more honest than a robot of neutrality. You are not going to find fourteen people with no biases. That, he says, is absurd.

He is very pro-jury: they get it right a lot of the time, most of the time, and they work hard. An acquittal on the homicide charges is possible, because the jury has to find Chauvin’s state of mind — intent, or gross recklessness that disregarded a known risk of death. The judge had just allowed a third-degree murder theory of depraved indifference, which does not require intent. If there is an acquittal, Sullivan expects massive protests. If there is a conviction, he does not see a large pro-Chauvin camp ready to take the streets. Sentencing could still detonate anger: one count up to about ten years, another up to about forty, depending on what the judge does. Lawyers, he adds, mostly do not write for history during a trial. The defense lawyer is a partisan advocate; the prosecutor is a minister of justice on that case. Some sentences still acquire a shelf life anyway.

Fridman mentions O.J. Simpson. “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” is still in the lexicon, Sullivan says, which is exactly the kind of afterlife a line can have when cameras are on. It should not be foremost in a lawyer’s mind. He was a first-year public defender when that verdict came in. The case mattered as the first major DNA trial, and the prosecution’s mistake, in his telling, was failing to present the science in a vocabulary a jury could use.

Johnnie Cochran understood the science and translated it. He was dismissive of tiny quantities: they found such-and-such amount of DNA, as if he had wiped a finger on his nose. The line worked because the state had not laid the predicate — yes, it is microscopic; you do not need much; a smear from a nose can transfer DNA that still tells you something. Nucleotides and the rest were being thrown at people who had not heard them since high school, and they were not woven into a story. Cochran’s lesson is that every case, including a scientific one, is still narrative.

The other lesson was trial-advocacy one-on-one: never ask a question to which you do not know the answer. Handing Simpson the glove without knowing whether it would fit was far too risky. Sullivan thinks that is what acquitted him, the theater of a glove that would not go on, in front of the cameras. Asked whether his own work is storytelling, he does not hesitate. Since time immemorial people have told stories to make sense of the world; scientists tell a different kind. As a species we are still moved by narrative. That is first and last in trial work. Introductory books tell young lawyers to start the opening with “this case is about…” and fill in the blank. That sentence is the story you came to tell.

Sullivan says he misses Aaron Hernandez. The double-murder trial he tried was one of those impossible cases in a particular way: the client had already been convicted of a separate murder, and almost everyone in the Boston jury pool knew it, because Hernandez had been a popular Patriots player in a football town. They were defending a double homicide with a convicted murderer sitting at counsel table. The underlying killing had gone unsolved for a couple of years until a nightclub bouncer said something to a cop in the theater district. Once Hernandez’s name was in the air, Sullivan says, the police went all out.

They found Alexander Bradley, a significant Connecticut drug dealer, who in exchange for a deal pointed at Hernandez and said he had been there and that Hernandez was the shooter. Jose Baez, who teaches in Sullivan’s trial-advocacy workshop at Harvard, called and asked if he wanted to go to the prison and talk. They sat with Hernandez for two or three hours. Before they left, he asked to retain them. Sullivan’s first impression was physical: this is what a professional athlete looks like, bigger and more fit than anyone, oddly small on television. He was extraordinarily polite, younger in mind and body than the early-twenties chronology suggested, with a radiant smile and a remaining innocence in how he saw the world.

He has not watched the Netflix documentary *Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez* and did not participate. Attorney-client privilege, in his strong view, survives death, so he was not inclined to talk about their conversations. He generally stays away from press during trial; some lawyers watch it religiously, but he trusts the room more than “Joe from 756 at Gmail.” A story broke on the radio during the trial that Hernandez had been in a same-sex relationship; local sportscasters mushroomed it. Prosecutors briefly floated what Sullivan calls a specious “gay rage” motive and then backed off, an offensive theory he is glad they dropped. He will not discuss what he learned from Hernandez himself. He has no idea why Hernandez killed himself. It was a shock. Sullivan was scheduled to visit a couple of days later. Hernandez was anxious for Baez and Sullivan to take over the appeal of the murder conviction he had already suffered, and he was talking about getting back into the league — maybe not the Patriots. A few days later he was dead.

Looking back makes him very sad. He believes Hernandez absolutely did not commit the crimes of which they acquitted him. He does not know enough about the first case to opine. In the case they tried, he thinks Hernandez had the misfortune of a famous name, and a police department that really got going once they had it. A remarkably talented athlete, a stack of possible trajectories, and one that ran to suicide. Fridman connects it to the earlier image of lives as paths you only partly choose.

Asked for books that formed him, Sullivan starts with Richard Rorty’s *Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity*. The claim that did work for him is that our most deeply held beliefs are contingent: there is nothing beyond history or prior to socialization that is the final story of a human being. Received wisdom, highly contingent along many registers — and yet Rorty still holds beliefs strongly, recognizing the contingency, without sliding into “everything is okay.” That vocabulary helped Sullivan live with a real tension. Infanticide might be socially contingent, even anthropological, and he still thinks it is wrong, even if he cannot give a non-circular theoretical backup. The payoff is humility. Ideas are always already in progress, never fully formed. If you do not have the final Answer with a capital A, you can get to better answers with a lowercase one.

In the solidarity section, Rorty describes an imaginative ability to see different people as *we* instead of *they*. Sullivan calls it a beautiful concept and an active process. The second book is W.E.B. Du Bois’s *The Souls of Black Folk*, which he calls pivotal in his intellectual development and one of the premier sets of essays in the Western literary tradition: a deep sociological, philosophical, and historical analysis of the predicament of Black Americans, from one of the country’s great polymaths. He returns to it yearly. Fridman, who grew up in the Soviet Union and whose own flavor of injustice is Jewish, asks whether it is a way into an American history that still feels foreign. Anyone, Sullivan says, is a better person for having read Du Bois.

The third book, once he hears the accent, is Dostoevsky’s *Crime and Punishment*, which he first read as a high-school junior or senior and still treats as a meditation on the meaning and measure of a life. He has always wanted to walk St. Petersburg and see the word-pictures with his own eyes. Advice to a young person picks up the university thread from the start of the conversation. A professor told him when he got to Harvard that you have to be willing to come face to face with your intellectual limitations and keep going. In elite spaces, many people have never met a truly hard task; they take the gentleman’s B and pull back. The better risk is to give it your all and still not quite get it. Outside the academy, the same rule: come face to face with your fears and keep going. Fear, Fridman suggests, is often a decent compass — except, perhaps, for the cage with the lion.

The purpose of an education, Sullivan says near the end, is to work through what it means to be a human being. Philosophers, economists, laboratory scientists, and poets are offering different vocabularies for the same question; the poet describes a reality to the same degree as the physicist. He still sees himself as a student. That, for him, is the best part of university teaching: you learn from students and colleagues, you modify opinions, you never stop. Fridman thanks him for carrying what is best about Harvard. Sullivan, who has been on the receiving end of that institution’s least courageous hour, still talks as if the fire is worth keeping.