Stuff happens

It is common for people of aging years, I prefer that to old f… (just occurred to me this is a class publication)…ok, fogies. In my early years I did not have mentors other than my parents. Maybe I did have mentors but forgot who they were. That’s what happens with the elderly. But decades later, when my hair began turning gray, I met Herb Morris, who became my friend and mentor.

Herb was… I hesitate to use the past tense; Herb passed away last year but he endures. At UCLA he was a law professor, dean of humanities at UCLA, a psychoanalyst, and author of numerous works on moral and legal philosophy, and literary criticism. In a past column, I wrote about Herb, but what follows is an extended piece I wrote for a book, “In Commemoration, Herbert Morris, UCLA Professor of Law and Philosophy,” edited by Professor George Fletcher (Mazo Publishers 2023). In addition to personal reflections about Herb, this unique book contains essays from a range of scholars in a variety of disciplines. These include law, philosophy, art, literature and religion, all pertinent to Herb’s many interests.

This takes me back to the mentor issue. The self-centered autobiographical piece I wrote is about my life’s preparation to meet Herb Morris. Herb would understand. Teaser, George Fletcher, I mean Professor Fletcher and I knew each other in high school. We have a tacit understanding about what and what not to reveal from those bygone days. And because judges these days are more revealing about their lives, what follows is my partial revelation; no biblical reference intended. The takeaway: Who we are and who we become is a crapshoot.

Herb Morris - My Years of Preparation

Earlier this year, four of my classmates and I attended the 100th anniversary of our junior high school, Le Conte Junior High School. Yes, I know, today it’s called a middle school. For authenticity, hereafter, I will use the term junior high school. Let’s be clear, we were not the alumni from the first class, which I assume was in 1926, three years after the opening in 1923. It is still shocking that we graduated when the school was only 20 years old. Gulp. You do the addition. I cannot bring myself to write the year. Before I go on, it might be instructive to know who Le Conte was. Sounds French. I looked him up on Wikipedia before attending the event. I was an inquisitive kid, but in the 1950’s, I was more interested in surviving than knowing who Le Conte was.

Short digression on Auguste Le Conte, 1823-1901. Why? Herb is looking over my shoulder as I compose this reminiscence. Herb wants me to tell you something about Auguste Le Conte. Typical Herb. Le Conte’s name may be French, but he was thoroughly American, a physician, geologist, professor, and conservationist who taught at the University of California at Berkeley. His pal was John Muir.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but during those early days of survival and inquiry at Le Conte Junior High, the inquiry part was preparation for my establishing a deep and lasting friendship with Herb Morris decades later. Assuming I have piqued your interest about the survival part of my junior high school experience, there were some truly tough kids bussed in from a place, God knows where, called Roger Young Village. This bussing program predated Brown v. Board of Education. Roger Young, I recently learned, was a war hero during the second world war, but that’s beside the point.

I joked that the kids from Roger Young Village were so tough that Roger Young Village’s sister city was Devil’s Island. I was a short, scrawny kid who read books, even ones that were not assigned. And I played the piano. With those three strikes against me, I was a nervous zebra on the Serengeti plain when the students from Roger Young Village arrived. I devised a plan to survive. I befriended the Roger Young students and helped them with their schoolwork. The plan worked even though they got lousy grades under my tutelage. I was agnostic even then, and carefully avoided talking about religion with the Roger Young kids who wore crosses. They were the ones who were particularly adept at beating the crap out of someone who rubbed them the wrong way.

They were my friends, sort of, and I survived. I even became the Boys’ League president. I still wonder if it was the Roger Young contingent that put me over the top.

In those early formative years, I thought, and still do, that literature and the arts enhance one’s life. I cannot be more specific other than to say it sharpens our perceptions about our place in the world, and somehow makes us better at whatever we do… not all of us. This is foreshadowing of my meeting Herb Morris some 35 years later.

In junior high I was “into” my Thomas Wolfe phase and saw myself as Eugene Gant processing the vicissitudes of Le Conte Junior High. It wasn’t until I learned that Thomas Wolfe was antisemitic and treated Maxwell Perkins poorly that I dropped Thomas Wolfe. To make the breach complete, I stopped trying to write essays in his style to the relief of my English teachers.

Fast forward. Hollywood High school. That is where I met Professor George Fletcher. He was not a professor then. At the risk of offending my good friend, that was the last thing I ever thought he would become. At that time professors to me were more like apparitions than actual beings. But turnabout is fair. Neither George nor I ever thought I would become a presiding justice on the California Court of Appeal. I thought of becoming a jazz pianist. Herb would have thought that was cool. Herb was not right about everything. Philosophers and professors of Herb’s caliber do not worry about starving to death. Not sure what George’s plans were at that time or whether he had any. We never imaged that the two of us would be lecturing Hungarian judges in Budapest in the early 1990’s about Anglo-American jurisprudence. Herb and I agreed that George makes things happen.

I went on to major in English literature at UCLA and then attended law school at Berkeley, California, in the 1960’s. I avoided the Vietnam War and thought I had gained some tools to survive in the “jungle.” Would appreciate it if you don’t spread this around. You can imagine Berkeley in the 1960’s. I cut some classes to witness a panel discussion with Philip Roth, James Baldwin, and Jonathan Cheever. I also cut property class to audit a course in the English Department taught by literary critic Alfred Kazin. He lectured on Catcher in the Rye. Like any complex legal problem, that novel got me to thinking along with Holden Caufield, “Where do the ducks go when the lake freezes over?” Good thing I went to law school. As I shall explain, if I had not gone to law school, I would not have met Herb.

I ultimately became a judge and then a presiding justice on the California Court of Appeal.

Many years ago, California formed a “Judge’s College” to train new judges on the art of judging. The courses were generally geared toward teaching judges the technical and practical approaches to judging. These included issues relating to the evidence code, family, criminal and civil law, and dependency.

Drawing upon my liberal arts background, I sought to enhance what I thought was an impoverished judicial education. Friends put me in touch with Professor Herb Morris. A warm and enduring friendship developed, along with a seminar in philosophy and literature Herb helped me develop for trial and appellate judges.

We read and discussed the works of H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Lon Fuller, and others. In literature, we explored themes of justice, the Trilogy in the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Melville’s Billy Budd, Kafka’s The Trial and The Penal Colony, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Herb set us on our course. Thereafter for many years appellate specialist and Professor Robert Gerstein (Ret.) and I taught a course at the judicial college based on the foundation Herb established. I have lost count on how many times we all saw the play Measure for Measure.

When I write or speak about Herb Morris, I use the present tense because his presence is palpable. His influence in many disciplines is pervasive and continues to open avenues for further exploration.

My wife Barbara and I had dinner with Herb a month before he passed away. At 94, Herb’s mind was, as usual, sharp and inquisitive. His lively conversation concerning the publication of his insightful analysis on the French painter Poussin shed light on fresh ways to consider, among other things, religion, free will, and choice. Herb, a down-to-earth, unassuming observer of the human condition, a law professor, a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, who made a difference to anyone who knew him or read his books and essays on philosophy, ethics, and literary criticism.

So, Herb, I will miss our lunches and dinners, but our conversations will continue and so will our special friendship. Your essay on the soul was at first a hard sell for me. But, Herb, I get it. There you are.