Ronald Sullivan is a law professor at Harvard and previously a lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron Hernandez. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Ronald's Twitter: https://twitter.com/profronsullivan
Ronald's Website: https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10870/Sullivan
Ronald's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_S._Sullivan_Jr.
Ronald's NY Times Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/harvard-ronald-sullivan.html

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:13 - Harvey Weinstein
8:18 - Harvard succumbs to pressure
19:33 - Safe spaces
25:51 - Cancel culture
28:48 - Evil
32:58 - Hitler
37:34 - Criminal justice system
41:35 - Innocence
44:04 - Racism in the judicial system
56:06 - George Floyd
58:31 - The trial of Derek Chauvin
1:12:20 - O. J. Simpson
1:16:54 - Aaron Hernandez
1:28:35 - Book recommendations
1:36:10 - Advice for young people
1:38:18 - Death
1:40:24 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School known for taking on difficult and controversial cases.

He was on the head legal defense team for the Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez in his double murder case.

He represented 1 of the Gina 6 defendants and never lost the case during his years in Washington DC's Public Defender Services Office.

In 2019, Ronald joined the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein, a film producer facing multiple charges of rape and other sexual assault.

This decision med with criticism from Harvard University students, including an online petition by students seeking his removal as faculty dean of Winthrop House.

Then a letter supporting him, signed by 52 Harvard Law School professors, appeared in the Boston Globe on March 8, 2019.

Following this, the Harvard administration succumbed to the pressure of a few Harvard students and announced that they will not be renewing Ronald Sullivan's dean position.

This created a major backlash in the public discourse over the necessary role of universities in upholding the principles of law and freedom at the very foundation of the United States.

This conversation is brought to you by Brooklyn and Sheets, Wine Access Online Wine Store, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, and Blinkist app that summarizes books.

Click their links to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that the free exchange of difficult ideas is the only mechanism through which we can make progress.

Truth is humbling, and being humbled can hurt.

But this is the role of education, not just in the university, but in business and in life.

Freedom and compassion can coexist, but it requires work and patience.

It requires listening to the voices and to the experiences unlike our own.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Ronald Sullivan.

You were 1 of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in advance of a sexual assault trial.

For this, Harvard forced you to step down as faculty deans, you and your wife, of Winthrop House.

Can you tell the story of this saga from first deciding to represent Harvey Weinstein to the interesting, complicated events that followed?

So I got a call 1 morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who asked if I would consent to taking a call from Harvey.

He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him.

I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors, and then a day or 2 later, I decided to take the case.

This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe.

So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice, most of my time is teaching and writing, but I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible.

I take the challenging sorts of cases and this was, fit the bill, it was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had pre-judged the case.

When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment in the public had the case pre-judged, even though the specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker.

That's the New Yorker article that sort of exposed everything that was going on allegedly with Harvey.

Is there a philosophy behind you taking on these very difficult cases?

Is it just your love of the law or is it of is there like set of principles why you take on the cases?

I take on I'd like to take on hard cases and I like to take on the cases that are with unpopular defendants, unpopular clients.

And with respect to the latter, that's where Harvey Weinstein fell.

It's because we need lawyers and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases because those sorts of cases determine what sort of criminal justice system we have.

If we don't protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the least and the last, the unpopular client, then that's the camel's nose under the tent.

If we let the camel's nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse.

That is to say, if we short-circuit the rights of a client like Harvey Weinstein, then the next thing you know, someone will be at your door knocking it down and violating your rights.

There's a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect the civil rights and civil liberties of people.

And these are the sorts of cases that tested.

So, You know, for example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda.

By all accounts, he was not a likable guy.

He was a three-time knife thief and not a likable guy.

But lawyers stepped up and took his case, And because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent, those warnings that officers are forced to give to people.

So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the best values in our criminal justice system so I Proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual rights of the person whom I'm representing but the rights of citizens writ large, most of whom do not experience the criminal justice system.

And it's partly because of lawyers who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules that protect us, average, everyday, ordinary, concrete citizens.

From a psychological perspective, just you as a human, is there fear?

Because if you're facing, I mean the whole point, a difficult case, especially in the latter that you mentioned of the going against popular opinion, you have the eyes of millions potentially looking at you with anger as you try to defend, you know, this the set of laws that this country is built on?

No, it doesn't stress me out particularly.

I try not to get too excited in either direction.

So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions.

And I've gotten over 6,000 people out of prison who've been wrongfully incarcerated and a subset of those people have been convicted.

And, you know, there's people who've been in jail 20, 30 years who have gotten out.

And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you and that sort of thing.

And in that sense, I'm sort of a part-time Taoist.

The expression reversal was the movement of the Tao.

So I don't get too high, I don't get too low.

I just try to do my work and represent people to the best of my ability.

So 1 of the hardest cases of recent history would be the Harvey Weinstein in terms of popular opinion or unpopular opinion.

So if you continue on that line, where does that story take you, of taking on this case?

Yeah, so I took on the case, and then there was a few students at the college.

I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate entity from the Harvard Law School.

Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard University and the law school is obviously the law school.

And I initially was appointed as master of 1 of the houses.

We did a name change 5 or 6 years into it and were called faculty deans.

But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge.

So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they're assigned to a particular house or college, and that's where they live and eat and so forth.

So I was responsible for 1 of the houses as its faculty dean.

So it's an administrative appointment at the college.

And some students who clearly didn't like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation.

And from there, it just mushroomed into 1 of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university in modern history.

It's just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom.

And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret.

We expect students to do what students do.

And I encourage students to have their voices heard and to protest.

The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay, absolutely craven and cowardly.

The dean of the college, same thing, Rakesh Khurana, craven and cowardly.

They capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19-year-olds.

And it appeared to me that they so, so desired the approval of students that they were afraid to make the tough decision and the right decision.

It really could have been an important teaching moment at Harvard.

So they forced you to step down from that faculty dean position at the house.

I would push back on the description a little bit.

So I don't write the, you know, the references to the op-ed I did in New York time, Harvard made a mistake by making me step down or something like that.

I did not step down and refuse to step down, Harvard declined to renew my contract.

And I made it clear that I was not going to resign as a matter of principle and force them to do the cowardly act that they in fact did.

And you know, the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Karana, commissioned this survey.

They've never done this before, survey from the students, you know, how do you feel at Winthrop House?

And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results.

They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came back positive for me.

And it didn't fit their narrative because most of the students were fine.

And I challenged them to this day, release it, release it.

But no, but you know, they wanted to create this narrative and when the data didn't support the narrative, then they just got silent.

The students demanded it, I demanded it, and they wouldn't release it because I am, I just know in my heart of hearts that it was, it came back in my favor that most students at Winthrop House said they were fine.

There was a group of students that weaponized a term, unsafe.

They said, we felt unsafe, and they bantied this term about—but I'm—again, I'm confident that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt completely fine and felt safe and so forth.

And the super majority, I am confident, either said, I feel great at Winthrop or, you know, I don't care 1 way or the other.

And then there was some minority who had a different view.

But you know, lessons learned, it was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop.

I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean.

And I'm still in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school.

So in the end, I thought it was, it ended up being a great experience.

The national media was just wonderful in this, just wonderful.

People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard.

Compared me to John Adams, which I don't think is an apt comparison, but it's always great to read something like that.

But at any rate, that was the Harvard versus Harvey situation.

So that seems like a seminal mistake by Harvard and Harvard is 1 of the great universities in the world.

And so sort of its successes and its mistakes are really important for the world as a beacon of how we make progress.

So what lessons for the bigger academia that's under fire a lot these days, what bigger lessons do you take away?

How do we make other universities, Yale, MIT great in the face of such mistakes?

Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education.

That is to say we have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students say.

Now, this comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance, but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason.

They are among the greatest minds on the planet earth in their particular fields at schools like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the greatest minds on earth.

Things like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty.

And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately the grownups in the room have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a student's education.

And my situation is 1 example where it really could have been an excellent teaching moment about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat, what it means to treat people who are in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.

But rather than having that conversation, it's just this consumerization model.

Well, there's a lot of noise out here, so we're going to react in this sort of way.

Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools' commitment to free and robust and open dialogue.

So to the degree that academic freedom doesn't sit squarely at the center of the academic mission, any school is gonna be in trouble.

And I really hope that we weather this current political moment where 19-year-olds without degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make decisions in the best interests of the university, in the best interest of the student, even to the degree though some of those decisions may be unpopular.

And that is going to require a certain courage.

And hopefully, in time, and I'm confident that in time, administrators are going to begin to push back on these current trends.

It's been around for a long time for a reason, and 1 of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static.

So I have every view that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and be around another 400 years.

So, I mean, what this kind of boils down to is just having difficult conversation, difficult debates.

When you mentioned sort of 19 year olds, and it's funny, I've seen this even at MIT, it's not that they shouldn't have a voice.

They do seem to, I guess you have to experience it and just observe it, they have a strangely disproportionate power.

It's very interesting to basically, I mean you say yes, there's great faculty and so on, but it's not even just that the faculty is smart or wise or whatever, it's that they're just silenced.

So the terminology that you mentioned is weaponized as sort of safe spaces or that certain conversations make people feel unsafe.

What do you think about this kind of idea?

You know, is there some things that are unsafe to talk about in the university setting?

And just Like you said on the flip side with a slippery slope, is it too easy for the lines to be drawn everywhere?

So this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic research about feeling psychologically unsafe.

And so the notion here is that there is, there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible.

I am assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet.

At elite universities like MIT and like Harvard, that's probably the safest space people are going to be in for their lives, because when they get out into the quote unquote real world, they won't have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide.

So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling.

I think that the duty of the universities are to challenge people.

It seems to me that it's a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale, any of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went in.

That seems to be a horrible waste of 4 years and money and resources.

Rather, we ought to challenge students, let them grow, challenge some of their most deeply held assumptions.

They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far, and to do it fairly and civilly.

So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there's a long tradition in the university of civil discourse.

So you should draw lines somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse.

The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly and frankly, but do it civilly.

And, you know, so to, you know, yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, you know, do that on your own space, but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university.

So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate to talk about at a university.

Now, should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing the flat Earth theory, the Earth is flat, right?

So if certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment, Yeah, there's space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we're not gonna give you this platform to tell our students that the earth is flat.

But, you know, a topic that's controversial, but contestatory, that's what universities are for.

If you don't like the idea, present better ideas and articulate them.

And I think there needs to be a mechanism outside of the space of ideas of humbling.

Like I've done martial arts for a long time.

I mean, in the space of ideas, I mean, even just in engineering, just all the math classes.

My memories of math, which I love, is kind of pain.

It's basically coming face to face with the idea that I'm not special, that I am much dumber than I thought I was, and that accomplishing anything in this world requires really hard work.

That puts you, because I remember when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I was gonna be the smartest, the best fighter, the Nobel Prize winning, you know, all those kinds of things, and then you come face to face with reality and it hurts.

And it feels like there needs to be efficient mechanisms from the best universities in the world to, without abusing you, it's a very difficult line to walk, without mentally or physically abusing you, be able to humble you.

And that's what I felt was missing in these very difficult, very important conversations is the 19 year olds, when they spoke up, the mechanism for humbling them with ideas was missing.

It kind of got broken down because, as you say, there does, like, I sensed fear.

And fear is paralyzing, fear is destructive, especially in a place that's supposed to be all about freedom of ideas.

And I mean, I don't know if you have anything, any thoughts to say on this whole idea of cancel culture where people, a lot of people use it as become political, so stay maybe outside of the world to politics.

Does it bother you that people are sort of put in this bin and labeled as something and then thereby you can ignore everything they say.

I mean, Steven Pinker, there's a lot of Harvard folks that are fighting against these set of ideas.

I think that we as a culture are way, way, way too quick to cancel people.

You know, someone says something or makes an offhand comment, even a mistake, There's a move to simply cancel folks.

So I think that this quote unquote cancel culture has really gotten out of control at this point.

It's forcing people to be robotic in many ways.

I was gonna say, now I know I'm venturing into your intellectual domain.

For future robots watching this, no offense.

And there are minutes discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life in any sort of way because who needs the stress

Well, in some sense, you're an inspiration that you're able to withstand the pressure, the pressure of the masses.

But it is, it's a sad, it's a sad aspect of human nature that we kind of get into these crowds and we start chanting and it's fun for some reason and then you forget yourself and then you sort of wake up the next day not having anticipated the consequences of all the chanting.

I mean, there's some responsibility on social networks and the mechanisms by which they make it more frictionless to do the chanting, to do the canceling, to do the outrage and all that kind of stuff.

So I actually on the technology side have a hope that that's fixable.

But yeah, It does seem to be, you know, almost like the internet showed to us that we have a lot of broken ways about which we communicate with each other and we're trying to figure that out.

This mistake by Harvard showed that we need to reinvent what the university is.

I mean, all of this is, it's almost like we're finding our baby deer legs and trying to strengthen the institutions that have been very successful for a long time.

You know, the really interesting thing about Harvey Weinstein and you choosing these exceptionally difficult cases is also thinking about what it means to defend evil people.

What it means to defend these, we could say unpopular, and you might push back against the word evil, but bad people in society.

First of all, do you think there's such a thing as evil, or do you think all people are good and it's just circumstances that create evil?

And also, is there somebody too evil for the law to defend?

And so that's a—so the first question, that's a deep philosophical question, whether the category of evil does any work for me.

I do think that I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally understood.

So there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn't do any work for me.

But the category evil, in fact, does intellectual work for me, and I understand it as something that exists.

What kind of work does it do for you intellectually?

That is to say that the conditions in which 1 grows up and so forth begins to create this category that we may think of as evil.

Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth are more prevalent in say serial killers So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct.

But I don't have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil.

And, you know, I'm not a determinist thinker in that way.

So you come out the womb evil and you're destined to be that way.

To the extent there may be biological determinants, they still require some nurture as well.

But do you still put a responsibility on the individual?

And so some responsibility on the individual indeed.

We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad choices in front of them.

And that makes me very sad that the people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them.

That the people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them, and that's unfair, and that's on all of us.

Wow, that's so powerful, the constellation of bad choices.

That's such a powerful way to think about sort of equality, which is the set of trajectories before you that you could take if you just rolled the dice.

Life is a kind of optimization problem, sorry to take this into math, over a set of trajectories under imperfect information.

So you're gonna do a lot of stupid shit to put it in technical terms.

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Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #170