Interview with Judge Guido Calabresi
Guido Calabresi is a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School where he served as dean from 1985 to 1994.
“Call Me Guy”
Contents
Max Raskin: For someone who has a lot of different interests and also two very significant careers, how do you split up your day in terms of what you work on?
Guido Calabresi: Everybody has a tendency toward some mental problem – which, if it went further, would cause trouble. Some tend to paranoia, some to manic depression. I tend to be compulsive, no doubt about it. That’s one reason why I'm able to get done so much of what I do. It isn't so much that I organize a day, but it is that when I'm doing something, I do that. I concentrate totally on that and get it done far faster than I myself would expect. Pretty much every week, for instance, there will be a day when I do nothing but see students, and that's what will be that day, and that's what I focus on.
MR: Have there been any characters in your past whose work habits you found interesting? I know you clerked for Justice Black.
GC: Black was fascinating because he had no requirements at all about when you came in or not. You could come in late, you could come in early – he would do the same. On the other hand, he had no qualms and didn’t think it strange to call you up at three o'clock in the morning and say, “You know, Guy, that case we were thinking about…I decided you were all wrong, and here's the way we’re going to do it.”
MR: Wait, he called you Guy?
GC: Yes. He called me Guy because he couldn't pronounce Guido.
Guy is the English for Guido. I used it for a year or two in high school, when I stupidly wanted to conform – it’s the only time I ever did. Some people who still see me from high school will call me that. But I never used it again until I went to work with Black and saw that he was having trouble pronouncing Guido, and so I said, “If you want, you can call me Guy.”
MR: When you write, whether opinions or books, is your first draft on computer or hand?
GC: I do it by hand. I still use those long yellow pads. I'm going to try to do more dictating, because I think as I get older, it gets more difficult, but all my writing – my way of thinking – is still hand and pen. And my handwriting is horrible.
One of my old secretaries, who is now retired, was with me for more than 30 years and said that you have to read me up and down, rather than across. I've never understood what that meant! One of the things my clerks and my current assistant have to figure out is what and how I write.
MR: Shelby Foote tells a funny story about Horace Greeley’s handwriting. Apparently, he had the worst handwriting in the world, and his editors wanted to play a prank, so they dipped a chicken’s feet in ink and had it run up and down the page. They gave it to the one linotype operator who could read Greeley’s handwriting. The man then started typing away and at the very end turned to Greeley and said, “Sir, I think I’ve got it all, but that word right there…is that ‘constitutionality’?”
GC: You come by these things, honestly. My dad had terrible writing and his mother was on him all the time. In the days before xeroxing and things of that sort, he would send off for reprints all over the world. He had little cards with his name on it, but then he'd sign his signature, which would be unintelligible. He sent these off to Japan on one occasion, and there arrived at his hospital a package of reprints with his scrawl magnificently copied in Japanese handwriting. Someone in the mail room there wrote, “Can't read. Must be Dr. Calabresi,” and sent it up to him. So my father had that thing framed, and gave it to his very elderly mother.
MR: What kind of pen do you use?
GC: I use this kind of stupid pen that I throw away and lose all the time.
One View of A Common Law for Tragic Choices
MR: Do you have any compulsions about writing?
GC: The main thing is I have to have enough time. Most of the serious stuff that I've written, I have written up in Maine where we have a fishing camp. I don't fish, but my father-in-law, who was a great fisherman, gave it to me. Not to his son, not to his older daughter, not to my wife, his younger daughter – all of whom used to fish. Because, he said, an academic needs a beautiful place away from things where he can work. There, for instance, I would get up in the morning, knowing that I had enough time, that I knew I was doing nothing else, and then start to work.
MR: For how long usually?
GC: That would depend. I would want to write something like 10-12 pages, and then when I got to that point I'd stop, and then I'd play.
You want to have enough time, but then when you get done, you'll stop. I follow what Hemingway said which was to never leave the pump empty. That is, I never stop at the end of a passage or the end of a chapter – I'll always start the next one. And then, the next day when I write, I read everything. I go back to the beginning. Even in a book that I'm doing, I will re-read before I start to write. I've always been a very, very fast reader, and so I just go over everything and then start to write.
MR: What's your favorite piece of writing that you've done purely in terms of the quality of the writing?
GC: Jeepers, it's so strange because it depends on what I'm thinking of at that time. Right at the moment, a lot of people are very much concerned with Tragic Choices, because so much of what is going on in the pandemic is all dealt with there. Actually, recently the Prime Minister of Italy was explaining to parliament about what Italy had done to deal with the pandemic and said, “All this has been said by Calabresi in Tragic Choices.”
I was able to keep all my discussions and arguments with a wonderful guy, Philip Bobbitt. He is a brilliant, complicated guy and he was my student. There are things there that are me, and there are things there are him, and things that are both for us. And at the moment, that's what I love.
When I'm doing my court work, I’ve got to say that probably what I like most is “A Common Law for the Age of Statutes.”
MR: When you write an article like, “One View of the Cathedral,” do you know when you've put the pen down that you have a hit?
GC: That was one of the funniest things of all because I was visiting at Harvard, and the law review pinged me and asked if I would write an article for them. And so I sat down and wrote that. It's the only thing I've written that almost got rejected.
MR: Really? Why?
GC: When I gave it to them, they didn't understand it. But they had asked me for it, so they were embarrassed, and they said, “Well, maybe we can have it if we really make a lot of changes in it.” And I said I didn’t mind a heavy edit and that they should treat me as they would a student. The only thing was it was the end of the year, and I was going back to New Haven – so I invited the editor-in-chief and the articles editor to stay at my house. It was published, and of all the things I've done, it was the thing that had fewest editorial changes.
You asked me, did I know it was going to be that great a hit? No. I liked it because it made neat some things which I thought people thought were very messy. But I thought it was almost too simple.
MR: Do you write in the morning?
GC: I usually write in the morning.
MR: When do you wake up in the morning?
GC: I'm not an early riser, nor am I like my father and my brother – people who worked at night. I wake up 7:30, eight o'clock. I ride a standing bicycle for about half an hour, and do a couple exercises of that sort, and then have breakfast.
Medaglia d'Oro
MR: What do you have for breakfast?
GC: Always the same thing: Half an orange, an essentially white omelet and a cappuccino.
MR: Do you make the cappuccino yourself?
GC: Yes. We use Medaglia d'Oro coffee. Finding a decent Italian coffee when we first came during the war was a great event, and we've stayed loyal to it ever since. One of my clerks got me a machine, which just frizzes up the milk.
MR: And how do you make the coffee?
GC: In what they call a Vesuviana.
MR: My firm invests in coffee businesses, and we’ve visited a number of espresso machine manufacturers outside of Florence. Some of the pieces are art.
GC: They're magnificent. Those machines are beautiful, but in the end, I like just making it in those machines which you can now find pretty much all over.
MR: So you don’t grind the beans yourself?
GC: No, no.
MR: Oh, interesting.
GC: I'm easy on food. I like good food, but I don't get crazy.
MR: Where's your favorite restaurant in New Haven?
GC: The Union League.
MR: And what's your favorite thing to get there?
GC: I think their fish is especially good. We like it because they make food in ways that my wife and I can't make at home. And they're very, very good. Their haddock is amazing, their salmon is wonderful.
MR: Do you enjoy pizza?
GC: Yes. I love pizza. I'm not allowed to have as much now as I used to.
MR: Where's your favorite pizza?
GC: It used to be The Spot. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but many years ago some students at Yale Law School wrote a book called The Best, which described what was supposed to be the best of everything – the best college in England, the best this and that – and of course, the Yale Law School. And they described as the best pizza, The Spot, which was a little tiny place right next to Pepe’s. It was separate from it, and run by an old, old man who was toothless, whose name Boccamaiello…the name doesn't exist – it either had to be Boccadimiele, honey mouth, or Boccamaiale, pig's mouth. Whatever it was, he made the best, best pizza. When he died, Pepe’s took it over. Now Sally's is our favorite.
Country Mice and City Rats
MR: What about New York City? Were you ever tempted to live permanently in New York City?
GC: We have an apartment in New York, and when I go down for sittings we stay there. Every time we're there for a week it's really nice to go from being country mice to being city rats. But I don't know…I grew up in New Haven, and I like this place, which is odd because I'm also totally Italian, and New York is one of the few places that is a real city in an Italian sense. Most other places that call themselves cities in America are really New Haven grown large. That's what I think of Boston. I don't think of Boston as a city.
MR: What do you like about New Haven?
GC: I like the fact that it is small enough – it has all the problems of American cities – every one of them. But it also has a degree of art, of music, of museums, of things that you can do which are on a level of a really great, great city.
I'm going back some years, but you could go and hear Ralph Kirkpatrick play the harpsichord, and just get tickets at the last minute. If you were doing that in New York, you would've paid ten times as much, and it would've been months ahead of time to get them. But beside that, it's small enough so if there are problems here you want to do something about, you can do something.
MR: You were a selectman, right?
GC: I was a selectman of Woodbridge, yes. I don't know if you know the origin of the word “selectman.” It was from early New England. The selectmen were the people whom strangers were put to live with, so that the selectmen could make sure that they didn't cause trouble.
It’s one of the things that both my wife and I think about when we compare living here with Europe and Italy, in particular – how there, the stranger might be Elijah, might be Apollo, might be Christ, and should be welcomed in. But the old New England tradition was “strangers are dangers.” I’m totally Italian in that, and my wife, who is as New England as one could possibly be, has become that completely.
MR: Just getting back to the music – will you listen to music when you write?
GC: No. Again, it's that obsessiveness. I'm not quite as bad as my grandmother used to be – when she listened to music, no one could say anything because you had to just focus. I'm not that bad, but when I'm writing, I don't do anything else.
MR: Do you listen to music though?
GC: Yes, and it's classical music. I love opera, and I love Mozart…everything by Mozart. I love Bach. There are things that people enjoy like Bruckner that I don't much like.
Beethoven, I love, but it has to be done very well. And I often find it a little depressing. You have a feeling that he's hyper, that he may be angry, or may be happy, and a bit too much. And I love it, but you have to have a kind of energy with it. I find Mozart is so much more relaxing.
MR: What symphony or concerto do you keep going back to?
GC: Oh my goodness. What to say? Well, let's just say take an opera – Don Giovanni.
MR: Really?
GC: I've seen that a thousand, thousand times. La Traviata comes maybe a fairly close second, but Don Giovanni is the one that I've seen most, and I’ve seen it all over.
MR: Someone who has never been to Italy – where would you tell them to go?
GC: Well, I think Florence, which is where we have an apartment. I have a particular affection for Florence. I'm not Florentine – I was born in Milan because my father was teaching there. And in many ways, I think Milan is still one of the greatest cities anywhere, because it's totally Italian. People don't realize how Italian it is, but it is also a cosmopolitan world city.
My family's from Bologna and Ferrara, and we are in many ways Emilian. People say, “How do you tell when you go from Emilia to Romagna? In Emilia, when you stop at a farmhouse, they'll give you water. In Romagna, they'll give you wine.”
The university context of Bologna and the grand city of Ferrara – with a grand family that was open to everyone, especially Jews – are two things that are very much a part of me. But they're difficult places to understand as quickly as you can understand the beauty of Florence. And so I would tell somebody to go to Florence.
Pizza Bagels
MR: I read something you said about your mom – that as she got older, she felt both more Catholic and more Jewish?
GC: My mother, yes.
MR: As you get older, what does your religion look like?
GC: I think very much like my mother. I'm a practicing Catholic. I'm involved in the Catholic Chapel at Yale, which is amazingly liberal, and quite wonderful. That's the kind of Catholic I am, and my mother was too. On the other hand, my Jewish heritage is something that I care about enormously. And it's a little bit of a snobbery, I must say.
MR: What do you mean by that?
GC: Well, we go back to Roman times, and the story is that my mother's family was brought by Titus in his triumph. When the Romans conquered a place, they would bring back princes or kings. But when they conquered Palestine, they brought back judges, priests, and elders.
We were the elders. And in Hebrew, they called themselves zekenim. Over the years, in Italian it became Del Vecchio. They came as slaves – they became tutors to the emperors, followed them to Ravenna, and in 500 set-up shop in the little town of Lugo, near Ravenna as bankers, money lenders, and as rabbis of the Italian rite, which is different from the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic.
We continued doing that with many ups and downs. The first time we went nearly broke was when the English kings reneged on their debts to the Florentine bankers, who reneged on their debts to the Jewish bankers – that is, to us. The family tradition is that we did something quite improper – we used our wives’ dowries to pay off our debts so that we would not go bankrupt, and stay in business, and we stayed in business. And finally in the 18th century, we'd lent the popes enough money so that a very liberal pope from Bologna issued a “condotta” that gave us the right to practice our trade in Bologna, which at the time was closed to Jews. I'm sure that he meant banking, money lending, but the family tradition, I don't know if it's true, is that our answer was, “Yes, but we're also teachers of law,” because we were rabbis, and that's how we got into the law business as well.
MR: If someone wanted to read about this history, what would you recommend?
GC: I would urge you to read my oral history which comes out this summer.
Obviously most of it is about my teaching and scholarship, but there are a couple of chapters that talk a bit about my family's history. It's interesting because my mother's family has this great, great name and tradition, and so on, but my father's family was there first. The tradition in my father's family is that they were Jewish traders in Rome at the time of the Republic.
MR: Both of your parents were Jewish?
GC: Yes – not practicing. Nobody has been practicing in my family for about 150 years. There was one great-grandfather who was, but probably in rebellion to his father, my great-great-grandfather who was fiercely anticlerical. But all very proud of the tradition.
MR: Do you have any Jewish practices remaining?
GC: No, we never did. On the other hand, my father who would not set foot in a synagogue, because he was anticlerical, and non-religious in every way, wanted to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara. He also wanted to be buried next to his wife in the Grove Street Cemetery here. And he couldn't make up his mind, so when he died, we did something which I'm sure was improper. He wanted to be cremated, and so he was cremated, and half his ashes are in the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara, where they allow cremation – I don't know how or why, but they do. And half his ashes are in the Grove Street Cemetery.
MR: Do you believe in God?
GC: Yes.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
GC: I hope so.
MR: Is it something you think about at all?
GC: All the time.
MR: Really?
GC: Yeah. When you're nearly 90, you have to worry about these things. My mother was religious, my father was not, and as I was growing up, I thought about these things a lot. And when I would lean one way or the other, each of them – magnificent people – would say, “That's fine, but don't stop thinking about it.”
MR: Do you pray?
GC: Yes.
MR: Is it ritualized? What does your prayer look like?
GC: It is ritualized. When I bicycle, I pray. I pray for forgiveness. I pray that I may be able to do things for people. I pray for all the people who I know who have needs and trouble, and for all the horrors of this world. I pray for the end of capital punishment.
MR: Do you pray a liturgy, or do you just speak to God directly, one-on-one?
GC: I pray directly. I also pray The Lord's Prayer and a prayer of St. Francis.
Of Doctors and Donuts
MR: Are there any Renaissance paintings you love?
GC: Well, in a funny way, yes, there is…but it’s odd. In terms of art, so much of Michelangelo is so incredibly powerful – the Slaves together with David in the Accademia are the most amazing things, because they're pulling themselves out of the stone.
But a religious painting that I love is in a town near Vinci in Tuscany – it is of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. What is strange is that behind Elizabeth, whom she's visiting, are two women, one old and one young. And it's not clear what they're doing there, but the older one looks so much like my mother. And why and how that could be, one doesn't know…
MR: Did you ever do psychoanalysis?
GC: No.
My daughter is a psychiatrist, and my mother's father studied with Charcot, the person who taught Freud, and was an early neurologist. My grandfather practiced for a few years in Milan, around 1900 to 1905 or 1906. He decided that it was all bunk, and when his father died, he inherited substantial things, so he moved back to Bologna to look after his affairs, and never practiced again. But he always said, “Someday this will be something serious – someday this will be a real field.”
I think he would've been very happy that his great-granddaughter, my daughter, is a psychiatrist, and my nephew, my brother's son, is a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins. The two sides of what it was – neurology and psychiatry, which he thought was pretty bunk at that time – have come to be very serious fields.
My children all care and they're very much into psychiatric things and so on. But I was brought up thinking that this was still not there.
MR: What’s your view of health – you have a lot of doctors in your orbit. How do you stay healthy?
GC: I try to eat well.
MR: What does that mean?
GC: That means not eating too much meat. I think I should be a vegetarian, I'm not. I think that in a hundred years, people will wonder why sensitive people like me could do something like eat animals. And I worry about that, but I'm not a vegetarian. On the other hand, I don't eat fats. Lots of vegetables.
MR: Is there any junk food you like?
GC: I don't eat them, but I love donuts.
MR: What’s your favorite donuts?
GC: Glazed.
MR: From where?
GC: Just any donut shop. There's a very fancy one downtown, but any old place.
MR: What is your view of doctors? Are you skeptical?
GC: No, I believe in doctors. I grew up with them. My grandfather was a doctor, my father was a doctor, my brother was a doctor…
MR: Even your doctor was a doctor!
GC: That's right. Like them, I think that most doctors don't know what they're doing, because most people in most fields don't know what they're doing. But if you find a good one, it’s helpful, and I do what he says.
My internist is a young, quite wonderful guy, originally from Hong Kong. Good enough so that two years ago in March when we were about to go to Italy – we make oil in October and see friends in March – and he said that he had just come back from Hong Kong to see his parents and there was something happening in China, and he said, “Don’t travel.” He had seen the coming of COVID, and had we gone to Italy, we would have arrived just when it hit there, and I wouldn't have survived.
Olive Oil
MR: Did you say you make oil?
GC: Yes, we have an olive grove at the border of Florence and the next town, with the most beautiful view of the world. And we go every fall and make olive oil.
MR: Do you pick them?
GC: We pick the olives with some farmers. This is all due to my wife's work. That's a good story about how she, who studied history of art at Radcliffe, became essentially an anthropologist, writing about Tuscan farmers.
The ones she was writing about no longer had land to work, and while Italy has wonderful safety nets and they were all living in quite nice apartments and things, they were climbing the walls because they couldn't work.
So she said, “Find us a handkerchief of land zoned for farming, and maybe we can buy it.” And this old farmer found us this fantastic hilltop – which is over the Certosa, and looks at all of Florence and the Duomo in the distance on one side, and perfect Tuscan countryside on the other – with 300 olive trees. We bought it and the whole family continues to use it as a gathering place – we always go and have picnics there. But in the fall, we make oil, and then we bring it to an old-fashioned mill, which does things the way it used to be done. It is still cold pressed.
MR: Do you have any in your house right now?
GC: Yes, sure. We leave almost all of it with the farmers, but we ship back enough for ourselves, for our family and friends. And every year at the December court meeting, I bring a little bottle for each of my colleagues.
MR: Do you cook?
GC: Yes…well, the answer is not really now. I used to cook, but my wife prefers cooking and loves it. And so practically I don't.
MR: If you wanted to impress your wife, or you wanted to impress someone, what's the best thing you would cook?
GC: I would cook either veal scallopini with mushrooms in olive oil, or a completely different thing – kind of an omelet of zucchini and eggs with lots of oil, and made just in a way that makes it very different from what anybody else would.
MR: Olive oil or butter?
GC: Olive oil, olive oil.
MR: That's an easy one?
GC: Strangely, because in Milan, one used butter.
MR: That’s why I'm a little surprised.
GC: Julius Caesar supposedly said when he came to Mediolanum, “These strange people use a grease from cows’ udders, instead of pure oil.” And Bologna uses a lot of lard…pig things. But I fell in love with oil.
MR: What's your favorite kind of pasta?
GC: You name it. That's my problem. I will have any pasta. Really, really good tagliatelle…
MR: And then what kind of sauce?
GC: I like sometimes just a plain tomato and oil sauce. There's nothing better than a truly good Bolognese meat sauce. And I often like things with mushrooms.
MR: What do you think is the key to a successful marriage?
GC: Gentleness, and the fact that you've married somebody who you not only love, but you admire and respect. My wife is an amazing person, just an amazing person of incredible talent, incredible goodness, and just amazing. And I admire and I respect her, and the fact that she admires and respects me is such a turn-on.
MR: Do you get her flowers?
GC: Well, any number of little things. For instance, at lunch, now that we're home because of COVID, I always bring her coffee. That's one thing, and then in the evening I always get her a glass of wine, even if I don't drink.
MR: Do you wear cologne?
GC: No.
MR: Do you floss?
GC: Yes.
MR: Every day?
GC: Every day I floss, and I also use one of those silly things you poke into your teeth.
MR: Do you use an electric or a manual toothbrush?
GC: Manual.
Inter, Inter, Inter
MR: What about sports?
GC: I’ll tell you one other thing which is very much a part of me and the history. I'm a Yankee fan. Now this, people say is strange. Here is somebody who tends to be for the little guy – how could he be a Yankee fan? And this says something about me and my brother whom I adored, and coming to America.
Summer of 1941 – we arrived in the end of ’39, so we've been here a while. My brother says, “If we're going to stay in this country, we have to make our peace with it.” And I say something like, “Yes, brother dear.” He's 11, I’m 8. I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "We have to have a baseball team." And I said, "That makes sense," because everybody seemed to have a baseball team. And he said, "We shouldn't have the same one."
Although he was heading towards medicine, he already understood the advantages of portfolio diversification. At that time, summer of '41, everybody in New Haven was rooting either for the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Yankees. They were heading towards the World Series, and New York was near enough. My brother, being the older one, and the Dodgers being the jazzier team – Leo Durocher…
MR: Leo the Lip!
GC: So my brother said, "I'll take the Dodgers. You'll take the Yankees." And I'm loyal. Somebody sticks a pin on me which says bananas, I'm loyal to bananas. So I became a Yankee fan. And of course, that fall in the World Series, Mickey Owen dropped his celebrated third strike, and the Yankees won the World Series, and I've been a loyal Yankee fan ever since.
MR: Do you listen to games on the radio, or do you watch them?
GC: I watch them on television. That's the only thing I watch on television. I don't watch television.
I sometimes watch soccer games. I don't watch anything else, but I do watch Yankee games on television.
MR: What's your soccer team?
GC: My favorite team is still Inter in Milan. The fascists changed its name to Ambrosiana because Inter sounded foreign, communist, but we always called it Inter. Inter, Inter, Inter, and I've remained loyal.