Hi! I’m Larry.
I’ve written about, taught, and practiced constitutional law for many years, having joined the Harvard law faculty in the fall of 1968, just before I turned 27. In a future life, I think I might try astronomy or astrophysics, or maybe even pure math, which was my favorite subject in college and grad school. I still love reading about the search for a unified TOE (“theory of everything”), although I can’t really pretend to know a superstring from a supernova. Stuff about black holes interests me, in the end, more than stuff about corporate (or even, at times, constitutional) law. But law too has its deep structures and amazing symmetries, and I find an elegant constitutional argument almost as inspiring as an elegant mathematical proof. I do despair, though, of ever discovering eternal truths in the social sciences, and when I’m in a truth-obsessed mode, I despair of ever finding in the world of law any proposition half as remarkable as, say, the fact that:
e to the i Pi = -1
I love brilliant magenta sunsets, unagi, Martin Amis’ “Time’s Arrow,” the fish tank at MGH, T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” eating, my stairmaster, looking at the ocean, dreaming about impossible things, New Yorker cartoons, the twist in a short story, The Hotel New Hampshire, good (and even not-so-good) movies, re-reading The Great Gatsby and Ethan Fromme, and Monet and Vermeer. I particularly like Bellini’s “St. Francis of Assisi” at the Frick in Manhattan. I love Mozart, Simon & Garfunkel and Joan Baez, who played at the Mount Auburn Club in 1961. I have been having a great time (after much initial hemming and hawing) with my PC and even my Zaurus and would love to see what’s wrought by science and technology over the next couple of centuries.
I’m something of a political news junkie, but I am fairly disillusioned with politics in the 1990s. I am nonetheless anything but apolitical (although my legal views are much less result-oriented and certainly less politically driven than some people seem to suppose). Having said that, I should stress that I despise injustice and human suffering and want to do my part to help overcome both, but, in the end, I think I can do more through seeing connections and deepening people’s understanding than through direct service. That’s why teaching and working on the third edition of my treatise, American Constitutional Law, due out in the year 2000, mean a lot to me.
Nothing means more to me, though, than my kids Mark and Kerry, and my wife Carolyn. I love them all more than life itself. And, as for life, sometimes I love it, and sometimes, frankly, I don’t.
