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Dworkin, cont. Another memory related to Ronnie Dworkin: One of the classes he taught was a seminar in jurisprudence for third-year students that met in his home -- his home was the Master's quarters in one of the Yale colleges. (Trumbull?) For the class of 67 (or was it 66?), one of the chosen was Si Wasserstrom, younger brother of Richard, a professor of mine at Stanford (and Tuskegee). Si told me that Jonathan Miller, of Beyond-the-Fringe fame (absolutely hilarious) had been staying with the Dworkins and came to one or two sessions and participated vigorously in the discussions. Our year produced no such glories, but an interesting comment is that recently I canvassed Tom Grey, Mike Reiss, and Mark Schantz as to whether they could remember anything that was discussed or said at our weekly meetings there in the Dworkin residence (Russ Carpenter, Bill Iverson, and Dick Markovits also attended). Zip, was the answer.
Here is an obit for Ronnie: Dworkin, though it mixes up some things. One interesting bit though: "His parents, David and Madeline (nee Talamo) separated when he was a baby, and his mother, a promising concert pianist, worked as a music teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, to support Ronald and his brother and sister." Maybe this had something to do with the fact that after Betsy* died of cancer in 2000, he later married Irene Brendel who had been married to the famous pianist, Alfred Brendel.
* Betsy's maiden name, incidentally, was Ross.

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Sparer cont. "Ed liked Yale but to the disappointment of many of us he did not get tenure. I thought at the time that he was denied tenure, not because he graduated from Brooklyn Law School, but because he looked and talked like he graduated from Brooklyn Law School. In retrospect, I think the denial was because he didn’t fit in where the law school saw itself going. We used to say that the faculty was made up of old Turks and young fogies. Thomas Emerson who was an advisor to FDR and helped draft the national Labor Relation Act was still an active faculty member. But the younger members were more high powered academics engaged in a search for truth whereas Ed saw the law as a mission. The high powered academics were in favor and Ed didn’t fit in.
Also, looking back, I think we were the tail end of the “silent generation.” It was the height of the anti-war protests, and I was very active in them, but it never occurred to me to protest the denial of Ed’s tenure or even to send a polite note expressing my dismay.
I wish I remembered more but . . . I hope [we] will be able to preserve a little of why Ed Sparer's time at Yale was a short but important part of its history."
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Guido, cont. This 2014 article Some Thoughts on Yale and Guido" by Laura Kalman, history prof at UC Santa Barbara, is wonderfully full of information about Guido's background, including this that he blurted out on one occasion when asked what was most important in his legal education: "“I am a refugee!” And of course, how can I not have been influenced by the fact that we were antifascists and that we left Italy because my father had been jailed and beaten in 1923 and he was a democrat with a small “d”; that we were very, very rich there and came here with nothing because it was against the law [to take money out of Italy] under penalty of death?" We also learn he "arrived in Manhattan on September 16, 1939 at the age of six, knowing but three English words—“yes,” “no,” and “briefcase”!—who was bullied by his New York classmates, and who became an outsider in old New Haven by virtue of his Jewish ancestry, identification with Catholics, and the vowel at the end of his first and last name." And: "One semester after Guido crossed the ocean between Milan and Manhattan, New Haven and Yale claimed him. His mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi, earned a Ph.D. in French at Yale.4 She became a professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College, then professor and chair of the Italian Department at Albertus Magnus College.5 Guido’s father, Massimo, who had helped publish and distribute the newspaper of the resistance movement, Non Mollare,6 had been an associate professor at the University of Milan and had been denied a promised promotion to full professor when the Fascists blocked it. Yale awarded him a research fellowship in internal medicine in 1940, and he broadcast the message that many Italians opposed fascism.8 Massimo Calabresi became chief cardiologist at West Haven V.A. Hospital and a member of the Yale Medical School faculty. Like his wife, he received a doctorate from Yale. His was in public health." And: "Young Guido had contact with the law school as well. He first spoke English outside his home with the daughter of Yale law professor James William Moore. He attended day camp with his future Yale Law Journal editor-in-chief, Stephen Shulman, whose father, a professor at Yale Law School, would later become its first Jewish dean" And there's much, much more. The article is extraordinary.

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