Look Closer

“I appreciate that. And I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Dennis. I really do.”

“It’s been my pleasure. So, should we go over the allocations one more time?”

“Please.”

“Okay,” he says. “Five million to the American Stroke Association.”

“Right.”

“Five million to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.”

“Yes.”

“Five million to the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health.”

“Correct.”

“Five million to the National Runaway Safeline.”

“Yes.”

“Oh-kay,” he says. “And you took out that million a few months ago.”

Right. That’s for something else.

“So,” he continues, “that leaves only a couple hundred thousand left over. You could leave it with us, or I could transfer it to a money market.”

“Divide it up equally and add it to the five million we’re giving each of those groups,” I say.

“You don’t want to keep even a little for yourself, Simon?”

No. I don’t want one penny of that money.

104 Simon

“Thank you, Professor Southern. Professor Dobias, we’ll hear from you now.”

The law school faculty, nearly a hundred professors, sit in comfortable leather chairs in a roughly semicircular pattern in one of the many glorious spaces at our school, a room like most others bearing the name of a magnanimous benefactor.

I stand at the front of the room, my one opportunity to make my pitch orally. Yes, I’m wearing a suit and tie.

“I’ll be brief,” I say. “I want to talk about why I’m here. Not here, applying to be a full professor, but here, period. I initially thought I’d become a lawyer because my parents were lawyers. My mother, in particular, who some of you remember, inspired a love of the law. Its goals, its ideality, but its flaws and frailties as well. But the truth is, I was just a kid, a college kid who was taking the next step without being sure it was what I wanted.

“As many of you know, my mother died when I was starting college. I took a couple years off and struggled with her suicide. I was even institutionalized for a while. I blamed myself for her death. I blamed my father. I blamed a lot of people and things. I had a good therapist who taught me to look at things differently. I got better and started up college again.

“When I was finishing college, literally taking my last final exams up here at the U of C, my father was murdered in St. Louis, where he then lived. And as crazy as it seemed to me, the police suspected me in his murder. We were estranged. We didn’t speak. Our relationship had ended badly after my mother’s suicide. All of that was true. But as I explained to them, that was all in the past, six years in the past. And as I also explained to them, it would have been impossible for me to have committed the crime while I was in Chicago during finals week.”

(Well, almost impossible.)

“But that didn’t stop the police from pursuing me. They searched my home in Chicago, my family’s house. They tore it apart, frankly, left it in shambles. They tried to discover my communications with my therapist as well. They questioned my friends and my classmates. They invaded every aspect of my life. They turned my life upside down, inside out.

“I knew I was innocent, of course. But on just the tiniest of suspicions, the government was able to destroy my life. And when they realized that they had no case against me? When they realized I couldn’t have done it—did they say so publicly? No. They didn’t give out a clean bill of health. They just dropped a bomb on my life and left me to pick up the pieces.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. When I realized, from experience, the importance of our constitutional protections. We read about them in books, debate them in classrooms, but I saw up close and personal their importance. I’ve devoted myself to that scholarship ever since. I’ve watched as our Fourth Amendment doctrines have become eroded, in my opinion, by the courts. I’ve argued for changes, wholesale changes in how we understand the privacy rights of our citizens. And I will never stop trying. I will never stop challenging and pushing and prodding. I’ll never stop writing about it. I will never stop teaching it. It’s all I’ll ever want to do.”

I didn’t rehearse this speech. I didn’t need to. This is what I think, what I feel. I didn’t, couldn’t tell them the truth about what I did in St. Louis. That’s the only part that bothers me. A lie sprinkled into an otherwise heartfelt statement.