“I put my hand up on the lever, said let it rock and let it roll"

In a nutshell:

Chappaqua, New York

Hackley School

Middlebury College
A.L.B., History & Classics

Quinnipiac University School of Law
J.D. magna cum laude

Admitted to practice law: Connecticut; D.Conn.; 2d Cir.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

My interests include English literature, Classical literature and philosophy, the Anglo-American common law, the continuing relevance of liberal arts education, trap and skeet shooting, fencing (foil), sailboats, the Yes album “90125," Errol Morris documentaries, and getting into arguments with people who think that Ayn Rand was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

I am a liberal, in the old-fashioned,mid-20th-century sense of the word. The fixed stars of my ideological constellation are Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bobby Kennedy, Tip O’ Neill, Justices Brandeis and Douglas, Learned Hand, and their intellectual antecedents: Mill, Locke, Lord Coke, and Aristotle. I usually vote Democratic, but that party has recently ingested dangerous amounts of the morally psychotropic doctrines of critical race theory, and I presently identify as politically homeless.  I believe in individual liberty, civil and human right, the rule of law, market capitalism generally and Keynesian macroeconomics specifically, and a modest foreign policy.  I am a skeptic of America’s forever wars, the virtues of actual—not rhetorical—socialism, the principle that free markets necessarily produce free people, and almost any policy when framed in the language of revolution and/or emotionally-inflected populism. I appreciate conservatism, in the Burkean sense, insofar as conservatism is properly understood as a type of liberalism, but unfortunately no American political party presently practices this form of conservatism.

My favourite book is Moby-Dick, and I would have rather written that than be a two-term President of the United States or the first man to walk on the moon.