YouSaid · the spoken record

Ronald Sullivan

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-03-22
most recent: 2021-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sometimes can do psychic injury on one if you get really invested and really sad or happy. It does become emotionally taxing. But the idea of someone sitting in jail for 20 years, completely innocent of a crime, can you imagine sitting there every day for 20 years knowing that you factually didn't not do the thing that you were convicted of by a jury of your peers? It's got to be the most incredible thing in the world. But the people who do it and the people who make it and come out on the other side as productive citizens are folks who say they've come to an inner peace in their own minds and they say these bars aren't going to define me. That my humanity is there and it's immutable and they are not bitter, which is amazing. I would tend to think that I'm not that good of a person.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, emotionally and psychologically it can be taxing. I follow a model of what's called empathic representation, and that is I get to know my clients and their family. I get to know their strivings, their aspirations, their fears, their sorrows. So that certainly...”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12% of the population represent 40% of the drug charges in the country. There's some disequities along race and class and the criminal justice system that we've really have to fix. They've grown to more than bugs in the system and have become features, unfortunately, of our system.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Otherwise, reliable evidence. And this is all because we place a value on liberty. And I think these are good things. And it says a lot about our criminal justice system. Some of the bad features have to do with the way in which this country sees color as a proxy for criminality and treats people of color in radically different ways in the criminal justice system from arrest to charging decisions to sentencing. People of color are disproportionately impacted on all sorts of registers. One example, and it's a popular one, that although there appears to be no distinguishable difference between drug use by whites and blacks in the country, blacks, though...”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That a statement by increased math or not, you know, terribly far from where we're sitting right now has gained traction over all these years. And it's that better 10 guilty go free than one innocent person convicted. That is an expression of the way in which we understand liberty to operate in our collective consciousness. We would rather a bunch of guilty people go free than to impact the liberty interests of any individual person. So that's a guiding principle in our criminal justice system. Liberty. So we set a process that makes it difficult to convict people. We have rules of procedure that are cumbersome and that slow down the process and that exclude”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot broken right now, and I usually focus on that. And it's funny, but it carries a lot of truth to it. And the joke is that in the United States, we have the worst criminal justice system in the world except for every place else. And yes, we certainly have a number of problems and a lot of problems based on race and class and economic station. But we have a process that privileges the liberty. And that's a good feature of the criminal justice system. So here's how it works. The idea of the relationship between the individual and the state is such that in the United States we privilege liberty over and above very many values so much so.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States. But I get the broader point and don't want to bog down in technicalities. I'd likely pass right now as I see it unless it was a case where nobody else would represent him. think that I have some sort of duty and obligation to do it. But yes, everyone absolutely deserves a right to competent counsel.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, whether I would do it if I were a public defender and assigned a case, yes, I started my career as a public defender. I represent anyone who was assigned to me. I think that is our duty. In private practice, I have choices and I likely based on the hypo you gave me and I would tweak it a bit because it would have to be a US.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think everyone'll do the second one first. Everyone has a right to a defense if you're charged criminally in the United States of America. So I know I do not think that there's someone so evil that they do not deserve a defense. Process matters. Process helps us get to results more accurately than we would otherwise. So it is important and it's vitally important and indeed more important for someone deemed to be evil to receive the same quantum of process and the same substance of process that anyone else would. It's vitally important to the health of our criminal justice system for that to happen. So yes, everybody, Hitler included in the United States for a crime that occurred in the United States.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, yeah, we all make choices. And so some responsibility on the individual indeed. We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad choices in front of them. And that makes me very sad. That people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them. And that's unfair. And that's on all of us. But yes, I do think we make choices.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's highly contingent, that is to say, that the conditions in which one grows up and so forth. Begins to create this category that we may think of as evil. Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth are more prevalent in say serial killer. So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct. But I don't have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil and I'm not a determinist thinker in that way. So you come out the womb evil and you're destined to be that way to the extent there may be biological determinants that still require some nurture as well.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first question, that's a deep philosophical question, whether the category of evil does any work for me. It does for me. I do think that I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally understood. So there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn't do any work for me. But the category evil in fact does intellectual work for me. And I understand it as something that exists.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching this, no offense. And there are many, and it's discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life in any sort of way because, you know, who needs the stress of it”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we as a culture are way, way, way too quick to cancel people. And it's become almost reflexive now. Someone says something or makes an offhand comment, even a mistake, there's a move to simply cancel folks. So I think that this quote-unquote cancel culture has really gotten out of control at this point. It's forcing people to be robotic in many ways. No offense.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so to, you know, yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, you know, do that on your own space, but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university. So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate to talk about at a universe. That ought to be the presumption. Now, you know, should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing the flat earth theory, you know, the earth is flat. So if certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment, yeah, there's space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we're not going to. Give you this platform to tell our students that the earth is flat. But, you know, a topic that's controversial but contestatory.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horrible waste of four years and money and resources. Rather, we ought to challenge students that they grow, challenge some of their most deeply held assumptions. They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far. And to do it fairly and civilly. So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there's a long tradition in the University of Civil Discourse. So you should draw a line somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse. The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly and frankly, but do it civilly.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet at elite universities like MIT and Harvard, that's probably the safest space people are going to be in for their lives because when they get out into the quote-unquote real world, they won't have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide. So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling, I think that the duty of the universities are to challenge people. It seems to me that it's a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale, any of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went in. That seems to be a”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. So, this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic research about feeling psychologically unsafe. And so the notion here is that there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible. And that's the argument.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“19 year olds without degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make decisions in the best interests of the university, in the best interests of the student, even to the degree, though some of those decisions may be unpopular. And that is going to require a certain courage and Hopefully in time, and I'm confident that in time administrators are going to begin to push back on these current trends. Harvard's been around for a long time, has been around for a long time for a reason. And one of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static. So I have every View that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and be around another 400 years. At least that's my hope.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could have been an excellent teaching moment about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat people who are in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system. But rather than having that conversation, it's just this consumerization model. Well, there's a lot of noise out here, so we're going to react in this sort of way. Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools' commitments to free and robust and open dialogue. So to the degree that academic freedom doesn't sit squarely at the center of the academic mission, any school is going to be in trouble. And I really hope that. that we weather this current political moment where”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education. That is to say, We have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students say. This comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance, but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason. They are among the greatest minds on the planet Earth in their particular fields at schools like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the greatest minds on Earth. They are there for a reason. Things like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty. And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately the grown-ups in the room have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a student's education. My situation is one example where it really”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the supermajority, I am confident, either said I feel great at Winthrop. Or, you know, I don't care one way or the other. And then there was some minority who had a different view. But lessons learned, it was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop. I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean. And I'm still in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school. So in the end, I thought it was, it ended up being a great experience. The national media was just wonderful in this, just wonderful. People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard. Compared me to John Adams, which I don't think is going to comparison, but it's always great to read something like that.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the students were fine. It was the loudest voice in the room. So they never released it. And you know, I challenged them to this day, release it. Release it, but no, but you know, they wanted to create this narrative and when the data didn't support the narrative, then they just got silent. Oh, we're not going to release it. The students demanded it. I demanded it, and they wouldn't release it because I am, I just know in my heart of hearts that it was It came back in my favor that most students at Winthrop House said they were fine. There was a group of students that weaponized a term unsafe. They said we felt unsafe and they bantied this term about. But I'm, again, I'm confident that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt completely fine and felt safe and so forth.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvard made a mistake by making me step down Or something like that. So I don't write those things. I did not step down and refuse to step down. Harvard declined to renew my contract. And, you know, and I made it clear that I was not going to resign as a matter of principle and force them to do the cowardly act that they, in fact, did. And, you know, the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Carana commissioned this survey. They've never done this before, survey from the students, you know, how do you feel at Wimthrop House? And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results. Why did they never release the results? They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came back positive for me and it didn't fit their narrative because most of the students were fine.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would push back on the description a little bit. So I don't write the references to the op-ed I did in the New York Times.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claudine Gay absolutely craven and cowardly, the dean of the college. Same thing, Rakesh Karana, craven and cowardly. They capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19-year-olds. Oh, 19-year-olds, you're upset. I need to do something. And it appeared to me that they so desired the approval of students that they were afraid to make the tough decision and the right decision. It really could have been an important teaching moment at home.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are undergraduate students. So I was responsible for one of the houses as its faculty dean. So it's an administrative appointment at the college. Some students who didn't clearly didn't like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation. And from there it just mushroomed into one of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university in modern history. It's just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom. And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret. It's frankly, it's an embarrassment. We expect students to do what students do. And I've encouraged students to have their voices heard and to protest. I mean, that's what students do, what is vexing are the adults, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I took on the case and then there was some few students at the college. So let me back up. I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate entity from the Harvard Law School. Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard University and the law school is obviously the law school. And I initially was appointed as master of one of the houses. We did a name change five or six years into it and were called faculty deans. But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge. So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they're assigned to a particular house or a college. And that's where they live and eat and so forth.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it doesn't stress me out particularly. It sort of comes with the territory. I try not to get too excited in either direction. So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions. And I've gotten over 6,000 people out of prison who've been wrongfully incarcerated and a subset of those people have been convicted. And if people have been in jail 20, 30 years who have gotten out. And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best values in our criminal justice system. So I proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual rights of the person whom I'm representing, but the rights of citizens writ large, who most of whom do not experience the criminal justice system. And it's partly because of lawyers who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules that protect us average everyday ordinary concrete citizens.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvey Weinstein, then the next thing you know, someone will be at your door knocking it down and violating your rights. There's a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect the civil rights and civil liberties of people. And these are the sorts of cases that test it. For example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda. By all accounts, he was not a likable guy. He was three-time knife thief and not a likable guy, but lawyers stepped up and took his case. And because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings. We have the right to remain silent. Those warnings that officers are forced to give to people. So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I take on, I'd like to take on hard cases and I like to take on the cases that are with unpopular defendants, unpopular clients. And with respect to the latter, that's where Harvey Weinstein fell. It's because we need lawyers and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases because those sorts of cases determine what sort of criminal justice system we have. If we don't protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the least and the last, the unpopular client, then that's the camel's nose under the tent. If we let the camel's nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse. That is to say, if we short circuit the rights of a client like”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker, that's the New Yorker article that sort of exposed everything that was going on, allegedly with Harvey. So I decided to take the case.”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, sure, so I got a call one morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who asked if I would consent to taking a call from Harvey. He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him. I said yes. And one thing led to another. I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors and then a day or two later decided to take the case. This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe. So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice most of my time is teaching and writing. But I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible. I take the challenging sorts of cases. And this was fit the bill. It was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had predudged the case. When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment in the public had the case prejudged, even though”
2021-03-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #170 – Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source