Samuel Freedman's Letters to a Young Journalist led me to Alan Dershowitz's Letters to a Young Lawyer -- doing the courts beat makes you buy funny things off Amazon -- and this passage in particular spoke to me:
"A law student once asked Judge Benjamin Cardozo, then on the New York Court of Appeals, why he got all the interesting cases. He replied that the cases were not particularly interesting until he started to think about them. I observed that phenomenon with Judge Bazelon, who managed to turn the most mundane criminal cases into vehicles for raising the most profound legal and moral issues of criminal responsibility, the role of defense counsel and the relationship betwen poverty and crime. His passion was reflected in his opinions and his life's work. It was also contagious, and many young lawyers who worked for him caught it. I know I did."
That came at the end of a chapter called Live the Passion of Your Times.
And here I was reading to get some inside baseball on the LAW game.
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