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AI: So then at that point you had this goal in mind, and what did you do to begin putting that into practice?

PI: Well, the first thing I wanted to do after I left law school was to get a job teaching law. I did not want to go to work -- in fact, I had an offer from a very big corporate law firm in Washington, D.C., to go down there and to be their full-time pro bono lawyer. It was a very tempting offer, and the man who gave me the offer said, "Look, you will, you can work on any case you want to. You'll get a regular salary as an associate, but you'll just do pro bono work." This was one of the first firms that offered that option. And it was very, very tempting, but I didn't want to leave Boston, partly because my wife really enjoyed the work she was doing there and I'd lived in Washington. I didn't really want to go back at that time. So I decided to stay in the Boston area, and if I could, find a teaching job. And it turned out to be one of these true stories of, "I found my job in the New York Times." They used to run a series of ads, "I found my job through the New York Times." Well, I did. I, one Sunday, looking in the academic help wanted pages that they run every week, for law instructors at Boston College Law School. And I applied for the job and was hired immediately. There was a very brief interview. I think it was one of the first times a Harvard Law School graduate had actually applied to teach at Boston College Law School. So I was hired. And this was a instructor's job where I was teaching legal research and writing to first-year law students, and also teaching a course in American legal history. If I recall, the salary was $12,000 a year, more than I had been making any time before. And I really enjoyed that year. I liked the law school, and I really enjoyed the teaching experience. Anybody who's taught first-year law students legal research and writing, knows that it can be a very time-consuming, difficult job. You don't get the kind of rewards if you're teaching regular law school courses. But my students seemed to respond really well to the way I taught the course, which was very different because I used actual, real cases for their exercises and got them involved, and in fact, contacted, in some of these cases, contacted the attorneys who were handling them and asked if they needed some assistance. So my students were doing research that might actually help somebody. And I enjoyed that. But it was not a job, it was a one-year job. I probably could have stayed for a second year, but I also wanted to go back to teaching undergraduates, which I had been doing at Boston University as a graduate assistant to Howard Zinn. And I'd also done some undergraduate teaching while I was in law school. I taught a course on law and justice at Tufts University, which is near Boston, and enjoyed that.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.