 In those days, Harvard, like many other law schools, many other universities, had a policy of making people emeritus at a certain age. And at Harvard, you could stay on maximum to the age of 70, and then you could no longer teach. Congress had passed a law, by the way, making this illegal, but the university's got an exception for seven years, and I was in that seven-year period, and so I was going to be made emeritus, and I didn't want to be emeritus, I wanted to keep teaching. And I knew Frank Alexander well, he had been my student, and he had invited me to Emory, by the way, to give a lecture once, and I'd been down here, so I got in touch with him, and he got in touch with President Lainey, and they made me an offer of this Woodruff chair, which was a very, very good offer. Jim Lainey offered me an appointment for a lifetime. In fact, I had a letter from the dean of, so long as your energy, interest, and productivity continued. I remember asking the dean of the Harvard Law School, and I was an assistant professor, whether we shouldn't have a course in law and Christianity, because I said to him, Christianity had such an important influence on the development of the history of law in the West. And he looked at me, and he said, he was a wonderful man, but he didn't like this idea. He said, well, it might be an extracurricular seminar, not for credit. I want to tell you in those days, religion was a sort of taboo subject in the law schools. It was just of no interest, indeed today, it's not a major interest in most law schools. There are a few like Emory, which recognizes importance. Every legal system rests on a belief system, and what's been called civil religions. We believe in what? We believe in democracy or freedom with the same passion that in religious circles people believe in God. We believe in America. I love America, our religion is what comes from the heart, as well as the mind. It's the belief system. What you're committed to, what you're willing to fight for and even to die for. So we have deep in our tradition and deep in our constitutional law this concept of belief underlying legal rules. But most of the courses teach legal rules, which they're viewed from a political, from a policy orientation. What does the legislature want to accomplish by this rule? Not where did this rule come from historically and morally. My own interest now is above all in the coming together of the different cultures of the world. For the first time in the history of the human race, the entire population of the world is beginning to interact with one another all over into a kind of a world emerging world society. We have a world economy, we are developing a world society with a world law. And as we're concerned with that, we have to look at the different belief systems which underlie these various cultures. Perhaps instead of talking about religions, we should talk about spiritual values and common spiritual values and different spiritual values, differences and similarities. Two defects which I attribute to American legal education, the lack of a historical perspective and the lack of a, let's call it a universal or comparative perspective, are very detrimental in preparing people for practice. If you go into a law firm today, in the first place you have clients in all countries and I mean it's amazing the extent to which multinational legal practice and the law firms have to train the law school graduates in multinational legal practice because they don't get in the law school. You're a better lawyer if you have a historical perspective. I think all the legal practitioners would agree. It's just the law schools that don't recognize the law professors who are each in his own way propounding his own legal perspective which is not historical. My perspective is that we are undergoing a fundamental millennial change. We're changing from the, I like to say, from the second millennium of the Christian era to the third. And we're now in a new thousand year period or a hundred century period of history where everything, now the world is a new world. In my lifetime it all happened. I can't believe it, but I grew up, you know, we looked at England when we studied law. Well I went pretty far, started studying French and German law, then I suddenly had to realize there's also Russia, you know, and I had to become a Russian specialist. And then China, I've just been invited to China, I mean it's been an enormous transformation. In my lifetime we had two world wars. We're all in touch with each other over these computers and these emails and these air travel and so forth. This is all happened in my lifetime. And I think it's helpful to youth to tell them that. I think they need to hear it because they grew up not knowing anything about the past. In my experience I'm amazed at the consequences of a lack of a historical perspective. Legal education could help to bring the world together through the world economy, through world sports, through human rights, through all of it, through intellectual property which is becoming a more and more universal. We're told that there once were only 20,000 people in the whole world, in Africa mostly, they've spread little by little, they've traveled over thousands and thousands and thousands of years and they've filled the whole earth and now we're all in touch with each other everywhere. And I think this is providential and I think we have to find now common spiritual values to hold us together or we may destroy each other with our nuclear weapons. And I think we've got to go back to human nature, the common features, common spiritual values if we're going to give a legal foundation to this new world economy and this new world society that's emerging, which someday will become a world, I hope, a world community. It's going to take generations and centuries before this world, emerging world society develops finally into a world community and we have to avoid above all the dangers to this, which are the destruction of the human race, which is a possibility. This is where we're faced with this incredible choice between the self-destruction of the human race and the coming together of all these cultures and law can play a particularly vital role and that's my world law. I was not quote the father, unquote, I'm the father of four children but I'm not the father of any discipline.