4.2.12 WC: 191694 grandmother laughed and said: “Berenkoff’s no judge, he’s a butcher.” She explained that “his first name is Judge,” and then she spelled it out: “G-E-O-R-G-E,” which she, with her Yiddish accent, pronounced “Judge.” Shortly after New Year I got my letters of acceptance from the various law schools to which I had applied. Since I had done very well in college and was president of the student government, I got into all the law schools to which I applied. I chose Yale, much to my mother’s regret. She wanted me to go to Harvard. Until the day she died at age 95, when people ask her where I went to law school, she replied, “He got into Harvard, but he went to Yale.” I also got into Columbia Law School, and the dean of Columbia, William Warren, wrote a letter to my parents, congratulating them on my admission and on the fancy scholarship I had won. (I still have the letter addressed “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Dershowitz”). I interpreted his letter as an attempt to have my parents try to persuade me to go to Columbia. So I wrote back—not to Dean Warren, but to “Dean Warren’s parents, care of Dean Warren, Columbia Law School.” I told his parents that their son was writing to my parents, and suggested that they tell him that if he wanted students to go to his law school, he should write to the students themselves rather than to their parents. I thought it was pretty funny, but I stopped laughing several years later, when I was on the law school teaching market and I went to Columbia for an interview. After meeting several members of the faculty, I was taken in to meet Dean Warren. He was waiting for me, with my letter in his hand. I was sure I would never get a job offer, but he looked at me and said, “That was a really good letter. I stopped writing to parents after getting it.” He offered me a job. Immediately after graduating from Brooklyn College, I got married to a woman I had met in a Jewish summer camp that boasted of the many “shidachs” (meetings that resul