4.2.12 WC: 191694 When I told Bazelon about the justice quote from the Torah, he asked me why the word justice was repeated. Wouldn’t it have been enough to say “justice you must actively chase after.” “Why ‘justice, justice.”” No word, or even syllable of the Torah is supposed to be redundant. Every one has a meaning. I told Judge Bazelon that the rabbis had a field day providing interpretation to the repeat of justice. My favorite, the one I had proposed in my Bar Mitzvah speech, was that the first “tzedek” meant legal justice, while the second meant compassionate justice. Judge Bazelon corrected me: “Compassion must come before the law. The first means compassionate justice, the second legal justice.” Whichever came first in Judge Bazelon’s court, every decision that he wrote or joined combined elements of both. His compassion wasn’t always appreciated, even by its objects. Judge Bazelon once showed me a letter he received from his most famous defendant, a man named Monte Durham. Durham was the defendant in the case in which Bazelon announced his innovative approach to the insanity defense in the form of a new rule called “The Durham Rule” that declared a person to be legally insane, and thus not guilty, if his crime was “the product” of a mental disease or defect. This controversial rule revolutionized the relationship between law and psychiatry. The letter from Monte Durham complained about the rule bearing his name. “Now everyone calls me “Durham the Nutcase.’” He noted that when doctors discover a new disease, they name it after themselves and not after the patient. He wondered why the new rule wasn’t called “The Bazelon Rule” instead of the “Durham Rule!” Bazelon apologized to Durham and noted that if judges could name new rules after themselves there would be too many new rules. Judge Bazelon and I were a match made, if not in heaven, at least in legal nirvana. I learned a lot from him and even taught him a little. We remained lifelong friends, though the y