I think we can best discuss all this material, which is very interesting even to me, if we separate some of the pieces.

First, although Art's initial posting may give a different impression, he isn't actually saying that I called some student, himself or anyone else, "stupid" or "a moron" in class. I don't run a recording device in this class all the time, as I do in my other classrooms for other reasons, so we don't have tape to prove the negative, but although class is a theatrical performance and I use all the registers available to performers, that would be censurable conduct falling outside the rules I play by. Art is angry at me, and certainly feels, perhaps justifiedly, that I've been unnecessarily hard on him in a private conversation—which being private I wouldn't talk about here except that he's brought it up—but Tuesday's class conversation, as Joshua Hochman noted, was until its last quick exchange, not personally about Art at all. He has criticisms to level that I want to respond to, but I think we should be able to take off the agenda the most inflammatory charge he seemed to make, but wasn't as far as I can tell actually making, and which would not be justified. The particular phrase "lazy and stupid" was applied, as people will remember, to law professors at Columbia Law School, not to students, and whatever else may be true about my colleagues, they can take care of themselves.

Nona, on the other hand, is specifically criticizing my class "name calling" with respect to non-students, particularly corporate entities that own cultural or intellectual property, and the oppressors of law students both in academia and in firms. Her criticism is that those portions of my performances make her cringe, and are, as she puts it "blunt[ing] the impact of his teachings and thus, his fight for freedom."

Dan Karmel speaks for many in raising two other criticisms, that I am sometimes dismissive of student arguments in class, and that I am "insulting" in comments on written work.

All of these criticisms are seriously-intended, useful to me as well as to the people making them, and deserve considered response.

I want to begin with Dan's two points, and I want to begin there because I addressed them, prospectively, at our first class meeting. I said then, as you remember, that people were going to get cross with me for cutting off student arguments, or for being dismissive, and for being hot rather than sweet in commentary on written work. I explained then that from my point of view, these feelings, which I recognized would be strongly felt, come from conflict with a basic necessity on my side. Editing, I said then, is a job that cannot be done with primary or even secondary concern for the personal sensitivities of the author. The only way it can be done, I said, is with a degree of candor that will always be, and will much of the time feel like, brutal honesty. I told a story on that first day about an old friend of mine, a former criminal defense attorney in private practice, who has been a professional journalist for more than a decade now. I said that he recently described himself to me as a sexual assault survivor after completing an edit with the very professional and accomplished editor at the famous magazine where they are both on staff. I said that the very nature of his immensely exaggerated metaphor showed just how complex and fraught the nature of the editorial relationship is. I warned that I was acting as an editor of our class conversation as well as all the writing here, that there would be moments of hurt feelings, which as a human being I genuinely regret causing, but that I would nonetheless do the job in the only way I believe it can really be done.

So here we are. Nona has referred before to my "scary red type," and although she tries to be as appreciative as possible of my efforts, she, like Dan, shows here serious signs of wishing I were different in precisely the way I warned in advance I would sometimes annoyingly refuse to be.

One of the reasons I work the way I do, in this and all my other classes, is that I am fully, publicly accountable to the whole class for every comment I make on all the work done by all the students who work with me. Whether my editorial interventions are "scary" or "insulting," whether they are fair comment too bluntly or just bluntly enough phrased, whether they are productive or useless in helping people to write better—each reader here has access to all the information and can judge. I wish all teachers worked this way. That they don't is—allow me to amplify my earlier comment—lazy, cowardly, and stupid.

I am no different from those who criticize me in this respect: I have always found being aggressively edited an uncomfortable and ego-bruising experience. But except when it was conducted by inept editors, as it sometimes was, I always found it in retrospect, when my temper had cooled, a valuable experience that improved my use of language. Whether I am skillful or inept is in the end for each of you to judge. Experience suggests to me that you should expect your eventual judgment to differ from the view you take in the heat of the moment, when the web page on which I have been bleeding red ink is yours.

Nona's criticism points in two other important directions. First, let me state simply that the reason I talk with disdain and contempt for the forces of wealth and power in this exceedingly unjust society is to remind you as often as I can that this is precisely the lawyer's job. Our task, in Mark Twain's phrase, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. You are subjected every day to various forms of propaganda—from teachers, placement workers, and colleagues, among others—telling you that your real interest lies in propritiating power—in order to get a grade, an interview, a job, a client, a fortune, or a sinecure. If you come to believe this corrupting nonsense, society will in the end be worse rather than better for your presence in it.

Second, I don't want this class to be part of my fight for freedom: I don't think I have any business making this class about my work. We don't read here what I write, we don't talk in any depth about the substantive issues on which I work. And although I consider myself to have had some creative legal ideas, I don't use them as fodder here. Art says "If you have a real problem with these companies and practices, a real interest in your students, their pursuit of 'justice,' and possess knowledge that we don't, then do your job. Teach us." I am teaching two other courses this year that have precisely that purpose, and in your third year, when I get back, I will be teaching them again. Those courses too have wikis, and in those almost every word of what I say is recorded and transcribed; you are free to listen, read, and learn as much as you like. Here however, at this stage in your passage through law school, I am teaching something else, with which I believe that would more or less completely interfere. Accordingly, Art says, "I have come to the conclusion, that in fact you do not oppose these things you decry based on principle." But his conclusion is based on what I haven't talked about; even the "neutral point of view" taken by the Wikipedia advances the opposite interpretation. I think, in short, that Art is jumping to a conclusion, which is a habit I have called to his attention, as you know.

Which brings us at last back to Art's original "Open Letter," which kicked off the present conversation. Those who have no experience with the Cult of Mac will perhaps be surprised that in a document so full of hurt and personal anger there would be so much discussion based upon, and so much quotation from, Apple Corporation press releases. On Tuesday, as you recall, we were discussing Thorstein Veblen, who has been dead for seventy years, but who—unlike many famous dead people—has never been appropropriated for an appearance in an Apple advertisement. This is not because Thorstein Veblen didn't "think different." As I pointed out on Tuesday, Apple products are perfect examples of Veblen's theme of the superseding economic value of waste. They are glitzy, overpriced, underfunctional, coercive artifacts designed to appeal to the personal image snobbery of non-technical, creative people, breathing not just indifference but elevated levels of contempt for the very folks who pay way too much to buy them. Apple is a cargo cult; it makes hyperexpensive shiny things designed to ensnare consumers in a system that is technically and psychologically difficult to escape, but which integrates so completely with the self-image of the consumer that it creates organizational loyalty making it possible to sell cult members a lifetime supply of wallet-busting schlock with total predictability.

As those who were there will recall, Art asked me, rather pointedly, to give an example of what Apple could do differently. In response, I described the design and function of the display of the OLPC—technology invented by Mary Lou Jepsen—whose properties emerge from a culture of respect for the users of the device (specifically children), and which achieves fundamental innovation in performance, safety, power-consumption and maintainability as a consequence. When I finished this somewhat tedious technical example, Art asked me, again aggressively, what I took from it. I said, "that you don't know everything." He considers that belittlement, and is plainly very mad about it. I thought it was fair comment then, and I do now. I think it is patent that I wasn't calling him stupid, or even ignorant. I was telling him that there's more in the world than he knows about, and that he jumps often to conclusions on the basis of one-sided or incomplete evidence.

In the office hours conversation Art mentions, he did indeed ask me to explain to him more about privacy law. I didn't say, "I teach some courses on the subject, and you could take them." I did, however, say nothing to him that can't be found on those course wikis. Among those things, I said, "If you care about privacy on the Net and technological freedom, and you use Steve Jobs' stuff, you're a moron." As students in my other courses will tell you, and as you can hear yourself if you care to listen to the endless tedious recordings on the wikis, this was not a personal comment aimed at him, though he takes it that way. His resistance then was as concerted as it is now, and although he exaggerates in saying that it consumed 45 minutes—because the whole conversation was shorter than half an hour—his determination does indicate how successfully Apple has caused him to increase perilously his ego investment in his consumption.

The sacrifices of freedom and privacy necessary in order to live in Jobsville may well be worth paying for some individuals; I have no problem with that. I would never tell Art or anyone else what computer to use or what to run on it. What I told him then, and what he apparently bitterly resents, is that if someone can't see those sacrifices, I have nothing to teach him about privacy and the Net.

(A digression: When we made SFLC, my Legal Director, Dan Ravicher, decreed as a rule of recruiting that we automatically discard any job application containing a resume in Microsoft Word's .doc format. Anyone doing that despite our published instructions, Dan reasoned, surely was of no professional interest as a trainee or colleague. I was skeptical at first, but it has turned out to be an excellent decision.)

With those who believe my teaching could be better, I am in vehement agreement. I have been teaching for a quarter-century now, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the individual classes in which I fully lived up to my own intentions. There has been none this term. I think it is much easier to be a great lawyer than a very good teacher. It may be worth remembering once again that teaching is a performing art, in which the actor ought not be either completely conflated with or utterly separated from the role. You will have noticed that we meet in an amphitheater, that there is an overture, and often an interlude. Mike's concurrence sums up a frustrating truth, that who we "are" as teachers is never exactly who we are.

One last thing should be said. I am impressed and pleased that all of those who have criticized my conduct, sometimes with as much brutal honesty as I could have wished, have shown no doubt that their courage in speaking would be fairly received. I hope that Nona was wrong in saying that people are reluctant to criticize my conduct of this course because I am grading it. I am glad, at any rate, that neither she nor Art shows the slightest concern. That's as it should be.

People here, even the ones who are mad at me at the moment, have probably realized that I don't do this work out of love of law school, or a desire to be liked by law professors, or in hopes of being appointed to something, or in order to buy stuff for my family. I do it out of commitment to and admiration for young people who are capable, through talent, hard work and sheer luck, of growing up to change the world. I'm trying to help you crack the shell of the egg that has your future self inside it. But sometimes you can't break eggs without making an omelette. To those on whom I've been too hard, including Art, I apologize. To those who wish I'd stop trash-talking about the owners of everything, okay I will. Someone else will have to pick up the task of voicing Thorstein Veblen then, of course. But yes, you can.