Professor of international law, presenting this program, please join me in welcoming them. [applause] thank you. Without further ado i thought i would plunge into a question for the judge and the biographer. Richard posner, when you were the age of some of the people in this room you were fabulous yates scholar interested in literature. What made you decide to go to law school . Law school was always the default graduate choice. I give some thought to graduate school, decided, not for me. I dont think i can stay. Harvard law school has a formative impression on you, i suppose . It launched your trajectory in many ways. Tell us about the academic experience. It is mixed, but they did something clever. They stacked their best teachers the first year in law school. Very nice. Got a good start. Second and third year, like all the professors i realized thinking about this, i skipped my last year of high school, only 16 when i went to yale college and only 20 when i went to law school, young