January 24, 2001: Class Notes

Class Notes Features:

William Zabel '58, human rights activist, takes on the NYPD

Law professor turned TV commentator: Election law expert Richard Pildes '79 moved into the spotlight

David Tepper '94 fulfills childhood dream: By landing a spot on Jeopardy!

Keeping up with intellectuals: Patricia Cohen *86 makes rigorous thinking accessible

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William Zabel '58, human rights activist, takes on the NYPD

In an entire lifetime, one may never have his or her deepest convictions truly tested. Others, like New York attorney William D. Zabel ’58, a human rights activist, seem to be tested all the time. One of Zabel’s earliest trials came in 1955, during his freshman year at Princeton, when a trio of gun-toting students in Ku Klux Klan outfits burst into his dorm room. They harassed Zabel because he had recently written a letter to a prominent national magazine denouncing a Mississippi jury’s decision to acquit two white men accused in the much-publicized murder of Emmett Till, a young black man. The attempt at intimidation had little effect on Zabel’s commitment. Neither did fire-bomb-tossing rednecks in Canton, Mississippi, where in the 1960s Zabel did pro bono legal work for civil rights activists, nor the repressive policies of Pinochet’s Chile, where he worked with attorneys who risked their lives representing victims of state-sanctioned violence.

Although Zabel made his name professionally as a trust and estate attorney in the Manhattan law firm he cofounded, Schulte Roth & Zabel, he has always found time to pursue his avocation, participating for more than 40 years in battles over human
rights in Northern Ireland, Turkey, and other trouble spots around the globe.

Now, as chairman of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Zabel has turned his attention to a problem much closer to home: the strained relationship between the New York City Police Department and the city’s minority communities. “We are trying to find a way to develop mutual respect between the police and the communities that feel they are being mistreated by them,” he says.

Although his activism through the years has often brought him face-to-face with injustice and inhumanity, Zabel maintains that the benefits outweigh the costs. “It is very rewarding work,” he says. “Human rights is kind of the religion of the 21st century; it is a universally bonding code.”

By Rob Garver
Rob Garver is a journalist living in northern Virginia.

Law professor turned TV commentator: Election law expert Richard Pildes '79 moved into the spotlight

Richard Pildes ’79 didn’t move to New York to become a media celebrity. But since November, he’s been one. After the 2000 presidential election, which left the media scrambling for people who could explain the ensuing litigation to a confused populace, NBC hired him to be its official commentator.

A professor of election law at New York University Law School in Manhattan, Pildes welcomed the chance to explain the issues to a broad audience. “The media find it difficult to represent in other than won-loss terms legal decisions that are nuanced and subtle,” he says. “I thought that one of my roles in commenting publicly was to resist that tendency.”

Pildes was well prepared to do so after spending almost a decade helping write The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 1998), a textbook that covers voting rights acts, ballot initiatives, the Electoral College, and alternative voting systems, among other topics. “I’ve been interested in these issues for a number of years,” he says.

At Princeton, Pildes majored in chemistry, but he headed to Harvard Law School after graduation and then clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. He then joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Law School before moving to NYU as a visiting professor. He will become a full-time faculty member next fall.

Although Pildes’s ongoing appearances before the TV cameras will likely end now that the election is finally resolved, his opportunities for public engagement will not. He has been involved in several federal voting law cases -- he’s worked as a court-appointed special expert, filed amicus briefs, and helped represent North Carolina in a redistricting case that has gone on for years -- and sees more looming. Referring to the decennial redrawing of electoral districts, he predicts “a great deal of legal uncertainty once we move into the redistricting of the 2000 census.”

By David Marcus ’92
David Marcus is a reporter for the Daily Deal in New
York City.

David Tepper '94 fulfills childhood dream: By landing a spot on Jeopardy!

David A. Tepper ’94 doesn’t consider himself religious, but since age 10, he has revered one thing: TV’s Jeopardy! And on August 30, 2000, Tepper went to Mecca.

“Getting on Jeopardy! has been a dream,” enthuses Tepper, who has had a hearing impairment as long as he’s watched the show. But for this molecular biology major turned bankruptcy lawyer, the dream had nothing to do with money.

“People who get on Jeopardy! are very positive role models -- combining intelligence and wit and grace under pressure,” says Tepper, who lives in Richmond, Virginia. “I would much rather hang out with a Jeopardy! player than [Survivor’s] Richard Hatch.”
So starting his junior year, Tepper tried out annually. And last July, senior contestant coordinator Susanne Thurber invited him to a special interview/practice session. “We wanted to see if he needed any special accommodations,” recalls Thurber. He didn’t, except for no audio Daily Double clues.

Afterwards, back at home, says Tepper, “I spent the time practicing, keeping score, sometimes standing up with a bright light shining on my face.” During each night’s broadcast, Tepper and his parents used an intricate scoring process to gauge how he’d do in actual competition.

When it came to the real thing, says Tepper, “I just concentrated on playing the game, having a good time, and maybe being somebody that Middle America could cheer for.”
Helping Tepper win his first game, too, were Princeton classes. Among his winning questions were Dante’s last name (Robert Hollander ’55’s legendary Dante class), how you say “yes” in Portuguese (101 with Leslie Damasceno), and the origins of the political party names “Whig” and “Tory” (Brent Vine, Origins and Structure of the English Language).

In four games, Tepper won more than $25,000, which will help him move to Washington, D.C., where he hopes to land a government job. But his favorite parting gift was a letter from a young hearing-impaired girl. “She saw me on Jeopardy! and just lit up,” says Tepper. Recalling his youthful admiration of the show’s contestants, he says, “It just astonishes and humbles me that someone would think the same about me.”

By Rob Kutner ’94
Rob Kutner is a freelance writer in Los Angeles, who has tried but failed to get on Jeopardy!

Keeping up with intellectuals: Patricia Cohen *86 makes rigorous thinking accessible

When Patricia Cohen *86 arrived at the Woodrow Wilson School for her first semester, she had to fill out a form describing the details of her previous academic studies.

“There was a space to list what textbooks we’d read, and I wrote one line: ‘Intro to Economics, a black textbook with red and yellow dots on it,’” remembers Cohen. Her love for quantitative analysis didn’t exactly blossom. “The one thing I remember was that most statistical studies are worthless,” she says. “I keep that in mind now.”

Although Cohen, editor of the New York Times’s Arts & Ideas section, eventually came to appreciate the analytical framework she learned while earning her MPA at WWS, her love of journalism quickly superseded any desire for hard-core policy wonkdom. After graduating, she became an editorial writer for New York Newsday and then held editorial posts at Rolling Stone and the Washington Post. In 1997, she went to the New York Times and launched Arts & Ideas, a Saturday section covering the intellectual scene.

Her job is the ultimate in intellectual eclecticism. On a Saturday last fall, the section featured pieces on a philosophy professor turned cyber-publishing guru and the warm reception given to American leftist thinkers in Europe, among other stories. While the very nature of journalism, she says, is to “drop into a place -- whether it be geographic or intellectual -- figure out what’s going on, and then make it accessible,” a section dealing with the notoriously Byzantine world of academia provides its own challenge.

“Every story should be understandable for an intelligent general reader who knows nothing about the subject,” she says. And to keep her stories grounded, she’s banned a whole cadre of academic words, including “social construct,” “deconstruct,” and the adjectival use of “postmodern.”

Cohen is also dealing with new, nonwork challenges: In September 2000 she returned from maternity leave after giving birth to a son. “Coming back to work has been a lot more difficult than I ever anticipated,” she says. “So much of my identity has come through work, and suddenly this whole new aspect of life is competing.”

By Katherine Hobson ’94
Katherine Hobson is an associate editor in the New York bureau of U.S. News & World Report.