Rebecca  Hollander-Blumoff, Law Professor and Adventurous Baker

92-129. Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Will Bachman

Will Bachman 00:59
Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Rebecca, welcome to the show.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 01:15
Thank you Will. I’m really excited to be here.

Will Bachman 01:17
So, Rebecca, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 01:22
All right, great. So it’s been a long journey, and I’ll just start at the beginning. So when I graduated from college, I had deferred my going to law school for a year, and I spent a year in Spain. I had always wanted to spend a year immersed in a country with a different language, and really, you know, kind of have that experience living somewhere really different and trying to again, kind of get that language experience as well as just the cultural experience. So I spent a year in Spain, and it was a fascinating year. I have more to say about that, maybe later, if we want to get to it. But then I went to law school, and I was really happy to be back in Cambridge, which I love. And so I was also lucky to have a few of my college buddies who were still around doing grad school in Cambridge. So it was a really great time, you know, in terms of being able to still, still be part of that community. So I went to law school, and then when I graduated, I clerked for a federal judge in New York, in the Southern District of New York, and then I went into practice. At that time, I was really interested in potentially being a federal prosecutor, and the Federal Prosecutor Office in the Southern District of New York did not hire people straight out of clerkships. So pretty much, if you wanted to do that, you needed to go into practice for a little while. So I did that. I went to a small boutique litigation firm that did about 60% white collar criminal defense and about 40% civil litigation. And I was there for several years, and I really found myself loving working with my clients. What I loved about that job was being really a counselor, being a person who a client could call, day in, day out, say, like, what’s going on with my case, or I’m really concerned. I’m really stressed out. You know, what should I do? How should I be thinking about this. I still remember the first time that somebody asked me, like, you know, what? What do you think? And I said, Oh, well, I’ll go get the partner, and, like, I’ll talk to him, and then I’ll get back to you. And he said, No, I want to know what you think. And I was like, Oh, wait, oh my gosh. Like, I’m a real lawyer whose opinion matters to this person, so I better have some opinions. I better do this, you know, do this right kind of, kind of gear up for that. And it was great. I really loved it. I loved working with my clients. What I didn’t love was being in a law firm – that was not a great setting for me. I didn’t love the hierarchy, you know, the constant accounting for every minute of your time. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, what, what should I do next? What is, you know, exciting to me that would be my next step now that I’ve had this experience of being a practicing lawyer, which, you know, was what I had been looking for, and I sort of lost a little bit of that dream of being a prosecutor in the defense space, I guess, how I would say that is, I believe very much in law enforcement. I have a ton of respect for our law enforcement, and you know, especially the US Attorney’s Office Southern District, of course, is in the news now, right? It’s a great office, but what I saw from the other side was people’s lives being completely disrupted, maybe rightfully so in some instances. But I got to the point where I thought, you know, that’s important work. Somebody should do it, but I don’t want to spend my life doing it. I loved helping my clients . . . I’ve sort of on the other side, just lost some of its appeal after I did that for several years. What I also was kind of thinking around this same time was that when you work in a white collar criminal area, especially a lot of your clients are very, very eager to get a plea deal or get immunity or work out some kind of agreement with the government. And I had spent a lot of time in law school studying negotiation, and I was really, really interested, kind of, from a theoretical perspective, in negotiation. What I saw in the negotiations that played out that I was a part of was that they were very people driven. That may sound sort of obvious, but they were very human. They were very relational. Things that people did in those negotiations made a difference fundamentally to the outcome in a way that the legal endowments didn’t always, you know, you know, basically somebody could have the law on their side, or the facts, even, you know, tied to the law, could be very persuasive, or they could be terrible, and it didn’t have as much of an impact as the interpersonal back and forth between the lawyers. And so I decided that I wanted to go back to school and get a PhD, and I wanted to study the psychology of negotiation. So that’s what I did so I dip my toe in at Harvard. Actually, I had taken a psych class my senior year. I took it with a bunch of friends. We took it pass fail – like, we had no connection to psych at all. You know, I didn’t really do anything with psychology. We passed. We all passed the class. But that was it. But I was really drawn, after being in practice, to thinking more analytically about the human behavior that was playing out in these negotiations. So I went to NYU. I was living in New York at the time, and I started taking classes in their master’s program, because I thought, well, I want to see if I like it, if it’s, you know, if it’s sort of what I think it is. And it was great. And so I segued into the PhD program, and I got a PhD in Social Psychology with a dissertation on procedural justice in negotiation. So the idea of fair process in negotiation, how that affects negotiation in a legal setting. So then, after I got my PhD, I went on the legal job market for academia. I had been teaching in something called the lawyering program at NYU while I was doing my PhD. That’s like legal research and writing program that is required for all first-year law students. So, I had some teaching under my belt as well. I also had been an adjunct over in New Jersey at Seton Hall, teaching negotiation, which I just loved. So, this was all kind of coming together, and I went on the job market, and I got a position at Washington University in Saint Louis, which is where I still am. I joined the faculty in 2006, and you know, so this is my 19th year on the faculty, and that’s what I’m doing professionally now. I teach a bunch of different things, the classes that are sort of the core of what I do. I teach civil procedure, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is basically the entire set of rules for how you navigate a civil case in court. You know, from the time that you’re thinking about filing your complaint all the way through, you know, the time that a jury makes a decision and afterwards. I also teach federal courts something that’s super hot right now, federal courts are getting a lot of attention being kind of on the front lines of that. It’s a little like in my class, we have a feature called fed courts in the news, and it’s like a fire hose like, you know, every week we’re talking about so much on news about federal courts as they play this key role right now in our political world. I also teach law and psychology, and then I teach negotiation. I teach a variety of different kinds of negotiation. I teach negotiation for law students in a regular kind of experiential skills way. I also have a negotiation theory seminar that I teach sometimes, and then I also do a lot of exec ed and professional training. So I have a class that I teach at WashU at Brookings, which is WashU, has a relationship with the Brookings Institution in DC, and we do exec ed for them, especially with government employees. A lot of people from the State Department come. That’s a great program. And then I do you know other kinds of just exec ed, that’s not governmental, but that’s been really an interesting, very cool opportunity. I’ve taught for groups like the Office of Naval Intelligence. Really, really interesting, interesting cohorts of people. And in the past 15 years, also, I have developed a course that some people are more interested in, which is a women’s leadership. Up negotiation class. So there I teach kind of just general negotiation for, you know, all comers, but then also there’s been a lot of interest in teaching a specific course for women in negotiation. And so I’ve done that for quite some time. And I teach here at WashU, also sometimes over at our medical school, doctors in particular, are really interested in negotiation skills. They don’t get any training in medical school on negotiation, but they do it all the time. And so that’s a group that I love working with. And then maybe last, but not least, I also do some work with the Rodel Institute, which is really interesting group that brings politicians together across the aisle as state elected officials to just have conversations about democracy and politics and conflict resolution and the world around us, and so that’s, that’s, you know, an affiliation that I’ve really enjoyed in The last few years. So that’s pretty much my journey professionally. And then I’ll just add that I met my husband in law school, and we’ve been together, in April, it will be 30 years that we’ve been together, so that’s exciting. And we have our 25th wedding anniversary coming up too, and we have three boys, and a variety of dogs. That’s that, I think that’s my journey. And I guess, I guess one more thing I’ll add is just that I, I love to bake, and so I have, like, I have my baking Instagram, and I bake a lot. So that’s it. I think that’s, I think that’s, that’s the overview.

Will Bachman 11:42
A lot of directions to explore. Tell me what is special or different for women when they negotiate? How is it different from just negotiating? That’s a

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 11:59
great question. That’s a great question. Because actually, when I was first asked to teach women’s negotiation, I really kind of balked at it, you know, I thought like, I don’t really want to do that. That’s not really where I want to focus. I don’t want to exacerbate the idea that there are differences between men and women in negotiation. That said I have, I think, come to a place where I love teaching those groups, and I actually even wrote an article about it. It’s called like “it’s complicated,” you know, teaching women negotiations, something like that, and why I think it’s complicated is because I teach the course very much as here are skills that I think every negotiator needs. These are core skills. These are key kind of strategic things to be thinking about. These are important building blocks. Here are important elements of psychology that I want everybody who leaves my class to understand and to think about how to use in a strategic, effective way. For women, what I think is important is not thinking about like, what I call kind of the pink razor negotiation, like, Oh, here’s how you’re going to negotiate as a woman. Good, you know, go negotiate like this. You know, women, that’s not what I think is is really useful, and it’s not my approach. My approach is very much to think about, what does the research tell us about gender and negotiation? What can we learn from the social science research about women, about women in negotiation versus men in negotiation in particular, one huge takeaway from that body of research is that there are really different perceptions that can come into play for men and women in negotiation that have a lot to do with the stereotypes that people hold so behavior x from a man might be perceived very differently than behavior x from a woman, not always, but sometimes. And what I think is really critical is for women, especially, to be armed with that knowledge so that they can navigate effectively through whatever those stereotypes might be, so that they can navigate through whatever road bike roadblocks might be coming up because of potential stereotype effects. So that’s really the approach I take. We spend, obviously, a lot more time than I’m talking about right now in terms of unpacking that research and really thinking about what it means. But that’s the approach that I take. Is, how are you as a woman going to navigate this landscape knowing some of this research, and in a lot of my kind of open classes that are not women’s leadership classes, per se, I also talk about that research because it’s not research that only women need to know. It’s research that’s actually really helpful for everybody to know. So thinking about the effect of gender, the effect of culture, the effect of race, all of those things are things that when you start saying like, Oh, only person X is going to learn about that because they need to know it, but nobody else needs to know it, I think that’s a mistake. So, so that’s my approach. And I think. Actually,

Will Bachman 15:00
is it something, something like, let’s say your opponent is a man, or the other, not opponent, but the other side of the table is a man. Now, If a man says to that man, like statement x, it might be just viewed as assertive, but if a woman says the exact same statement, it might be viewed as, like, pushy, something like that. So that you should be aware of this. If you’re a woman, negotiating, you can’t just follow the normal textbooks on negotiation that are written for men, because people might perceive you differently, even if you’re saying the same thing. Is that kind of part of the idea? I mean, I

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 15:39
guess I would never say you can’t just do the same thing. I would say you want to have your antenna up for what kinds of reception you might get. That might be different if you’re doing, you know, behavior X, you know, if I I’m not a huge proponent, generally speaking, when I teach negotiation of like the, you know, super aggressive pound the table. Go for the judge, right? But let’s just take that behavior for, you know, as an example. You might say that’s very stereotypically male, right? And so a guy that comes in and does that may not have the same backlash effect that a woman who does the same thing might have, and a woman might want to do it anyway. And that’s a choice that is defensible, you know, for whatever reason that she might have. But I would want her to be aware that there might be that pushback, that there might be those concerns, and it might be that there’s not. There’s a really interesting quote that Satya Nadella, who was the CEO of Microsoft, he might still be the CEO of Microsoft. I don’t know. I apologize I’m not in the tech sector, but he had this really interesting quote that he said, like, a decade ago. He said, The great superpower that women have in the workplace is that they don’t ask for a raise. They just wait for the right time, and they know that it’s karma, and they’ll get the raise, you know, when it’s the right time. And that’s one of their superpowers, right? And so a statement like that, I think, illustrates the kind of stereotypes that sometimes women face in the workplace. Here’s a guy who was out there saying, This is what’s great about working with women. They keep their mouth shut and don’t ask for things. Right? Now, that doesn’t mean that a woman should keep her mouth shut and not ask for things, but it does mean that if she’s going to go into a meeting with that guy, right, or you know other people, and it’s not just men who have this, you know, this biased, you know, it’s everybody who you know. Sometimes you know who, who can, who can exhibit this, right? You want to be aware of it. You want to know that that’s out there. You want to say, Okay, well, how am I going to frame this request in a way, or, how am I going to negotiate in a way that tries to navigate around this? Do I think this is great? Like, do I love it? Do I love saying, like, hey, there are all these stereotypes in the world, and here’s how you’re going to navigate around them. I do not. Like, would I love it if I had a magic wand and I could say, like, get rid of the stereotypes like or go in and crush the stereotypes that would be better. I don’t have that magical capacity to do it. And so the world that we are in embedded in I’m trying to give tools to navigate. I hope that. Hope that illustrates a little bit.

Will Bachman 18:13
So I had a negotiation class in business school, and it was one of the most valuable things I had in that program, right? Like that I use every day. I’m curious. For the law students that you teach negotiations, what do you observe, or what are you hoping to achieve? Is the difference for those students when they walk in the door and when they complete the class, how are they approaching negotiations differently? And give us some examples of the types of negotiations that attorneys are involved in.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 18:52
Okay, so one thing that I think is very common misconception by people who haven’t been involved in any kind of academic pathway that has, like, a negotiation course, or component, is that some people are just like, born good negotiators, and some people are really bad at it. And, you know, you sort of are stuck with it. And then if you’re born good at it, you sort of go in and, like, you just do your thing, right? And if you’re bad at it, you know, maybe, you know, you go in and, like, you try, but you don’t do a good job. Or, you know, there are factors your personality stops you. I think that’s a really bad way to think about negotiation. The best way to think about it is as an experience for which you can prepare, right? You can prepare, you can be careful. You can think about all the ways to analyze it, both from the structural and the interpersonal, and you can plan for it. You can’t plan for everything, because it’s not a monologue, right? It’s a dialogue. Or can be even you know, more parties can be present. So sometimes you know things you say are going to have an effect that you know is going to take things in a different direction than you expected. But the more you prepare, the more you think from a strategic and analytical angle about what you’re going to encounter. What are possibilities, you know? What are things you’re going to do if this negotiation doesn’t work out? What are the interpersonal elements that are present, all that stuff? And I could kind of go on, you know, more, but the more you see that the better, right? I kind of liken it and like, this is for our cohort. Like, my students don’t understand this, but I kind of liken it to The Matrix, you know, in The Matrix, when you can see the code flashing down, like at the very end, he can kind of see all the code, you know, and he can see the way the world is. I think of that as very much a good metaphor, all these things that are happening in negotiation. Most people think of them as just kind of the things that happen. It’s all very implicit. And if you can take all those things that are happening and make the implicit explicit, right, it doesn’t mean you have to make it explicit for the person, right? But make it explicit to yourself, you know, even you know, during the prep and then in the negotiation, right, being able to sort of take that analytical viewpoint and say, like, Okay, I see that this is going here. And, you know, what are my possibilities? You know, okay, I’m going to take a break and, you know, work on, you know, these three things, or whatever it might be, where you’re going to think about it analytically, rather than sort of having knee jerk reaction in the moment, like I’m just kind of doing rather than being critical in my analysis, I think that was only half of your question.

Will Bachman 21:27
Yeah. So, right. So a lot of people might think of negotiation as effectively a zero sum haggling, whereas much more about strategically problem solving so both sides can increase the size of the pie and generate, you know, give off things that are low cost to you but high value to the other party, and vice versa, right?

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 21:52
Well, yeah, absolutely was. I didn’t mean to interrupt if you had more of your question,

Will Bachman 21:57
What are some examples where attorneys would be, you know, we often think it’s very adversarial. But what are some examples where they are engaging in negotiation like that, maybe like a plea deal, or some kind of, you know, resolving so much gets resolved outside of court, right? Give us some examples of how students might use your training in their practice?

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 22:19
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of times the key piece that students don’t see is the relational piece, right? Sometimes in a negotiation, you know, you do have two parties who are never going to see each other again. They hate each other, but a lot of times you don’t have that, right? You have a negotiation where parties are going to be embedded with each other on into the future. I mean, a paradigm would be like family law, for example, right, where you think it’s, you know, scorched earth, and we’re going to get this, you know. But you know, if there’s kids or if there’s any kind of settlement going forward, a lot of times, these people are still going to be in each other’s lives. But the same can be true for businesses, you know, contracts, there’s also reputational effects. Sometimes, outside of this particular negotiation people are going to hear about, you know, what happened in an industry. So there’s definitely room to think in a kind of more relational way a lot of times about these negotiations and the effects that they’re going to have, rather than like, it’s just a kind of zero sum deal, and then it’s over like, it’s like, you know, the paradigm, like haggling for a rug on your vacation or something that’s, you know, that’s not how most negotiations that are really meaningful to people work, and they do have this kind of embeddedness in a much broader sense. And as you say, a lot of times the zero sum piece is not true. Sometimes it is true, even when it is true, though, right? As I say to my students, what you’re doing in a negotiation is you’re not in front of a judge. There’s not ever going to be somebody who’s listening to you argue and saying at the end, Oh, you’re right. You win, right? You have to get that other person to say, like, Yes, I agree. And what that means is that what is on the table has to be something decent for them, right? And you might say, well, not doesn’t have to be right. Like, imagine, outside the legal context, I, you know, go and, you know, I work somewhere, and I go to my boss and I say, I want to negotiate for a, you know, new salary. Or my boss says, like, I want you to work on a project, you know, can we talk about, you know, this new project you’re going to work on? And you might see in both of those situations, like one person has all the power, one person has none of the power. All you need to do is have a decision by fiat. You know, my boss says, No, you can’t have a raise. Or my boss says you are going to work on this project. But what I think most people who are in the real world know is that when you have a setting where you could have a negotiated outcome, but instead, somebody makes the decision by fiat, you tend to have less good results over time, right? You have less retention of employees. You have less positive feeling about doing whatever project, etc, etc, which is why you often see negotiation, even in places where you would think like, oh, there’s just, you know, it’s just going to be decision by fiat, and it’s, you know, I guess. I think it’s a little bit kind of the same when you start to think about, oh, this is just a zero sum negotiation. Like, well, you know, most negotiations have other elements and other dimensions that are available. I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna and say, you know, you probably heard in business school, like, you know, the two sisters fighting over the orange, and one can have the peel and one can have the fruit rather than cutting it in half, right? And, you know, a lot of people say, well, that’s just a silly story, because no one ever wants the peel. Everybody wants the fruit. Now, I’ll just say, time out. I’m a baker, so a lot of times I do want the peel actually. And then when my husband eats the organic oranges, I’m like, stop. I wanted the peel, but, but even if you take that as kind of like, Oh, that’s not going to happen very often, I think something like that is still a great metaphor, because it reminds you to ask the questions and kind of going back to my classes, and what I want my law students to take away, which I know was like two questions ago. I want them to question their assumptions. I want them to think about situations where they might assume this is adversarial and it’s going to be, you know, fought tooth and nail, and then we’re going to hate each other at the end, and we’re dividing this pie. Check the assumptions, ask the questions. Think about what people really you know, what what they really want? What’s the best goal? What’s the best end goal? Back to what I was saying about my time in practice. Lawyers are counselors. Like, that’s what I loved about being in practice. Lawyers are there to counsel. And if, if the counsel is like, go for the jugular and get everything you can and not well, in five years, what’s your reputation going to be in your area, you know? Or in five years, are you going to have anybody who wants to still do business with you, etc, etc. Like, you’ve got to think more broadly.

Will Bachman 26:39
I guess there’s an interesting dynamic for attorneys that the principals on each side may or may not have interactions with each other in the future. You know, to your point family law, they probably will, they may or may not, but the attorneys, like the basically the agents in the discussion, may very well likely, because, you know, they’re both attorneys in the same town, the prosecutor and the defense bar, the two civil attorneys negotiating so they’re going to face each other in the sort of ongoing, repeated game, so they may have different, not necessarily misaligned, but different incentives than their clients to, you Know, maintain a reputation for integrity and so forth with each other, right? Which, which, I guess, could help the negotiation, but also could lead them to potentially have some influence on how they interact with their clients. Talk about that dynamic a little bit

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 27:34
That is so important, and I think, you know, it’s been studied a little, but it remains, I believe, understudied. A lot of times when we think about negotiation, kind of anywhere we’re like, oh, you know, this person, this person. There’s lots of places where people are negotiating on behalf of someone. And of course, in the law, it’s particularly salient. You know, that’s pretty much always what lawyers are doing. And there’s not enough research in that area. I think, you know, one of my articles is about, it’s based on my dissertation research, and it’s about, as I said, procedural justice in negotiation, that the idea of fairness, and what my research found, for example, was that when lawyers experienced fairness in negotiation, when they rated the process more fair, you know, as a more fair process, they were more likely to recommend the agreed upon outcome to their clients. They thought it formed the basis for a better long term agreement. But what’s really interesting about that: exactly the point that you say, the client’s not in the room, right? The lawyer’s negotiating without the client and the lawyers making an assessment about the fair treatment. Like, what does the client care about the lawyers fair treatment, right? And so this is this kind of question of, like, how does that translate? You could say it’s just a transitive property, like, if you treat me lawyer fairly, then I go tell my client, like, Oh, I was treated really fairly. This was a really fair process. Some clients might be like, sure, yeah, that’s great. And some might be like, What do I care? I pay you by the hour. You can be treated however, like I don’t care about that, right? But on the other hand, you might find that some lawyers could manipulate the client’s desire for fair process and present things differently to the client based on what they think might happen, right? For example, you might see a lawyer really stressing how terrible the process of the negotiation was. Not I was treated so unfairly, but like, this was an awful process. And here are all the bad things in an effort to get a client to be less enthusiastic about, you know, a negotiated outcome, or vice versa, right? You might see someone say, oh, like, this was a great process. They were, you know, they were this, this, and this, you know, everything worked, really, you know, in a very fair manner. And so you should take this, I really recommend this to you. And so the bias could kind of creep in a little bit more subtly, right? And it’s a really important question. And there’s lots and lots of places where there’s that gap between what the lawyer is experiencing and what the client is experiencing. There’s actually some fascinating research. I don’t mean to go too far astray, but there’s some fascinating research by Professor out at UC Davis, who has found that one of the most desirable forms of dispute resolution for, like, regular people, is they say negotiate, negotiation like they don’t want to go to court necessarily. They want a negotiation to happen, and they want to be present, like they want their lawyer to negotiate, and they want to sit there and be in the room, which, like for many lawyers, is terrible, like they’re like, I don’t want that, right? That ties my hands and, you know, it takes away my ability, or like, be good cop to their bad cop, or whatever. But, you know, people say they want it, and that’s an area where you could really see some reduction in that dissonance between the lawyer and the client, potentially. Yeah, that’s actually

Will Bachman 30:54
probably people who want that are probably misinformed, or, like, not highly educated on negotiation, because you actually want to have the principal out of the room so that you can say, Oh, my client will never agree to that. No way. They’ll stomp their feet, you know, right,

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 31:11
right? Yeah, no. I mean, that’s like, every time I look at that research, which I assign from my students, often I’m like, oh, like, those poor lawyers, right? Because that’s really, that’s, that’s not what you want. And you know, they might have a tough negotiation with their own client to try to explain why. That’s probably not a great move. I’m curious,

Will Bachman 31:30
do you get inbound requests to go and serve as an advisor or expert consultant on negotiations? Do you? Do you get those and turn them down, or maybe not seek them out? Or

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 31:43
so what I am always happy, especially since I teach so many executives and professionals, I often get requests to give advice, and I’m very happy to always do that, kind of, like, on a very pro bono, informal basis. Like, I’m always happy to sit down and have coffee with someone and talk through their negotiation, but I don’t, I don’t do that as like an outside practice.

Will Bachman 32:03
I see, I imagine, that some people that have your kind of education and teach similar courses at other schools might have a side gig of consulting on on those sorts of high stakes negotiations.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 32:16
Yeah, I think they probably do. I would need to up, up. My up from zero, my malpractice insurance, the lawyer, the lawyer is always in the in the line of fire. So, you know, I, I’m very happy with my informal consulting.

Will Bachman 32:32
Alright, a few areas you want to explore Spain. Where did you go in Spain, and what were you doing that year after college? And what sort of you know has that spoke to a lifelong love of olive oil infused tapas.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 32:50
That’s great. So I was in Madrid, and I went to Madrid, and I didn’t know anybody except there was a guy who actually was in Dunster house, a year ahead of me, who was living in Spain, and I stayed and like I slept on his couch for like, a week while I tried to figure out a place to live on my own, and I ended up living with a family for most of the year. It was a terrible experience, but interesting. And I studied at the Complutense, which is like a humongous university there. They had a program in what they called Hispanic studies. It was a program that was all about Spain, and it was, you know, like history, language, grammar, art, and everything was taught in Spanish. And it was sort of an international program. I often am kind of shocked in the modern world. This was all pre internet, so I don’t even remember how I found out about it and how I arranged it, you know, everything with letters and stamps and, you know, old fashioned. But that was the program, and they did it, and it was really interesting. It was a lot of students from all over the world who were in this program, you know. And so our common language was Spanish, and so it was. It was really interesting program. I learned a lot. I eventually moved into an apartment with some friends, which was a much better living arrangement. And it was, it was just a fascinating year. I found it to be, at least at the beginning, kind of a lonely experience being in a big city where I really knew almost nobody, and by the end, I kind of felt like, Oh, I could kind of go anywhere now. And that was one thing that was really great about it. Madrid is a huge city. It’s like, you know, it’s like New York, but in Spain, you know, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not kind of warm and fuzzy and friendly. And it was just like, I was just there, kind of on my own and and it was great. It was like, like living. It was not necessarily great, but looking back on it, it was a great experience to have had. Yeah.

Will Bachman 35:01
And how has did that kind of spark any kind of lifelong, you know, interest in Spanish literature or Spanish, you know, film, or Spanish food, or not

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 35:15
really, okay. I mean, I do like Spanish food, I do, you know, yes, but I wouldn’t say, I mean, I love the Spanish language. I wish I had stayed a little bit more connected to it. When I lived in New York, which I did until 2006 it was a little easier. There were more Spanish speakers, kind of in my day to day. But, you know, I I love to get back a little bit more to it, because, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s great. I went to Spain a few years ago with my family, and I remember the lady behind the desk at the hotel said something, and I was like, I’m sorry. Like, I don’t know that word. And she was saying email in Spanish, just to, just to go back to my other point, like that was a word I didn’t hear once when I lived in Spain, because there was no email

Speaker 2 36:06
if people didn’t have email, I mean email. So that was

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 36:11
I was like, oh, I need to update my vocabulary a little bit for the modern, modern Spanish experience.

Speaker 3 36:16
Correo electronico is they could say, yeah, she said, she said, ama, you

Will Bachman 36:27
have not heard Okay, so tell us about baking.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 36:33
Oh, baking. So I love baking. I’ve always loved baking. Since I was little, I’ve been a baker. And so I bake all kinds of things – you can you can look at my baking Instagram if you want.

Will Bachman 36:43
I’m well, share to us. What is the what’s the handle here? What’s the

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 36:46
I’ll look it up, and I’ll tell you look at it right now. So that’s where I post all my, all my baking things. It’s Rebeccahollanderblumoff, all smooshed together. No hyphen. Alright,

Will Bachman 36:57
alright. Oh,

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 37:00
and if for people listening to the Harvard podcast, who are Harvard people, you’ll recognize the building in my profile picture. Okay,

Will Bachman 37:09
and what are we talking like? You know, Brownie mixes here. Are we talking like tiramisu on a kind of foam, you know, embedded, gold

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 37:24
dusted. So I, yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m like a, like, one of the chemist bakers, and I don’t use any mixes. So, yeah, no, I love baking, bread, cookies, cakes, all kinds of different, you know, different projects. You know, fruit desserts, chocolate desserts, you know, all kinds of things.

Will Bachman 37:45
And okay, listeners, I am, I’m checking this out. This is extraordinary. These photographs are crazy good, okay, these Christmas cookies. This is like, I mean, you’re not just a photograph. I mean, you’re not as a baker, but you have somewhat is, are these your photos? Yeah, yeah. Those are my Oh, I mean, this is you. I’m glad you like it. This is not just a snapshot. I’m looking at these apple cider donuts that I can just, I mean, I can almost reach out and just touch the little dusting of sugar on them, on this beautiful, kind of blue ceramic against the red background. I mean, there is some artistry here, not just in the baking, but in the oh my gosh, this looks

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 38:23
this is my this is where my creative side gets to come out. So alright,

Will Bachman 38:27
and we have some macarons here. This is we have a a happy fourth with a raspberry, blueberry American flag. All right, okay, listeners, you you gotta check out this Instagram. There will be pie. This is, this is so beautiful. And is this a are you kind of baking so much that you’re kind of just giving it away and putting it on people’s doorsteps or stuff, or talk to us?

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 39:00
Uh, it does happen. It does occasionally happen that I bake off for my students, actually. Oh, nicely, as my boys have – two, you know, have gone away to college and so, you know, there’s only so much baked goods you can eat in the house. So I do like to share it with my students. And students are always a great repository for baking. They really are very happy when you bake for them. So yeah. But in our heyday here at home, I had my three boys, and I have two nephews who live just who lived, because now they’re in college too, but they lived like five minutes away. So, we had like a whole house full of baked good, baked good eaters.

Will Bachman 39:41
That is what’s it? What’s it mean to you? Is it sort of a time where you can just really, like interstate of flow and disconnect from the stress of professional life or or like, what’s, what’s, what’s, what’s special about it? Is it inventing new recipe? These are more just the texture, the materials. What do you love about it?

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 40:05
Really great question, you know, I noticed for a long time, like, if I’ve had a stressful day, you know, whatever, I love to bake. If I’m in a great mood, I love to bake. I think you’re right. It has to do with just the flow, you know, the being in the space. I love the making of it. I think I come from a long line of people who like to feed other people. So, you know, that’s just, you know, some people say, you know, food’s just food. Food is fuel. I’m definitely in the food is love camp and so, you know, baking is the way that I want to share my love with the world.

Will Bachman 40:43
Do you have and in terms of what you bake? My My daughter is also really into baking. She was, like, a finalist for one of these teen baking TV competition things, wow. But she was a finalist. She had this project one summer of she she said, Okay, I’m gonna bake every single thing in this French baking cookbook. Do you have any kind of personal challenges? Are you working your way through anything? Or, you know, do you have some kind of aspiration to make this best croissant or something? Or is it just ad hoc what you feel like doing? Tell us about kind of your choice of what to bake.

41:19

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 41:20
It’s a little bit more ad hoc, although sometimes I get books, you know, and I’m particularly inspired by them, and I’m like, I’m going to make a bunch of things. One year I did have like, you know, like, the 12 days of Christmas. I was like, I’m going to do the 12 cakes of Christmas. Okay, 12 cakes. Another thing that really kind of opened my horizons. This is a little bit silly, but when my kids were younger, especially living in the Midwest, I really wanted them to be exposed to a lot of different cultures, different ideas, and sometimes, you know, if you’re not traveling internationally, which, you know, is a little hard. When my kids were a lot younger, I really wanted them to kind of see the diversity of the world and kind of the just, you know how much difference there was, and you know, like, how much difference, even though you know how much similarity. So we actually did a thing where we cut up like a whole list of country names, and we put them in a hat, and every week we would pick out a name from the hat, and the kids would do, like a little research on the country, I mean, and they were young, so, like, the research, you know, like my one son who’s really into sports, would always research sports. And he’d be like, this is, like, their teams, and this is, but I would not do any research about anything except the food. And then I would make, like, a whole meal that was their, their cuisine. And then usually, of course, like a baked kind of dessert or some dessert. So that was a thing that was great to really open my horizons to all different kinds of family project.

Will Bachman 42:50
Tell us, does any one country stick in your mind? Of, oh yeah, for that country, I baked this and I baked this for dinner.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 42:58
Well, I’m going to tell you the thing that sticks in my mind. That’s the funniest thing there is a baked good called a Kringle that I made. I think it was an Estonian recipe, oddly, which I don’t think is like necessarily, what you would imagine, but it’s an Estonian Kringle. It’s like a cinnamon bread that then, like, I’ve made for years since then, because everybody loved it so much. But the funniest thing actually, about the one that like wraps around, yeah, exactly. It’s kind of you’ll see a picture. There’s definitely a picture of it on Instagram, but yeah, it’s

Will Bachman 43:29
Hungarians have that. I believe maybe Estonians do too, yeah, actually, I think

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 43:33
there’s a few different countries that do it. But the funniest thing was, my oldest child fell in love with this one dish that I made through all these, like, you know, different countries. It’s the Mongolian beef patty, like beef. And basically what it is it’s like a dough of flour and water and you wrap ground beef, like this piece of flour water, it’s the most plain thing you can imagine. And like, all my kids are like, we love that, especially my oldest one. So they’re like, let’s have the Mongolian like, meat pies, I guess Mongolian empanadas, yeah. And they’re like, I mean, like, the only seasoning is supposed to be salt, like, it’s they’re very, very plain. So it’s funny with, like, you know, all the crazy ingredients that I’ve bought over the years, that’s like one of the big winners.

Will Bachman 44:22
Winner. Okay, next segment tell us about any classes or professors at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 44:33
So I’m going to start by just saying I teach at a law school, and my focus in my academic work is on procedural justice. I took Justice my freshman year. I did really badly in it. It was one of my least favorite classes in college. I know people love it. I did not. It was like 800 people. I really just didn’t. So that’s my funny story about that the classes that I love. Loved, you know, I really, I was a history and literature major, and I loved a lot of what I did there. You know, I remember I had a US History class where I really wanted to write my term paper, whatever it was called, I guess they don’t call it term paper, but I was like, the big paper. I wanted to write it about the Beatles coming to America, like a kind of cultural movement. And the TA was like, Absolutely not. So I wrote about FDR court packing, and that was also fascinating, and I think really helped me more career wise, but kind of funny. I also took a French literature class, and, like, we wrote all our papers in French, everything was in French. And I loved that class. And I, you know, I wish that I knew French now, like I knew French then. I took an awesome modern poetry class, also that I loved, and I often liken the study of law to the study of modern poetry, because every word matters, right? Every word, every construction, is, is it’s either for a reason or we give it a reason. And, you know, it’s a lot like looking at the Constitution, or like looking at a statute like it’s, it’s that kind of breakdown of each word and its meaning. So, yeah, so those are some of the things that that I really enjoyed.

Will Bachman 46:18
Okay, Rebecca, where can listeners find you online if they want to follow up or keep track of your research and find out what you’re

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 46:28
doing. So I am the only Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff that there is, and I’m the only Hollander Blumoff that there is. So if you Google me, my WashU profile will come right up. That’s law.washu.edu there’s a faculty directory. I’m right there, and then I am also, I’m on BlueSky, and I’m I’m on the other one that

46:56
that I’m still calling Twitter,

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 46:59
and my my handle, or whatever it’s called, is our album, R, H, O, L, L, B, l, u, M, and, yeah, and you already know about my Instagram, so Alright,

Will Bachman 47:14
we will include those links in the show notes. Rebecca, oh,

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 47:18
I have a, I have a an author page on SSRN, which is like a Social Science Research Network page too. I forgot, right? Not

Will Bachman 47:25
every guest has one of those. Okay, we’ll include those links in the show notes. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining today. Thank

Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff 47:32
you. Well, this is just such an amazing, amazing project that you’re doing. Thanks for having me. You.