Robert Blecker is an Emeritus Professor at New York Law School, where he taught criminal law and Constitutional history. He is the author of 'The Death of Punishment', which grew out of the hundreds of hours of interviews he did with death-row inmates at some of the nation's most notorious prisons. (That research also led to him being the subject of the feature film 'Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead', as well as the star of the recent Amazon documentary 'Four Games in Fall'—about Deflategate and Tom Brady.) Blecker's play about the ratification of the Constitution, titled 'Vote No', opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and is headed back to New York for its Off-Broadway opening. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Blecker started out his career as a Special Prosecutor in New York, which is the context for the initial part of our conversation.

What do I wish I knew when I was starting out, that I know now? It is an excellent question. Oddly, it's not one that I'm hearing for the first time. It's one that I'm hearing for the second time. I didn't ask it the first time. It was restated from a question I did ask. So I'd like to tell you that story. I was a student at Harvard Law School, but I took a course from a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, a man named Richard Neustadt, who became well known for a book called Presidential Power. He was part of the Kennedy administration. If I recall, he was in the State Department, and he had held a number of positions. And he just exuded wisdom, to me. He taught us how to negotiate a bureaucracy, gave me some very good advice, then. And that was always treat the assistants as if they're the bosses. They may not get the salary, they may not have the title, but they know what's going on, and they have the boss's ear. And don't just treat them as a functionary and have them make appointments to speak to the boss. Speak to them as if they're the boss.