Skip to content
Welcome Students, Colleagues and Friends!
This website is constructed primarily for the benefit of students at Colorado School of Mines in one of the law related courses I teach (this semester being the Applied Philosophy of the Constitution for the McBride Honors Program). The site has attracted others too – colleagues who teach in this field, and often friends and others in the community who share an interest in these topics – all of whom are welcomed and invited to reach out to me ([email protected]) to share comments, insights, critique and friendship as peers in academic pursuits.
A Little About Me
I’ll open by sharing a little about myself, inviting reciprocity as I know my students cherish their families, friends, and non-academic interests which I hope they will similarly share in our classroom. I’m dad of three, grandfather of one, husband, brother, son, father-in-law, friend, and various creatures that roam our home. I enjoy music, poetry, art, science, good food and bad food, the ocean (skin diving and scuba, and riding waves), hiking 14ers and anyplace in the mountains, running (well, walking and jogging a bit) in half-marathons (trails being my favorite), riding (an ebike, if I’m being honest), my friends in the Evergreen community and other places near and far. Among my guilty pleasures are beekeeping, listening to philosophy podcasts, and travel (I’ve visited Brazil, Panama, the Carribean, Russia, Israel, Egypt, nearly every western European country, Iceland, Canada, and Mexico, 44 of the 50 US states, and have lived on/near each of the coasts and have a small place in a town named Aguada in the US Territory of Puerto Rico).
As for education, I’ve earned a Juris Doctorate from UC Berkeley (1986) and two bachelor’s degrees (Law and Society, and Sociology) from the University of California at Santa Barbara (1983). As an adjunct professor, I’ve been teaching law related courses at Colorado School of Mines for some two decades and served for many years on the faculty at the University of Denver (Law and Society division of The Women’s College). At Mines I have enjoyed teaching Constitutional Law, Applied Philosophy of the Constitution, Intellectual Property for Engineers, and Introduction to the Law, and have presented a dozen or so lectures on campus (the annual Constitution Day presentation for more than a decade, as well as guest lectures for other courses) and have led the McBride excursion to Washington, DC.
I’m a practicing attorney admitted to the bar in Colorado, California, and Washington, DC specializing in civil litigation as a trial attorney, real estate, corporations, and estate planning. [If you landed here while looking for information about my law practice, click Lawrl.com.] I serve proudly as a board member of various non-profits, currently as an emeritus board member for Special Olympics Colorado, and formerly on the boards of the Mountain Resource Center, The Learning Center Preschool of Evergreen, and Congregation Beth Evergreen.
Tidbits:
I maintain membership in a club (founded by my oldest daughter when she was 5) called “The Friendship Club that holds as its motto: “Helpful, Kind, Polite, Loving, Peaceful.” We accept any member who might try living with the motto.
Here’s the poem my mother-in-law, the late Dr. Barbara Sax introduced to Kim (my wife) and I as her wedding wish:
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver …
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
This was the father/daughter song we enjoyed at my daughter’s wedding (during COVID, outdoors) to Pedro.
My daughter, Michelle (Mishie), is Doctor Noodle, delivering babies and taking care of families in Broomfield, my daughter, Miriam (Mimi) is teaching 2nd grade this year in Philadelphia, and our youngest is my son Jesse, who balances his life as a pilot instructor in Baltimore alongside his life with his honey who is in med school and their pup, Jojo (who is not too easy …).
Core principle from which I tend to reason through jurisprudence involving constitutional law: Equality of our inherent dignity should be observed if we strive to build just communities on the little Earth we share.
Take care and give care!
Rich Levine
