Henry Weinstein

Henry Weinstein, a founding faculty member of the UC Irvine School of Law, spent 30 years as a journalist at the Los Angeles Times. But his career began long before that. “I actually started in journalism in elementary school,” Weinstein said, writing sports for the monthly newspaper. He went on covering sports until law school, when he switched to politics and legal affairs. “If you were at Berkeley in the ’60s,” he said, “it was probably hard to think you were going to spend your life just devoted entirely to sports.” Read more about Weinstein below.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. A Robert Lockwood blues CD. It’s a CD I often listen to while I’m stretching in my apartment first thing in the morning.

Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Empathetic.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. I wanted to be a Major League Baseball announcer. It was an early interest of mine and the very first job I had was as a statistician and announcer at a baseball league when I was about 15.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A Grey Goose martini, up, very cold, with two olives. It’s something I’ve come to appreciate more and more as I’ve gotten older. I also like strong red wine and single malt Scotch.

Q. What is the best advice you have ever received?
A. Advice I got from my parent at a very young age – just to do my best at whatever I was doing, and if I did my best, things for the most part would turn out fine.

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?
A. It’s very vibrant city, it’s a city where people have come from all over the world to fulfill their dreams. It’s constantly changing. I think it’s a very exciting place to live. It’s become a much more interesting and complex city than when I was a kid growing up. Whenever I’m away for a while and come back here I see new things.
On a more weekly basis maybe my favorite thing is the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. We live about five minutes from there and we go almost every Sunday. It’s just a wonderful representation of the city. There’s all kinds of great fruits and vegetables and food stands and there’s normally four or five kinds of music – good bluegrass, jazz. And you also have these 15-year-olds showing up who may be the next Dylan.

Q. What was the last thing that inspired you?
A. I find things that inspire me on a quite regular basis. There are a lot of people out there trying to tackle difficult social problems all the time. I was very inspired by the Obama presidential campaign. When I left the L.A. Times, the first thing I did was I went and volunteered for Obama for nine days in North Carolina, and it was a very uplifting experience.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. My wedding ring.

Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. I’m a bit of a pack rat. I probably have some books that I should give away, I probably have some neckties I should give away, and I probably have some CDs I should give away because I have more than I can probably listen to.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for a drink?
A. Nelson Mandela. I was very inspired by Mandela for many years. I have a very ratty, very old Free Nelson Mandela T-shirt that my daughter now wears. When he got out of prison and came to Los Angeles and spoke at the Coliseum, my wife and I went and it was very inspiring. There are a lot of people I’d like to meet, but he’d be at the top of the list.

To read more about Weinstein’s interview at Zócalo with Justice Carlos Moreno, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.