By Libby Adler

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The most surprising thing he ever said to me was “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really quite beautiful.”
We were sitting across the table from one another in a bistro in Boston’s Back Bay, enjoying a brief escape from the demands of our studies. In the spring of 1998, we were classmates in the Harvard Law School Graduate Program. Conrad,** a German lawyer earning his doctorate at the University of Frankfurt, was in Cambridge for the year to bolster his academic credentials, and I, an American lawyer, was doing the same, preparing to enter the law teaching market.