Among the abundant benefits of my Fulbright is the hands-off freedom I get to pursue almost any idea or possibility I please. Although the grant is not entirely unrestricted—I’m supposed to stay in Canada as much as I can and must turn in two very, very brief (i.e., one paragraph) reports on what I’ve accomplished—the Fulbright Fellowship offers something a little like the MacArthur Fellowship, which is a fully unrestricted grant intended simply to “provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their creative activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements.” If I put my mind to it I could do something completely bizarre with this money without too much risk of getting in trouble. Tobias Schneebaum, for example, was a 1955 Fulbright to Peru, where he promptly disappeared and spent the year in the jungle dining with cannibals.

My only act of Fulbright rebellion, so far as it goes, has been to work from home about once a week. That, I know, is pretty wild, and I make it even wilder by using that work-from-home time to pull together odd and diverse ideas and see what sense they make. Something like a self-imposed “20 percent time.” This is unstructured work and not anything like my law school experience, where I usually had “0% time” for anything beyond schoolwork plus a palette of projects that I tried to keep fresh and impressive. Some remarks that I recently read by Earl Johnson about the year when he and Gary Bellow were Ford Fellows at Northwestern Law School are apt:

If you can imagine a Gary Bellow without a caseload and a dozen projects to complete and a dozen deadlines to meet, that was what it was like. All we had to do for those ten months was write a few seminar papers and an LLM thesis. Our schedules were entirely flexible. We had plenty of time for self-exploration, for bull sessions about goals and aspirations, law, politics, and life in general. I still remember some of those conversations and draw inspiration from them.

I, too, am thankful for this time. As a lawyer intending to practice law in some form or another, I might never again have the luxury to take it. But, like Johnson, I expect I’ll long treasure what I did take.