A personal view of the ethics and values of Bernard L. Diamond.

I met Bernard L. Diamond when he served as one of my examiners for the American Board of Forensic Psychiatry in February 1979. Following that, we became good friends although we lived on opposite coasts. Soon after, we happened to meet in an airport. He said he was trying to determine the significance of a particular comma in a 16th century law book. It turned out to be in the paragraph in Lambarde's Eirenarchu,' referring to criminal exculpability, which is one of the more historically significant statements in the evolution of the AngloAmerican legal concept of criminal insanity. We had an animated discussion about it, partly because we had differing interpretations, although we agreed on its importance. Later I had to smile as I considered the picture we must have presented: two grown men arguing in an airport lounge about the placement and meaning of a comma in a book more than 300 years old.