What It's All About

N.B: I graduate from law school today, and I was selected to serve as the student speaker. I am posting the text of my speech because I think it is important for people to consider the role of lawyers and what it means to become one.

Whatever my graduation says about me, it indisputably says a great deal about my parents, two loving, courageous, brilliant people whom I respect more than I could ever express. I have pursued my goals with zeal because to waste all that my parents have given to and done for me would insult their hard work and commitment to their children. I also wanted to succeed at school because I owed it to my sister, a witty, strong, and indispensable best friend who always believes in me. I am as fortunate as I am happy today.

Commencement Address

Despite what the publishing industry would have you believe, there is, in fact, no manual for law school. I know because I came to St. Louis with a basic problem: I hadn’t the faintest clue about what I was supposed to be doing while here. Something about reading a lot.

I received no shortage of suggestions. One friend told me to remember that the first year, they would scare me to death, the second year, they would work me to death, and the third year, they would bore me to death. I wasn’t quite sure who the “they” in that sentence was, but I got the point. Another friend sent me one of those vaunted guidebooks, Getting to Maybe. I read the first five pages and got to bored. Still more: treat law school like a job; use the IRAC system; take bar classes; take what you like; never take tax!

All of this conflicting guidance worried me. Like any proper law-school-bound neurotic, I needed a plan. On the eve of school, salvation arrived via email: a link to a Slate column by Dahlia Lithwick entitled "Letter to a Young Law Student." After months of boogiemen, warnings wrapped in jokes, and heavy declarations running the gamut from “all lawyers hate law school” to "you’ll meet your wife there," Lithwick, herself a lawyer, granted me license to stop worrying. Cloaked in sarcasm and disdain for the legal industrial complex of big law firms, her message was clear: make law school what you want it to be.

In Lithwick’s essay, grades didn’t matter and everyone got a job in the end. Nothing better captured the subversion she endorsed. Reflecting upon it now, that was easy for her to say. She wrote her column in 2002, and she had graduated from Stanford ten years earlier. Her experience surely reinforced the veracity of her own thinking.

Perhaps Lithwick would counsel us differently had she enrolled in law school amid historic financial upheaval and later marched from her graduation into the uncertain economic conditions that greet our class. Cynics might insist upon this revision, but to the contrary, more than ever, we should stop to appreciate Lithwick’s rousing insight. And I do not propose that lightly, so as to marginalize the jobless, for I was among them until this time last week, and I long envisioned that I would deliver this speech without an answer for the question of what I would do in the fall.

We should return to Lithwick’s letter because it hints at what made this experience rewarding, even if not always easy. Offering an antidote for law school’s prosaic rhythm, Lithwick advised that rather than replicate scenes from Paper Chase or succumb to the hysterical culture of competitive legal learning, students stop to question. She encouraged students to cultivate friendships, to ignore a hidebound industry and investigate the world. Like the many here who have studied abroad, completed internships, played intramural sports, volunteered, run student organizations, or even just gone to bar nights, I tried to heed this recommendation. In general terms, this is the engaged, larger life that a lawyer can lead, and no time has ever demanded this from us as today does.

The United States is a country in which seemingly no one understands what judges do; a country where reform in response to documented financial misfeasance cannot defeat entrenched special interests; a country where disenfranchising voters is as common as election day. This state of affairs is endemic of an unaccountability culture that imperils our way of life, and attempting to understand the severity of these threats can breed hopelessness.

As lawyers, we can complicitly extend the status quo rather than challenge it. It needs us, after all. If we work hard, keep our heads down, and earn our small slices, we can insulate ourselves from what it is that these challenges--political, social, cultural--represent, and the role that the law plays in them.

That shouldn’t be good enough for anyone here, though. Enriched by coursework and experiential learning, by conversations with each other, and by years spent in a city with complicated demographics, our class has seen the ways in which each of us can make a difference, however incremental. I am not inclined toward cloying optimism, and I am not inviting you to join me in the streets. I won’t be there. Instead, we all must apply the analytical skills, circumspect reasoning, and ethics that we take from law school to our everyday adult lives and lead by example. Lead as lawyers who remember that we are people, and as people who believe in the broad, valuable application of our legal training.

The graduating class is a bright, energetic group. I have seen it, and I am confident that we can carry this burden, even if only in small ways that ultimately add up. I find this heartening because the mechanics of legal education foolishly distract from its admirable goals. To wit: I don’t anticipate that our respective futures will include many instances when we feverishly type for three hours while consulting an outline containing a universe of issues related to a four-page set of facts that we read in five minutes.

However, we can connect seemingly disparate ideas at work. We can strip arguments down to their core, even if only to prove that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David really are appropriate authorities on everything. Please remind my mother of this. We can look forward to a lifetime of understanding why convictions were upheld and stocks were bought back. Our legal education has gone far beyond briefs and contracts. It changed my own thinking, worldview, and personality for the better. I hope that everyone graduating today has enjoyed something similar, and that we all fight a good fight steeled by what truly mattered during this experience.