It is a great honor to be here with you this evening at this year's Midway Dinner.

This dinner is traditionally the time when you gather to take stock, exactly at the halfway point in your legal education. But why call it the "Midway Dinner," why not the "Halfway Dinner"?

Well, you have to understand something about the word, "Midway." The Midway Plaisance is, of course, the open space just next to the Law School that connects Washington Park to the west with Jackson Park to the east.

There is some symbolism here. In 1871, the South Park Commission hired the great landscape architect Frederick Law Omstead to come up with a plan for the Midway. Omstead had already done Central Park in New York, and the Midway was to be his masterpiece.

Quite elaborate, Omstead's plan for the Midway called for "a magnificent chain of lakes" connecting the lagoon in Washington Park with Lake Michigan. A labor of love, done in meticulous detail, the only copy of Omstead's plan was turned over to the South Park Commission whose offices were then in downtown Chicago.

Some days later, the plan, along with the office and the rest of the City, was destroyed by the Great Fire. Omstead's "chain of lakes" was never built. Others have proposed similar waterways between Washington and Jackson Parks, and perhaps something will come of it. What does that have to do with tonight's dinner? Not much, except that the Midway, like us, is still a work in progress.

Is there anything else going on? Well, the word "Midway" is used in a number of other ways.

In the dictionary, you will find that "midway" is a word used for the amusement section of a state fair. What does this have to do with tonight's dinner? There is a connection. Amusement parks became known as "the midway" because of the Midway Plaisance.

We are perhaps not a party school, but before the University of Chicago came to the Midway, there was the Great Columbian Exposition. The amusement section, including the original Ferris Wheel, was located on the Midway.

The Ferris Wheel was how Chicagoans topped Paris's Eiffel Tower, which had been built for Paris's great international exposition only three years before. Not as tall as the Eiffel Tower, but the Ferris Wheel was tall, really tall, taller than anything else in North America —and it moved, something the Eiffel Tower still doesn't do.

It's hard to appreciate the scale of the original Ferris Wheel. It was nearly three hundred feet tall. Each gondola held more than 2 dozen. A wedding was held in one of them. The Ferris Wheel's axle was forty-five feet long, thirty-two inches in diameter, and seventy tons in weight. It was the largest piece of steel ever forged. The Ferris Wheel's cement foundations went down 35 feet. You can't build anything there even now without doing massive concrete removal—something those who made the skating rink discovered the hard way a few years ago.

This meaning of the word "Midway" offers lessons. Some obvious ones— You should have fun. Lawsuits for architectural malpractice can be found right at your doorstep. But more importantly, the Midway itself still bears tangible evidence of Chicago's longtime commitment to Daniel Hudson Burnham's mantra— make no small plans.

Let's look for other uses of the word. "Monsters of the Midway," is today the nickname of the Chicago Bears. Here there is a more direct lesson for you as lawyers. Intellectual property, no less than real property, can be acquired by adverse possession.

The University of Chicago's football players were the original "Monsters of the Midway." The greatest football teams ever, the Midway is where they practiced and they too left their mark. For example, the distinctive scar on former president Gerry Ford's face, was left by Jay Berwanger in the Michigan game. Berwanger was a member of the Class of 1935 and the first Heisman trophy winner.

But when we dropped football, we abandoned our nickname, and the Chicago Bears appropriated it. This is not our only contribution to professional football. Another NFL team, the Racine Normals, bought our used football uniforms, and changed their name to match the color. As the faded color in the used uniforms was by then an unattractive red, the Racine Normals called themselves the "Cardinals" rather than the "Maroons." They now play in Arizona, with better uniforms.
The Midway from the start was the anchor of the University. Thinking about the Midway should make you think about the great university of which this Law School is a part.

In its first years, this dinner was held in Hutchinson Common —on the other side of the Midway— and was an occasion to meet faculty from other parts of the University.

You should not forget that this place remains a center of learning like no other. The University is about to finish a multi-volume dictionary of the Assyrian language, a project begun when Indiana Jones was still doing graduate work at our Oriental Institute and Ronald Coase was still an undergraduate at LSE. In 2008, our astronomers are going to finish the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most comprehensive survey ever done of the night sky. We are 20 years into publishing the definitive scores of the operas of Verdi and Rossini. Our scientists are out looking for the Higgs boson and they may soon find it. So cross the Midway. Take courses. Go to lectures. Explore.

But let's focus on another use of the word Midway. "Midway" is the name of what was, at the time the Law School was built in the 1950s, the largest commercial airport in the world. Huge, lumbering propeller planes would fly low overhead every day. It is for this reason that the law school's classrooms don't have any windows.

The name of the airport has nothing to do with the Midway Plaisance nor, superficially at least, with this dinner. It is named after the Battle of Midway. There are, to be sure, some lessons from this battle. Chief among them is that  when you are the underdog, when your options are limited, you have to take great risks.

But this lesson is not for tonight. Perhaps one day you will find yourself an underdog against long odds with limited options. But not now. Quite the opposite. Now is a time when you have choices. When you graduate —and you will graduate— you will join people who made such choices.

There is Sophonisba Breckinridge. a members of our first graduating class she worked with Jane Adams at Hull House, and she was a founding member of the Chicago Chapter of the NAACP. You will join Bernie Meltzer, an architect of the Lend-Lease program, and a prosecutor at Nürnberg. You will join Edward Levi, an academic among academics, who, when called to serve as Attorney General, rescued the Justice Department after the dark days of Watergate.

You and those around you are about to make choices, and if the past is prologue. You are among future Senators and members of Congress; Attorneys and Solicitors General; judges and ambassadors; managing partners, public defenders, CEOs, investment bankers, and entrepreneurs— and you are one of them.

This brings me then to the use of "Midway" I want to leave you with. Not the Midway Plaisance nor the Airport nor the Battle, but the small island in the middle of the ocean. Midway is where you landed as you crossed the Pacific in the early days of aviation.

You were halfway to the Orient, but you still had to decide where you were going. You had all of Asia to choose from. Were you traveling to Peking, Seoul, Tokyo or Hong Kong? Hanoi, Bangkok, or Singapore? Melbourne or Auckland or Manila? These were exciting, unexplored worlds, and you stopped at Midway first before you went on to any one of them.

You find yourselves at this Midway tonight. The question for you is a remarkably simple one: Where are you going?

Like Breckinridge, Meltzer and Levi, you will leave here learned in the law. But what you do with this knowledge— and all the other wonderful skills and talents you possess— is up to you. And you shouldn't let events choose your future for you. You should choose it.

So let me offer a toast to you tonight: May you pick your next destination well— and may you keep traveling until you find the place where you can do your best life's work. Enjoy the journey.