'Be Curious, Stay Tentative in Your Views, and Value Community.'
Good evening. Thank you to Dean Chilton for inviting me to participate in this Chicago tradition.
When I look out at this room, I see a group of people who have survived nerve-wracking cold calls, navigated through complex hypotheticals on exams, and perhaps consumed more coffee than is medically advisable. Congratulations to all of you on making it this far in your law school journey.
You are now well past the intense first year, in which you started learning the vocabulary and basic concepts of the law. While it might not always seem this way, the rest of law school will pass by very quickly. Before you know it, you will all be out there in the world using your legal training. But I come to you tonight with good news—and it really is good news—you still have half of law school left!
Despite some downsides—such as having to take exams and not having much money—being a student is a privilege. One of the reasons that I decided to become a law professor is that it is the closest that I can get to remaining a lifelong student, while also getting paid.
So, what should you be thinking about at the midway point of your legal education? I realize that inevitably you’ll spend some time thinking about jobs after law school. But I am here to urge you not to allow this to occupy most of your attention. After all, you’ll have the rest of your lives to be thinking about life after law school.
I have three general suggestions for your remaining time here. These suggestions are to stay curious, be tentative in your views, and value community.
In keeping with the celebratory nature of the evening, most of what I will have to say on these points will be lighthearted and will even involve references to my two children. But there will be one somber note near the end because I feel some obligation when speaking to a group of future lawyers to take note of the particular time in which we find ourselves.
My first suggestion for the rest of law school is to stay curious. One of the great secrets in life is that everything turns out to be interesting if you know enough about it.
The interesting nature of our world is something that we all intuit as children but then sometimes forget. When my son was a little kid—he is 31 now, my goodness—I would take him for walks in our neighborhood—in Colorado, where we lived at the time. I would sometimes get frustrated with him because he would stop every few feet and want to examine a leaf or a bug or something. But he was right to stop, and I was wrong to be frustrated. He was definitely not thinking about jobs after law school. He now does environmental planning work, by the way, so all that looking at nature paid off.
What does this mean for you during the next year and a half? It means that you should continue to sample widely from the law school curriculum, including from courses that you do not think will relate to what you will do in your professional lives. This sampling is easier at Chicago than at many of the other top law schools because of the quarter system, which gives you more opportunities to take courses.
In addition, you should take courses from outside the law school—cross the midway, as they say. Law connects with many other bodies of knowledge, including history, economics, philosophy, political science, sociology, and anthropology, just to name some of the other disciplines.
The interdisciplinary nature of law is true even for highly doctrinal subjects. One of the courses that I regularly teach is Federal Courts. It is a course chock full of rules and doctrines, often formulated by the Supreme Court. Many of these rules and doctrines are not at all intuitive, which makes it a challenging course. To understand the law of Federal Courts, it is essential to figure out why the rules have been adopted and why they have sometimes changed over time.
Sometimes the reasons are historical, which requires a knowledge of US history. Sometimes the reasons sound more in economic or political science terms—for example, in terms of litigation incentives, or what sorts of arrangements will likely lead to effective checks and balances. And other times the reasons may be jurisprudential, relating to the nature and sources of law.
In addition to these instrumental reasons for broadening your legal education, an even better argument for doing so is simply the joy of learning. For most of you, when you graduate from law school, that will be the end of your formal education. So, this really is the time to round out your studies and satisfy your curiosities.
My second piece of advice for the rest of law school is to be tentative in your views. As I’ve already implied, learning legal rules and doctrines is not the most important thing that you do in law school. More important are developing habits of thought: asking tough questions, being willing to doubt your own beliefs and assumptions, and realizing that sometimes the best answer is that “it depends.” This frame of mind is useful in life in general, so that you continue to grow in your understanding of the world.
One reason that I decided to accept a teaching job here five years ago, after teaching elsewhere for many years, was that Chicago is a place where everyone is encouraged to explore ideas. But exploring means taking some risks and not always knowing where you’ll end up. That can sometimes be disorienting or even frightening, but it is also exciting and enriching. You should take those intellectual risks.
Being tentative in your views means that it is okay to muddle along in your thinking for a while, without having everything worked out. This virtue of sometimes muddling along is true for law itself. Law often works best when it does not purport to be perfectly consistent or coherent or efficacious, and when it is not overly set in its ways. The needs of society are complex and ever-changing, and what may make sense today may not make sense tomorrow. With the education and training you are receiving here, you will be well-positioned to help the law continue to develop.
My third and final piece of advice is to value community. At the University of Chicago Law School, you are not passive recipients of a service. You are rather participants in an ongoing community, and you will continue to be part of that community even after you graduate.
This means that you should continue investing time in friendships with your classmates. These are relationships that may stay with you for the rest of your lives. My best friend from law school, which for me was during the 1980s, is still one of my best friends. I must confess that I am not especially skilled at building these social connections; my 24-year-old daughter, who is very good at it, often comments with some glee about my failings in this regard. But I recognize their value, and I hope you do too.
Valuing community also means that you should get to know members of the faculty—and not just because we’ll write you letters of recommendation. I often get emails from former students about their jobs, their kids, and other developments in their lives, and I appreciate those continuing connections, and I know my colleagues do as well.
Speaking of connections, one of the many features of our law school that I like is the Greenberg seminar program, because it allows faculty and students to get to know each other in a relaxed setting, often in faculty houses. This year my Greenberg students and I, along with another professor, are spending the year reading through all of the Federalist Papers together. We are finding that these essays, written almost 240 years ago, have a lot of contemporary relevance. It is especially rewarding to be drawing these connections together.
Of course, the idea of valuing community extends well beyond the law school. In this respect, it is important to remember that law is ultimately about people, not abstract concepts. We have law so that people can exist together peacefully and constructively and so that we all have an opportunity to flourish. There is a danger of becoming so enamored with legal abstractions that we lose sight of the human side of the law.
The connection between law and people can hit close to home, and this is where I get to the somber note that I mentioned was coming. It is standard in these talks to invoke different uses of the word “midway.” One of the prior speakers even focused on the Battle of Midway during World War II. I will mention a different use of the term: the recent Operation Midway Blitz by ICE immigration officials in Chicago.
I offer this example not to take a side tonight in the contentious debates over immigration enforcement—debates that implicate issues of executive power, federalism, and human rights. My point, rather, is that events like this one serve as a potent reminder that law directly affects people and communities. That has been abundantly clear not only in the immigration operations in Chicago but also in other cities, most recently in connection with the tragic events in Minneapolis. In thinking about the law, it is vital that we keep in mind its real-world effects.
In one way or another, while you are in the law school community, you are all preparing yourselves to play an important role in other, broader communities. That is part of what it means to be a lawyer. The best way to prepare yourself for that role is to obtain a well-rounded legal education. And that takes me back to the good news: you still have half of law school left. I urge you to make the most of it.
The following is my toast to you, the JD class of 2027: may you remain curious, continue to grow in your thinking, and treasure the people around you.
