Members of the Class of 2026, families, faculty, and friends:

Thank you, Dean Chilton, for that lovely introduction and for the honor of speaking at your very first commencement as dean. And thank you, Professor Strahilevitz, for sending such impressive law clerks my way.

To the Class of 2026: I well remember when I proudly sat in the pews where you sit today. With me was my wife, Edie. We’d been married just ten months, and it felt like we had our whole lives ahead of us. And we really did. Edie and I have now been married for more than sixty years. We have four children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Through it all, we somehow managed to build, maintain, and sometimes rebuild meaningful careers.

I attribute much of my professional success and satisfaction to the superb education I received at this fine law school. I learned from the very best teachers—Walter Blum, Harry Kalven, Soia Mentschikoff, Norval Morris, and many more. You may not know those names, but you walk right past their portraits every day on your way to class. These fine teachers taught me to think like a lawyer, to write like a lawyer, and to love the law. And the teaching didn’t stop on graduation day. Decades after I left the Midway, another of my favorite teachers, Bernie Meltzer, kept grading my papers. He sent me letters, and I mean actual letters through the mail, commenting on opinions I wrote as a judge. Twice, Professor Meltzer even insisted that his former student had gotten it wrong.

Of course, a lot has changed around here in sixty years. We didn’t have computers, much less AI. There were only five women in my entire class, and the place was virtually all white. Hyde Park was dreary, with little to do. Worried that we weren’t having enough fun, the Dean of Students talked our Property professor, Allison Dunham, into letting us have parties at the house he owned at 60^th and Kimbark and rented out to a bunch of law students. The parties were a real blast, especially because the Dean supplied not only a keg, but also a band called—and I kid you not—Mogen David and the Grapes of Wrath. 

I’m gratified to know, however, that some things have not changed. Your gifted and devoted professors taught you the same core skills and ideals that mine did. Thanks to them, and of course to your own hard work, you now have the tools to become superb lawyers. Whether you practice or teach, whether you work in government or the private sector, you have everything it takes to lead successful careers in the law. The challenge you now face, just as I did way back then, is how to have not just a successful career, but a meaningful one as well. Every generation before you has faced the same challenge, some finding more success than others.

Thomas Jefferson gave us just the guidance we need. In a 1792 letter to Britain’s first envoy to the United States, Jefferson wrote: “A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.” In other words, the way to live a meaningful life, a life of consequence, is to take personal responsibility for your society and everyone living within it.

Lawyers can fulfill that responsibility in many ways. We can serve clients, teach students, work for government, help organizations thrive—or even create new ones. And in each of those roles, we can serve valuable causes bigger than ourselves.

I found my cause in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I was deeply moved by the courageous Americans who sat in at lunch counters, braved Freedom Rides, and stood up to segregationists like Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor in Birmingham and Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma. At the Lincoln Memorial I heard Martin Luther King declare that he had a dream. I admired the devoted lawyers, both in the Justice Department and in private practice, who traveled South to bring the civil rights struggle from the streets into the courts. And I was profoundly inspired by the many courageous federal judges who rose above their segregated roots and, even at great risk to themselves and their families, honored their oath to enforce the Constitution’s guarantee of equality under law. Two powerful statutes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—both enacted while I was studying here at Chicago—have shaped and lent meaning to my entire career. 

[The next few sentences were not in my prepared text because I added them after the Supreme Court's Tuesday night decision in Allen v. Milligan. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was our nation’s most effective civil rights law. It was the Voting Rights Act that completed the work of ending Jim Crow. It was the Voting Rights Act that brought millions of Black voters into the democratic process and ensured that they have a voice. In Allen, however, the Court completed the work it began in Shelby County v. Holder, and continued through Louisiana v. Callais: contrary to the Fifteenth Amendment and its own precedent, the Court has now rendered that great statute virtually unenforceable. As a result, Alabama will hold its next election under a map that the district court found was expressly drawn to discriminate against Black voters. But this is not the occasion to mourn the demise of the Act—there will be time for that. Today we’re here to celebrate the Class of 2026, so I return to my prepared text.]

The law offers you many fulfilling paths. You may become an associate or partner in a law firm, a prosecutor or public defender, a professor, politician, or even a judge. I’d like to tell you how three of our fellow U of C graduates turned traditional paths in the law into deeply consequential ones.

Start with Alexander Polikoff, Class of 1953. Polikoff began his career in a major Chicago law firm where he specialized in securities law. He loved that work, and he was great at it. Yet he devoted decades of his career to a single mission: It was Alex Polikoff the securities lawyer who launched the famous Gautreaux litigation, a case that shattered Chicago’s long-standing practice of concentrating nearly all public housing in Black neighborhoods. Gautreaux produced real, measurable change: housing built throughout the region, thousands of families relocating to safer neighborhoods, and impressive gains in employment, education, and quality of life.

I first met Alex when I was a very young associate at Sidley. One day, a partner asked me to prepare an amicus brief in a school desegregation case for a firm client, the Chicago Urban League. Polikoff represented the plaintiffs, families fighting to desegregate their schools. His office shelves were crammed with volumes on securities law, but there he was, a partner in a major law firm, working pro bono on one of America’s most important civil rights issues. “Wow,” I thought, “that’s the kind of lawyer I want to be when I grow up.”

Michael McConnell, Class of 1979, took a different path. After clerking for both Judge Skelly Wright on my court and Justice William Brennan, and teaching here at Chicago, McConnell served with distinction on the Tenth Circuit. Then he did something perhaps unexpected. He gave up his lifetime appointment on the court to lead Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center, revealing that his first commitment has always been scholarship—scholarship whose impact extends well beyond the halls of academia. McConnell’s book The President Who Would Not Be King has permeated the national debate over the separation of powers. His widely cited articles on the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses have contributed to a modern understanding of the First Amendment that takes seriously the Founders’ twin ideals of prohibiting government establishment of religion while robustly protecting its free exercise. 

Then came Kelsi Brown Corkran, Class of 2005. Kelsi was one of my law clerks, going on to clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She served on the Justice Department’s Civil Appellate staff, chaired a major law firm’s Supreme Court practice, and is now a public interest litigator at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Kelsi’s life mission is to defend the Constitution and the rule of law. She has argued Supreme Court cases concerning birthright citizenship, homelessness, and asylum. She has helped defeat Supreme Court review in cases seeking to narrow protections for prisoners, workers, and immigration detainees. These are not abstract doctrinal issues. Every case involves real Davids up against real Goliaths. My constitutional law professor, Phil Kurland, taught me that the role of the courts, and therefore of lawyers, is to “protect the individual against the Leviathan of government, and to protect minorities against oppression by majorities.” That is exactly what Kelsi Corkran does every day.

Imagine these three lawyers sitting right where you sit today. Although they excelled at very different callings, they all have one very important thing in common. They all deployed the formidable skills they learned here at Chicago in our nation’s now 250-year effort to give meaning to one of the most important sentences in American—and, indeed, human—history: “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That is what they were doing. And you can do that too.

As you begin your lives in the law, pay attention to the world around you. Never lose sight of the many challenges our nation still faces. Embrace the defects in our less-than-perfect union as opportunities to make our world a better place. Attach yourselves to institutions whose missions you care about. And find mentors and role models like Alex Polikoff, Michael McConnell, and Kelsi Corkran. They will inspire you and help you in ways you can’t possibly anticipate.

Then, do it for the next generation. Your first opportunity to mentor younger lawyers will come sooner than you think. So, pay it forward as much and as often as you can. And always remember Thomas Jefferson’s admonition that we are all personally responsible for the society in which we live. Fortunately, we lawyers, and that now includes each of you, have a toolkit uniquely honed for precisely that responsibility. Use it well.

Congratulations.