You are on the verge of law school. And before you know it, you will be on the verge of law practice.

But let’s push our sights out a little further. Let’s imagine 10 years from now. It’s 2036, and you’re practicing law, in all the variegated splendor of different things that count as using a law degree. So what’s the world like, and what are lawyers doing? You want to know about that future right now, in 2026, so you can be ready.

But just one little thing—before we try to predict the world of tomorrow, let’s go back to the world of yesterday and think about what our predictions would have been.

A hundred years ago. It’s 1926. Roaring twenties, life’s great, lawyers know a good stock market when they see one. What you wouldn’t have expected from the next ten years is the Great Depression. Or the rise of federal agencies employing hundreds or thousands of lawyers.

OK, so that one didn’t work. Let’s try 1936. Try to predict the next 10 years. Unless your name was Winston Churchill, you probably would not have predicted World War II, with about 80 million people dying. You wouldn’t have predicted the atom bomb.

On a more modest but cheerier note, in 1936 you would not have predicted the GI Bill and its transformative effects on American higher education, and thus on American legal education, and thus on the practice of law. The GI Bill—which started out in 1943 with the name “a bill of rights for GI Joe and GI Jane”—democratized access to legal education in a way that’s hard to imagine now. 

So far, I think our predict-o-meter is stuck. Let’s try 1946.

You might not have predicted a world divided into US and Soviet blocs, both with nuclear weapons, that would fight a new war against each other in Korea. You would probably not have predicted the lawyers who led the construction of the post-war legal order in the West. Or the lawyers who courageously defended the victims of Joseph McCarthy.

And in 1946 you certainly wouldn’t have predicted the country was ready for Brown v. Board of Education, which was argued by a Black man who grew up in segregated Baltimore, and who won the decision from a unanimous Court.

And we could just keep playing this through. Everything is unexpected. That’s also true of sea changes in legal practice. Just a few decades ago, when Richard Nixon was president, there were students like you gathered for an Entering Students Dinner, and they had no idea that law firms would move to the billable hour, that attorneys would start advertising, and that you would find cases on computers.

And if you think back to just 10 years ago, when students sat here in September 2016, they did not expect Donald Trump to be elected president. Twice. They would not have predicted the COVID pandemic and Operation Warp Speed and the social effects of that time that we’re still trying to understand. In 2016, they didn’t know generative AI was coming.

So back to our prediction of 2036. It’s hopeless. You and I have no idea what the country will be like, or legal practice, or the Supreme Court, or anything. Prediction is a fool’s game, and you are not fools.

So does that mean we have to pack it in, and accept defeat in preparing for the world 10 years from now? For that question I want to answer a vigorous no. Instead of predicting the future, what you want is a legal education that is future-proof. Let’s think about what that means very specifically.

First, learn not only what the law says, but also why.

This is the great advantage of the Socratic method. I still remember my first class in this very building, in fall of 2002, Property class, with Professor Helmholz. We had all read a case called Pierson v. Post, about who owns a fox that is being pursued across different tracts of land.

Professor Helmholz walked to the lectern and looked at someone in the back row, and said, “Ms. Duffy, what were the facts of Pierson and Post?” I can assure you that what did not happen was that Ms. Duffy said the facts. Professor Helmholz said, “Hmm, that’s interesting; I always wondered what happened,” and we moved on.

Your professors may ask you some propositional questions about facts or about law, but that’s just the beginning. With their Socratic questions, they will ring the changes on those facts, and on that law, and you will see there is even more there than you imagined. Not just what, but exactly what—the exact details of where the fox moved, who was following the fox, how close the fox was being followed, and why these details might matter for the construction of the legal rule. And of all the leading law schools in the country, you are at the one that most pervasively uses the Socratic method in the first year.

Second, learn how law develops.

Lots of the great ideas associated with this law school can be seen as ideas about how law develops over time. That includes law and economics and the importance of incentives for how human behavior adapts to legal rules. It includes Professor Strauss’s work on how constitutional law develops like the common law. It includes Professor LaCroix’s work on how our constitutional federalism changed before the Civil War. It includes Professor Baude’s work on how there can be general law, law that different legal actors converge on even without any of them promulgating a legal rule. And it includes Professor Bradley’s critique of that idea, because it risks destabilizing much of our law.

I could list many more examples from the current faculty. The point is that to future proof your legal education, you want to learn law not just as a set of current data points, but also to think about law as a kind of structure, or organism, one that changes and adapts to its environment. Law is not just an empty field where other ideas and forces and powers work their will. It is its own thing, its own glorious and maddening and malleable and resistant and beautiful thing. Never really new, but never the same old thing.

You want to become a master of legal change. That is so important that here at the University of Chicago you will take a course, Elements of Law, that is designed to make you think more deeply about what the law is and how it changes.

Third, do your own work.

In 10 years, it will still matter whether you are a great legal writer, and the only way to get there is through each of the stages of writing yourself, rewriting yourself, rewriting again yourself, and so on.

The tools will change—typewriters, Microsoft Word, Claude—but the case for someone to hire you, depends on what you learn here. It depends on the hard work you have done. So embrace the work, and be glad you are at a law school that is absolutely committed to making sure that even in the age of AI, you learn how to write and think like a lawyer.

Finally, recognize that legal problems—really deep legal problems—are something we can make some progress on, and maybe understand a little clearer, but never really solve.

Let’s take one example. Right now disappointed litigants, including the federal government, are quick to take questions to the Supreme Court, jumping over the usual procedural steps. And the Supreme Court is allowing that to happen, and it’s sometimes jumping in to intervene quickly, not waiting for the usual process and full briefing and argument.

This goes by names like “the shadow docket,” “the emergency docket,” and “the interim docket.” There is lots to criticize about how this has worked over the last few years, and the justices and everybody else seem pretty exhausted by it all.

But what I want to highlight is the core normative problem. On the one hand, sometimes the Supreme Court has to act now or it will lose the chance to act later. To take an extreme example, if the Supreme Court doesn’t stop the execution of a prisoner, it will not have a chance to hear the prisoner’s case and grant meaningful relief. That, too, is an interim docket case.

On the other hand, we have all those layers of appellate process for good reason. The Supreme Court is not designed for making spur of the minute decisions on cases that are being heard in the lower courts. When the Court hurries to make an interim decision, it is more likely to do inferior work, and at the margin the justices will be more driven by their ideological priors.

That’s the normative tension: our judicial system is not designed for fast action by the Supreme Court, but sometimes the justices need to act fast to preserve their ability to act slow.

That normative tension is there right now, and it will be there 10 years from now, and a hundred years from now. At no point will we resolve this tension entirely in one direction. It is not turtles, but tradeoffs, all the way down.

You will be a better lawyer if you are in a law school that is never satisfied with the pat answer, the black and white view of the world, but is always pushing to find the tradeoff, to think about it as clearly as possible. Of all the law schools in the United States, and really of all the law schools in the world, there is none that is so characterized by this kind of intellectual curiosity and free inquiry and unwillingness to accept the solved problem as the University of Chicago. That is a skill of a future-proofed lawyer.

As I think back on what I learned here at the University of Chicago, this “home and sponsor of critics,” my legal education was marked by all four of these themes: the why of the law, an emphasis on legal change, responsibility for your own intellectual work, and a recognition of the tradeoffs in every hard legal problem.

One of the professors who future-proofed my legal education was David Currie, and his portrait now hangs in the hall outside the large classrooms. You should go look at it—Professor Currie has a big book in his hand, with an impish smile on his face; the picture just exudes curiosity; and you can tell he’s having fun.

He even inspired an affectionate limerick written by some of his students. The limerick was about how he taught a federal courts case called Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee; his Socratic questions about the case left us puzzled at the time, but they inspired us to keep learning after class had ended:

There was a wise prof in Hyde Park,

Who called Hunter’s Lessee a lark:

          Questions mysterious,

          Drew answers delirious,

And students left class in the dark.

Welcome to law school. I think you will love it. And what you learn in this building will never have a sell-by date. 

And so, a toast: to the future-proofed legal education of the Class of 2029.