Last Wednesday, August 23rd, I had the honor and privilege of addressing Akron Law's entering JD and MSL (Master of Studies in Law) students at our annual Orientation Dinner. The Dinner is a wonderful opportunity for incoming Akron Law students and their families to meet many of our faculty, staff, and alumni, and it marks the beginning of these students' lifelong membership in an even larger family: the Akron Law Family.
A few people have asked me to post the remarks I gave at the Dinner. They appear below, in slightly edited form.
Welcome to the Akron Law family. And welcome
to your first week as a member of the legal profession – the most important
profession in the world.
Alright, I might be exaggerating
slightly. The medical profession is
pretty important too: life and death often
turn on the decisions that doctors and nurses make. It would be hard to do without the
engineering profession: our buildings
and bridges would collapse or perhaps wouldn’t have been built in the first
place. Without the journalism
profession, democratic citizens would lack the information they need to make
difficult decisions in the voting booth.
But consider this: the decisions of lawyers determine whether democracy lives or dies. Without lawyers, democratic government would
collapse – or perhaps wouldn’t have been built in the first place. Without lawyers, there would be no such thing
as democratic citizens and no real point in having voting booths.
Human society exists in a constant
struggle between the forces of violence and the forces of reason. The forces of violence seek to subjugate 99%
of humanity to the will of the strongest 1%.
They assume many different guises:
fascism; racial or ethnic supremacism; imperialism; anarchism;
terrorism; kleptocracy (look it up!); theocracy; economic plutocracy. The logical (and usually intentional) endgame
of each of these “isms” and “ocracies” is the same: a small group of people, more powerful than
the rest because they wield weapons or other tools of violence or can pay or
persuade others to wield them, dominates the majority of their fellow men and
women, exploiting them for their own selfish purposes.
The forces of violence rear their ugly
heads every day, sometimes dramatically, sometimes so subtly that we barely
notice. When white supremacists march on
Charlottesville, Virginia carrying torches and, in many cases, assault rifles, they
represent the forces of violence in their most open and notorious form. When a theocracy-seeking terrorist uses a
panel van to run down dozens of pedestrians on a sunny summer day in Barcelona,
the forces of violence are palpably obvious.
Indeed, the very point of these acts is for the perpetrators to dominate
and subjugate others through the open threat of more violence.
But the forces of violence take quieter
forms as well. They act through the
employee who insults a coworker because of her gender identity; through the
student who expresses disrespect for students of other races; through the
internet troll who takes pleasure in anonymously bullying others; through the
police officer who finds an excuse to pull over black drivers in a
predominantly white community; through the political party that seeks to
arbitrarily entrench its power by impeding the voting rights of citizens they
fear will support their opponents.
The forces of violence in our society are (and
always have been) opposed by the forces of reason. The forces of reason seek to allow all human
beings to participate fairly and equally in shaping the world in which they
must live together. They deny that any
human being is entitled to dominate others by virtue of his or her race,
ethnicity, gender or gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, physical or
mental ability, age, wealth, or other morally irrelevant criterion. They seek common ground upon which collective
decisions can be constructed and recognize the need to protect individual and
minority rights so as to ensure the fairness of the decision process. The logical endgame of their efforts is a
world in which all of us can coexist without violence, because we recognize the
legitimacy of the decisions that bind us, even if we disagree with the content
of those decisions.
Our democratic system of government is a
product of the forces of reason, albeit an imperfect one. So are our commitments to constitutional
rights and to fair and impartial judicial procedures for resolving our
disputes. Universities like the one you
are joining today are embodiments of the forces of reason – though, again,
imperfect ones to be sure.
Which brings me back to why the legal
profession really is the most important profession in the world. In the end, the only thing standing between
the forces of violence and the forces of reason is the rule of law. The rule of law is the principle that all of
us – all members of human society – are subject to the same rules, and to the
same procedures for changing, interpreting, and applying those rules. The rule of law says that the same rules
apply to rich and poor alike; to black and white alike; to immigrants and
native-born citizens alike; to young and old alike; and yes, to neo-Nazis and
civil rights activists alike. The rule
of law is, in a very real sense, the opposite of rule by violence: it allocates power on equal grounds, based on
your status as a human being and not on your superior physical strength or your
access to weapons or other means of coercion.
Who preserves and defends the rule of
law? Lawyers do. Lawyers are the guardians of the rule of law. Lawyers have the expertise to make the laws,
to interpret them, to apply them in particular cases, and to resolve disputes
about how they should be applied. In
fact, those are precisely the skills you will be learning over the next three
or four years of your lives here at Akron Law.
So remember that when you are pulling your hair out studying for that torts
exam: what you are really studying for
is to become a guardian of the rule of law, of democracy, of individual rights,
and of the forces of reason over violence.
I want to leave you with one last thought
before I introduce our distinguished guest.
Being a guardian of the rule of law is hard. It is very, very
difficult. One reason it’s difficult – a
reason that surprises many first-year law students – is that often it’s not
clear exactly what the law requires in any given case. Sometimes the rules themselves are
fuzzy. And sometimes, even if the rules
are clear, how they apply to a given set of facts is not. Very often in the law, there will be plenty
of room for reasonable arguments in support of two – or more – very different
outcomes of applying legal rules to particular facts. This may be a source of frustration for you –
especially if you come from a background as an engineer or in some other field
where the point is to find clearly right answers. The law is not like that: in the law, very often the answers are
fuzzy. But keep in mind that this is
precisely why we need lawyers as
guardians of the rule of law, not computers or trained chimpanzees. Only lawyers can make sense of a situation in
which the law is fuzzy and turn it into a situation with an outcome that is
clear.
The other reason being a guardian of the
rule of law is hard is that law – even fuzzy law – often produces results we
don’t like. This is an inevitable
feature of the rule of law. A system
that always generated results that a particular person likes would be a
dictatorship – a form of rule by violence – not a system of law. In order to guard the rule of law, we as
lawyers sometimes must live with – indeed, sometimes must actively defend –
outcomes we find inconvenient, unpleasant, or downright abhorrent. This is why the ACLU defends the right of neo-Nazi
protestors to speak, despite detesting the message they will be free to utter
as a result. The ACLU realizes that the
law must apply to every person equally. If
the government can prevent a Nazi from speaking today, then it can prevent an
advocate of racial equality and social justice from speaking tomorrow. That would be government solely at the whim,
or in the interest, of those who happen to hold power at any given moment – a
form of rule by violence. The rule of law means the law must apply equally –
in a principled fashion, like a rule; that’s why we call it the rule of law. And applying the law equally, even when it
produces results that we hate, can be really hard.
Whenever the law hurts in this way, remind
yourself that there’s a greater cause at stake.
That cause is the rule of law itself, and the force of reason that it
protects. When a lawyer defends the
legal rights of an agent of violence, whether that person is a virulent racial
supremacist or someone accused of a garden-variety crime, it may look like the
lawyer is on the wrong side. But that
lawyer is fighting a much bigger battle.
She is protecting the rule of law and the force of reason from the very forces
of violence her client has endorsed or adopted.
And if she compromises her principles because she doesn’t like her
client or what her client stands for, the forces of violence win. This might be something to keep in mind as
you take the professionalism oath that our distinguish guest, Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio, will administer to
you in a few minutes.
