Honored guests, parents, and most of all fellow graduates, hello and welcome. To all graduating Boston University Law School students, congratulations. We made it. Three tough years, whether you were among those who did the work or not, same result; three tough years. Nineteen years of studying books, waiting for this moment when our formal education and training is finally done. Did someone say “freedom”? Please, God, let it be easier in the future?
Graduation speeches are kind of funny. They are the time when someone, for one day, speaks about those things that are never otherwise explicitly taught or mentioned at school. Platitudes are offered, advise given, big issues are addressed. I doubt two or three times a lifetime is enough. But the thought is that somewhere along the line we were supposed to pick-up the things that are in these speeches on our own, somewhere between civil procedure and LA Law.
If we are not going to work for major corporate law firms, we can plan for the first time in a long, long while to have evenings and weekend to ourselves, free of the guilt that we should be studying. It is worth giving some thought to what we are going to do with this time.
I suggest we take this time to educate ourselves. I know this sounds silly, even cruel after 19 years of formal education, but it is not education in the careerist sense but in the broader sense of which I am speaking. We should strive to understand more about the lives of others as well as our own. Learn from other cultures, from literature, travel and the arts. We should pursue education and greater understanding. From this we will develop a sense of fairness, seeing life not from a sense of our own gain, but from a wish to contribute to the general good. This is what it is to be educated, to be mature, to be cultured.
Over the past three years we have been taught to distinguish one theory or thought from another. We should apply this to our own judgment about what is right, distinguishing between what is right according to our own self-interest, and what is right for the general good. If we are really going to be able to see both sides of an issue, in the larger sense, we will need to lift ourselves above always siding with our own self-interest. We will have to learn to put ourselves in the place of people whom we are not, and whom one has never met, those who are less ambitious, the recently arrived, the ghetto dweller, the child beater, the rape victim, the alcoholic and the outcast – even the couch potato! We will never be able to imagine how others live unless we go beyond the analytically based education we have so far received. It is our feelings and imagination, and their refinement, that further education and culture will bring. It is that element of ourselves that we are left on our own to develop. If we are satisfied with just rational and technical based education; we will lose the ability to imagine not just what could be for ourselves, but what could be for everyone.
If we graduate and live our lives believing that our own idea of success, our own view of ambition and accomplishment is the only way to live life, we show our arrogance and our ignorance. If we judge others solely against our own standard of success and use it to feel superior or inferior vis-à-vis others, we show our lack of education and understanding. If we let our law degree be the end of our education, and let our analytical training and formal education become a weapon to slice through not only arguments, but also people, and decent ideals standing between us and our objectives, we are inviting trouble, not only for ourselves but for our society. We should not necessarily think less of people who are less ambitious than ourselves, ambition alone is not social worth. Others may not themselves have such high standards of achievement, but may instead possess some of the humane and spiritual-based qualities necessary for our joint prosperity. Let us not become slaves to our current definition of success. Most of life is ahead. The most educated among us freely admit that they know so very little. Life should not be lived in a neurotic pursuit of a narrowly determined view of success, each moment one step ahead of our ego’s deflation. Each moment has some meaning outside of how productive we are.
During the first few days of law school, I met a fellow student of who I could not be more fond of. As we came to know each other it became clear that our politics and ideology differed. He thinks abortion is a crime and John Sannunu’s politic divine. Yet, it was not difficult for me to gain and keep as much or more respect for him than anyone else I met in our years here. He never once let me walk by his place of study without interrupting himself to say hello and chat. He was always willing to give me that which is most precious to efficient producers like ourselves, his time. He will go to a corporate firm, I into immigration law. It is not one’s position, job or place that give us our dignity, it is the yearning that stems from our hearts. It is not one’s politics or ideology that makes one right or wrong. It is not our economic productivity that gives us our social worth. It is our sense of decency, of joint enterprise, of idealism and responsibility.
These are not matters of politics or career path. One does not have to go into public interest law to live a life of moral responsibility. In fact, it is probably the stronger of us who could go into corporate law and retain their sense of moral imperative. The danger is that in a world where profit and material gain are often the issues the law addresses, and our job is to defend these interests, we can easily fall prey to internalizing the feeling that economic profit is a legitimate end in itself, a goal worth living for. The danger is that when we work to defend the money interests of those whom we serve, the meaning of our lives will become those interests. This is a natural inclination against which we must always struggle.
This is also not a matter of politics. Politicians from George Bush to Michael Dukakis. From Pat Robertson to Jessie Jackson, to Ronald Regan, want us to reach both forward and backward to a more compassionate, cohesive and benevolent society. The only way they differ is upon whom the burden should fall, the government or individual citizens. In many ways, the point is moot, the burden, or rather, the opportunity to extend a hand to others always rests upon individual people, whether we vote for more taxes and government action, or are more active and benevolent ourselves.
The call for us to play a more active leadership role has seldom been louder. We live in a society which is splitting. Not splitting apart, (although maybe that too), but splitting into class lines, splitting into rich and poor. Over the past ten years we have seen our country change from being a place where virtually everyone was in the middle class to a society where the middle class increasingly ceases to exist. Our country is becoming a place in which the upper middle class and the rich will exist in polar extreme to the lower middle class and the poor. Will this transformation of American society into the type of class based society we have so far avoided affect us? I believe it will, both in our professional lives and as citizens of this country. Government and the law it creates will be challenged. The upper economic third of our society will increasingly make decisions and institute the laws it wishes. The lower two thirds of the people will be subject to our wants, laws and norms. Even more than now, the haves will dominate the law and have their views and interests represented.
For our part, as university graduates, as lawyers and citizens, how do we prepare for and react to this change?
The reality is that our society is changing beneath our feet and we are only prepared for what was. Not in our careers, we have an extremely good and up to date preparation in that respect. It’s the world around us and our roles in it that has snuck up on us. The danger is that the different segments of our society have somewhat already and will even more so in the future stop talking to each other. Our government and our laws will be the way top third of society talks at the bulk of our citizens. As the lifestyles, values and inclinations of each group seem more and more incomprehensible and silly to each other, resentment will grow. And we as lawyers, and as defacto leaders will become protectors of what becomes a coercive system. Sometimes, as any parent will admit, subtle coercion is not bad, but coercion in the name of power and “representing one’s own interest” is different than coercion in the name of compassion and benevolence. People will see us lawyers, if they do not already, as players whose exclusive purpose is to advise people on how best to protect their own self-interest. This will be our role, it should be part of our role, and it must not be our only role.
We do have another role. Sadly, one left only to be spoken of on graduation days. We as lawyers, and graduates of an excellent law school, have assumed the role of leaders, whether we asked for it or not. To others we are the yuppies, we are the ones “on easy street”, we drive society’s engine, we can even read what the hell the law says. There is a reason people hate yuppies and the reason is not only jealousy. It is disappointment in the way people of privilege conduct themselves. There is sorrow and anger about obligation ignored.
It may be necessary for us to recognize that just because the law is good for us, it does not mean that it is good for the majority. Just because the law fits our own lifestyle, does not mean it works best, or is fair, for those of us who need to organize society around different rules and who may need different encouragement’s and barriers.
To be educated and cultured is to act as a leader in the quest to be fair minded and to search to do the right thing. We need to look to education not simply as a way to make sure we end up on the top third economically, but also as an avenue towards greater understanding of the world around us. If not, we will have no hope of dealing with and leading the changing society around us. Even in our law offices, we will work with people of completely different backgrounds and priorities. Will we fall into the trap of hubris, of arrogance, of thinking that due to our years of formal education, study and accomplishment that we somehow have more of a right to be right, whether we are discussing law, politics or the last movie we just saw? If we become prone to the mistake of arrogance, any hope of turning our formal training and accomplishment into anything more than just a weapon for our own advantage will be lost. Instead from this day, look forward to the chance to begin educating ourselves about the emotions, reasoning and experiences of others and incorporate that into what we have already gained. Then we will be leaders. Then our accomplishment will really mean something, something which cannot be measured in dollars. Though we are successful in our formal education and will soon be in economic terms, this does not mean we are successful, as of yet, in any greater way.
I once attended a Moslem wedding of an African-American friend in Harlem. The person officiating the service suggested to my friend and his future wife that they raise each of their future children as if they were the world’s first, as if all the world’s children would one day emulate their own. I suggest that we try to have the same attitude, play the same role, attain the same level of responsibility as this minister suggested. We should go out to face the blank slate which will one day be our lasting contribution and our epitaph. If we try to live each day with recognition that we are setting an example for others to follow, we will take not just the benefits of our positions, but also fulfill its responsibilities. We will one day say that we have made a contribution and that the world is a better place for our having been here. For though we are young, we will not always be so. And in fifty years, near the end of our lives we will look back at our days and search for a sense of value and permanency, not in how much we billed per hour, but in what we have left in our children, in our relationships and in our spiritual contribution to the world soon to be left behind.
Whether we practice on Main Street or on Wall Street, the standard is the same. What is in your heart? Do you judge fairness from what is best for you, or can you extend yourself above our most base instincts to ask what is the best for us all? The golden ring is not made of gold. It is a euphemism for an ephemeral feeling. It is pursued in many ways, but most of its paths take one to seek the common good.
So as we venture forth into the backyards and concrete jungles of this great country, let us keep our sense of idealism and ethical basis. Let’s not allow our naïve goodness from fading away to nothing more than a childlike memory of adolescent fantasy. Carry forth not as men and women of today, but of everyday. Shoulder the burden of living in crowded places not by shutting yourself off from others and solely protecting “your own”. Go forward with feeling, compassion and openness towards those people and things we have yet to understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment