Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell

Welcome classmates! We are lucky to have you join us, and I am proud to begin my career as dean with such a talented group of students. I hope that I will have many opportunities to spend time with you, both while you're here and long after you've graduated and joined our core of loyal alumni. During the year I will welcome each of you to my home, and I hope you will also stop by my office from time to time.

Welcome speeches like this are a breeding ground of platitudes. Such talk means nothing coming from the speaker, who usually centers it around a few quotes he dug up from Bartlett's Quotations or The Simpsons, and leaves the listener bored and unfulfilled. So I'm going to try not to give that kind of speech, the one that talks about how hard law school is, how we teach you to think like a lawyer, how demanding our profession is, how you should work yourself to death.

What I would rather talk about instead is what it means to have the privilege of being a lawyer, and that will lead me to give you a bit of advice as to how to succeed in law school and, I hope, in your lives. Hard work is part of it, but that goes without saying.

Lawyers have always been an easy target of criticism. After all, we are partisan, we are sometimes argumentative, we by nature disagree, and we take money from people in distress, or at least people who have problems that need to be solved.

So what? To some extent, so does your doctor. So do your professors. So do engineers and architects, savers of lives, providers of knowledge, builders and creators. The difference, I think, that causes us problems, is that doctors, teachers, engineers, and the like, each do a job complete: the patient heals, the student learns, the bridge crosses the river. And those results are goods in themselves.

With us things are different. What does it matter to society if plaintiff A wins money from defendant B because they got into an argument about a strip of property, or a clause in a contract, about which reasonable people could differ? The main consequence often is that one reasonable person takes money from another reasonable person. What does it matter to society if Corporation A beats out Corporation B in a hostile tender offer for Corporation C? As we all know, the main consequence is that investment bankers get rich.

I don't mean to say that the consequences never matter. They always matter to your client, and you will often feel the thrill of helping a person in trouble solve a problem. They certainly matter when a defendant faces the prospect of losing his life. They matter deeply to a family of small means who receives compensation from a doctor whose maltreatment of their child has left a young life permanently damaged. They even matter deeply to our larger society when, for example, the Supreme Court makes a decision determining the outcome of a presidential election.

My point is not that consequences never matter - sometimes they matter quite a lot. Rather, my point is that when you look at the quotidian work of an individual lawyer, in an individual deal or an individual case, it is often hard to see the value these deals or disputes have to the economic growth or welfare of our society. Sometimes they look downright wasteful, or even destructive. It's sometimes even hard for us, as lawyers, to see that value on a day-to-day basis, and rarely do we have time to reflect upon it. If we can't, why should anybody else?

So I'd like to suggest that instead of our day-to-day work, we think of the collective body of our work as lawyers, the collective body of our work throughout all of history, the collective body of our work today, to understand what it is that we, as a profession, really do. When you look at our work as a collective project, I think it's easy to see that lawyers have a very special, indeed indispensible, value to ours, or any, society. That collective work is deeply inspiring. For when you look at the collective work we do, it is easy to see that we lawyers are nothing less than social engineers.

No single case or deal may be that important, at least as a social matter. But leave out the lawyer, and the ideas of scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs remain just that - ideas. Introduce a lawyer, and you create a successful business, or patent a new invention, or protect a work of art that improves lives, creates happiness, and enhances our standard of living. Leave out the lawyer and a factory is just a bunch of parts, an architect's plans are pretty drawings, a school goes unbuilt and unpopulated, a scientist's ideas for curing disease are words in a scholarly journal. Leave out the lawyer and you keep your money under your mattress instead of in a bank. Leave out the lawyer, and disputes among typically reasonable people turn into violence, and disputes among unreasonable people become worse. Leave out the lawyer and nothing and nobody are safe. Leave out the lawyer, and all of the institutions of economic growth and social welfare, all of the institutions of interpersonal regulation and the protection of the vulnerable, disappear. Leave out the lawyer, and we'd have little reason to get out of bed in the morning - and we'd probably be afraid to, anyway.

Lawyers build societies. Lawyers take the store of human behavior and human knowledge and turn them into tools, into instruments for applying all that we know to the world around us. There is a reason why law is at least the second oldest profession. And I suspect it's the first, because somebody had to structure the commercial transaction! Take away the lawyer, and you take away society. Take away the lawyer, and you take away civilization.

Don't lose sight of this, our collective role and our collective mission, as you struggle through the day's reading, briefing cases, keeping up with class discussion, absorbing the profound effect caused by a misplaced comma in a contract or a slip of a scalpel. You can become a competent lawyer without paying attention to any of this, or so I think. But you can never become a great lawyer without a keen and constant awareness of your role in society.

So how do you succeed in law school? How do you become a great lawyer? How do you fulfill your role as a social engineer? First, take advantage of all that we have to offer you. This is a remarkable law school, one filled with teachers and scholars of extraordinary talent and education, teachers and scholars who have created courses, programs, and experiences for you that are unlike those at any other law school. I know this better than most, because I have spent the last year visiting many law schools and studying what they do in making my decision as to where to become dean. Case Western Reserve is remarkable.

But it is only remarkable if you use it, and use it fully. College is over, and you are now responsible for your own education. As with anything else, you get out of law school what you put into it. So give it all you've got. What we have built for you is here for the taking. I sometimes hear students complain about law school. The fault most often lies in themselves.

But there is more. Lawyers are social engineers. The "social" part of this is critical. You cannot be a great lawyer if you don't understand your society, and you can't understand your society unless you are steeped in it. So, as busy as you will be, take the time to read history, sociology, psychology. Take the time to read great novels, go to the theater and the opera, study great paintings, and listen to great music. Read a newspaper and remain aware of world events. For these are the repositories of our collective consciousness, our culture, our society. These are the residue and product of humanity. It is through these cultural and intellectual experiences that we form as human beings and determine our social values. If you haven't already, start your lifelong process of continuing education in law school, and never let it go. Because you can be a competent lawyer without it, or so I think. But you will never become a great lawyer, you will never realize your potential as a social engineer. And you will never experience the real joy of exercising your craft.

One of the wonderful aspects of a life in the law is that you are always learning new things through your practice. Indeed you have to learn new things, many of which you'll have to teach yourself. You'll have to learn perhaps about surgery to prepare or question an expert witness, learn about the cultures of poverty and vulnerability to be an effective advocate for the poor, learn about the intricacies of finance to help a company grow with venture capital or to merge two giant corporations. We will teach you much. But you will always have to teach yourselves. Start practicing this in law school.

Challenge yourselves to stretch beyond the possible. You'll be amazed at what you can achieve. And you'll have a far more gratifying career, and a happier life. For if you don't challenge yourselves, you settle for mediocrity. You may not always succeed at the challenges you set for yourself. But it is far more satisfying to have tried and failed, than to settle for a placid life of middling achievement.

Eleanor Roosevelt spoke what I have always adopted as my personal code of living: "You must do something you cannot do." Follow that advice. Don't take the easy way out. Challenge yourself daily, and you will achieve great things.

So we lawyers are a lucky bunch. At least if we do it right. And we are here to help you do it right, to teach you and to guide you. But you must do your part; you must help us help you.

I want to close with just one other observation. Law school has often been described as a dreary, soul-sucking slog that turns you into the kind of person even your friends and family can't stand, a pettifogging, posturing, jargon-using, argumentative show-off. Well, this can happen. I know because it happened to me! But I got better.

Seriously, what I want to leave you with, what I hope you take away from this talk if you take nothing else, is that law school can be all that. But it shouldn't be, it doesn't have to be, and, if it is, you have only yourselves to blame. You are a remarkable group of educated adults. All of you have lived lives, have had significant experiences, have formed your characters, have at least begun the process of shaping who you are. All of you have values, commitments, and moral groundings that you have been developing your whole lives. No matter how easy it might be to slip into a mold that appears to be present in the structure of your education, don't allow yourselves to slip that way. Yes, we will change your habits of thought, but only to the extent necessary to train you to be the kinds of detailed, careful, critical, and analytical thinkers that any good work, lawyering or otherwise, requires. But it is not for us to change your souls. It is easy to lose sight of yourself in law school. I ask you not to do that. Maintaining your sense of self is yet another kind of hard work, but do it and do it well. For your own sake, and for the sake of your success, remember always who you are and where you've come from, no matter how difficult that at times may be. Do that, and you shall always succeed.

Welcome, good luck and, most of all, have fun. I look forward to enjoying law school with you.