Today, it is my privilege
to introduce Professor Carol Steiker. There will not be a formal
Q&A, but Professor Steiker will be available afterwards
to chat with students. Professor Steiker is the Henry
J. Friendly Professor of Law and Faculty Co-director of
the Criminal Justice Policy Program. She specializes in the broad
field of criminal justice where her work ranges from
substantive criminal law to criminal procedure
to institutional design with a special focus on issues
related to capital punishment. Professor Steiker is a graduate
of Harvard Law School where she served as president
of the Harvard Law Review, the second woman to
hold that position in its then 99 year history. After clerking for Judge J.
Skelly Wright of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice
Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court, she worked as a
staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the
District of Columbia, representing indigent
defendants at all stages of the criminal process. In addition to her
scholarly work, Professor Steiker has worked
on pro bono litigation projects on behalf of indigent
criminal defendants, including death penalty cases
in the US Supreme Court. She has also served as
a consultant and expert witness on issues
of criminal justice for nonprofit organizations and
has testified before Congress and state legislators. I was fortunate enough to take
Professor Steiker's capital punishment course, which was
hands down the best course I've taken at the law school. I vividly remember
the first day. We all filed in
to Langdell North, searched for the perfect
seat for the semester and settled in, chatting with
our friends and neighbors as we waited for class to begin. Professor Steiker, at the
front of the classroom, didn't say a word, but
somehow her presence alone lulled everyone to silence. The room was still,
and several moments passed as she gazed out across
the sea of eager students. Slowly and
deliberately, she began reading from an excerpt about
the Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine African-American
teenagers, ages 13 to 19, were falsely accused in
Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931. That moment stands
out because it exemplifies the
type of professor Professor Steiker is-- a professor that
students dream of and that other professors
seek to emulate, a professor who
does not shy away from the tough conversations,
one that encourages her students to lean
in when things get hard and who does the same
herself, a genuine badass, for lack of a better word, a
woman who isn't afraid to drop the occasional F-bomb
while effortlessly commanding a room,
ever more impressive in an institution
that was created for and continues to be
dominated by men. Professor Steiker, thank you
for consistently challenging us to think critically about
the most difficult topics in our society, for
allowing us space to empathize and recognize
the humanity in those who are so quickly demonized and
ostracized by our legal system, for pushing us to examine
the power, the limitations, and the responsibility
of the law in shaping a better,
more just society, and for being an example
of strength, brilliance, and fierce dedication to
combating grave injustice. Without further ado,
Professor Carol Steiker. [APPLAUSE] [? Noma, ?] thank you so much
for that terrific introduction. I've never been introduced
as a badass before. So that's going to go
down on the bucket list. I am honored and
delighted to be asked to address you as
your graduation grows near, class of 2018. And I have to say-- my own children, who
are in their early 20s, never ask me for
advice, and they rarely listen to it when it's offered. So this is a super treat for me. Settle in. In thinking about what
to say to you today, I was reminded of
this old TV game show from my childhood in which
people had two minutes to roll their carts through
the supermarket, trying to rack up the highest cost
bill for their groceries. Is that still around? You ever seen that one? It's a great show. So as I was thinking
about what to say to you, I was racking my brain for
champagne and caviar of advice to give to you, but what
I eventually came to is more prosaic. Instead of special
occasion wisdom, I want to talk about just
an every day kind of thing that we do all the time. I want to talk about
making choices. During your time in law school
and during my longer time here at the law school, students
come to me all the time asking for advice about
decisions they have to make, choices they have to make, what
should their 1L elective be, what courses should
they take as 2Ls or 3Ls, what summer job
should they apply to, should they write an
independent paper, should they apply
for a clerkship. And overwhelmingly, when I give
advice about these choices, my advice is really, kind of
it doesn't matter that much. None of these choices seem
to me to be that important, and students seem to imbue
them with much more importance than they have. But now, suddenly, here you
are on the cusp of graduation about to go out into the
world, and the choices that you're about to make
are genuinely consequential. You'll be entering jobs
that hopefully will last longer than a summer or a year. You'll be building skills that
will set you on one path rather than another. You'll be entering
into relationships that will be longer than
a night or a weekend or a couple of months and
that may even be lifelong. So these choices are
really different. And I wanted to
talk a little bit about how to think about
those choices-- not how to make the choices, but
rather what's at stake for you in making these choices. And I have two points I
want to make about choices. One is that choosing
wisely is more important than you might think it is. And my second point is
that choosing wisely is less important than
you might think it is. So listen up. For each of these
two points, I'm going to invoke a
little literary help and give you some
examples from my own life, and then I'm going to stop. So choosing wisely
is more important than you might think it is. I really came to this topic
because I was trying to think-- put myself back when I
was sitting where you are. I graduated from the law
school in 1986, 25 years old. And I was trying to think
of what I didn't know then that I feel like I do know now. And one thing that
I think I know now that I'm quite sure I
didn't know or believe when I was 25 was how
much my choices in work, in love, would affect
me, would change me. I, at 25, believed
that I was who I was. I had a lot of opinions. I felt myself to be more
or less fully formed, and I wasn't completely
wrong about that. But what I didn't realize was
that life experiences really do have a way of shaping you and
turning you, subtly and slowly, but truly, into the
person that you become. They don't transform you, but
there are many different people within you that you could be. And your choices will
nudge you slowly and gently toward one version or
another of yourself. And to illustrate this,
I want to share with you one of my favorite
books, a story from one of my favorite books
when I was a kid. It's probably one
you don't know. No one seems to know this book. I love this book. It's called The Diamond in
the Window by Jane Langton. Anyone know that book? One person has
heard of this book. My kids both had to read the
Fledgling by Jane Langton. You know that book? They both had to read
it in middle school. Diamond in the
Window, much better. Diamond in the Window is this
book about two kids, a brother and a sister, growing up
in Concord, Massachusetts, and they live in an
old Victorian house. And they share an
attic bedroom that has a diamond-shaped window. And it turns out that
this diamond-shaped window has magical properties. And what starts to
happen in the book is that the brother
and the sister start to have the same dreams
that they're both present in, and they remember
when they wake up. And then these
dreams begin to have an influence on their
actual living real life. I'm not going to go into-- the story gets kind
of complicated. But the dreams are very
beautiful and metaphorical. And one of the
dreams in the book is one of my favorite chapters. It's called the
"Hall of Mirrors." And in it, the two kids, who
are named Eleanor and Edward, the girl and the boy,
they're in the dream and they're standing
in front of-- they're each standing in front of
their own v-shaped mirror, and they can see two images
of themselves in this mirror. But the images are
not entirely the same. They're slightly different,
the two images that they see. Now just to go forward
with the story, I have to give you
a little warning. This book was written
more than 50 years ago, and it's deeply sexist,
something that totally went over my head when I was a kid. But you'll see what I mean
as I tell you the story. So what you need to
know about the kids is Edward has this dream of
being an Indiana Jones type explorer. He even has a name
for this person he's going to be
when he grows up, which is his name
spelled backwards. Eleanor's ambitions-- she
has a face full of freckles, and she dreams about being
elegant and beautiful and getting rid of the freckles. So as they look-- [LAUGHTER] I told you. So as they look at
their images, Eleanor notices that one of the
images has a little face powder covering up the
freckles, and Edward notices that one
of his images has a kind of swashbuckling air. And they reach out to touch
those images, and they realize, there's no glass there. These aren't mirrors. They're doors. And they can step through them. So they eagerly step
through their chosen image, and immediately two more
images, two more doors open up, each slightly different. And the kids begin to step
through the different mirrors. But ultimately, their
images start to age, and they begin to see adult
versions of themselves based on the doors they've
entered previously. But they don't
like what they see. Edward's choices yield
adults who seem kind of reckless and cruel, even. And Eleanor's choices yield
adult versions of herself that are kind of shallow and vain. And the kids are
really distressed by these future
selves that they see, and they try to
fight their way back, try to work back to the
earlier, younger choices. But it's very difficult.
They get confused. They get lost. They almost don't make it. But after travails, they make
it back far enough that they're able to make different choices. And this time,
they look carefully and more thoughtfully,
and they make serious, thoughtful choices. And then they see a different
array of adult choices, adult selves, open up to them. And here's where it's
like really nauseating. So Edward sees all of these
interesting adult things, including-- could
it be-- there he is sitting in the Oval Office. And Eleanor sees all kinds of
lovely futures for herself, and her equivalent
of the Oval Office is she's a grandmother
with lovely children and grandchildren. Despite the groan-worthy gender
stereotypes in this book, there is a lovely
wisdom in this story. It's not one big choice
that transforms us, but rather small choices
that nudge us imperceptibly toward different
versions of ourselves. And these can accrete
over time to work really significant changes
in who we are. And it's really difficult
to undo those changes once we realize that we've
become someone that we didn't really want to be. So I found this to be
true in my own life. So my choice to work as
a public defender early in my career for
about four years really shaped me in profound
ways that I didn't realize was going to be the case
when I chose the job. So I chose to be
a public defender for a variety of reasons. Like, when I was a
student at the law school, I came to law school not
thinking at all that I wanted to be a public defender. I'm not even sure I knew
what a public defender was. But in law school, I got very
interested in criminal justice. As a law clerk, I was really
drawn toward criminal cases. I clerked in DC. And so it turns out,
people in my family knew some people at PDS. And I got to know people
at PDS and I decided-- and I read a book about PDS
written by a former lawyer. And I decided that was
what I wanted to do. And part of what drew me to the
work of a public defender was maybe, oddly enough, my
own experience growing up as a suburban
Jewish kid in the US because, when I was
around 12, I got very immersed in the standard,
American Jewish girl literature around the Holocaust. So I read Anne Frank,
and I read Elie Wiesel. I had terrible nightmares
about these books. And I was really
shocked and puzzled by how people could have
viewed an entire people, my people, the Jews, as
somehow less than human. And so to me, thinking about
the criminal justice system, it appeared to me
that, in an era in which that kind
of prejudice is at least frowned
upon in most circles, it's still perfectly OK
and encouraged to hate criminals for what they do. And when it's encouraged
to hate someone, it's easy to think that maybe we
can change our procedures just a little bit in these
cases when you've got in front of you someone
who's charged with raping a child, for example. You might think, yes, our system
makes all kinds of promises about the way we're supposed
to treat criminal defendants, but maybe not today. Maybe we could just cut
a few corners to be sure that this one goes away. And it was thinking about
that and the way we hate and celebrate in some ways our
hatred of criminals and the way in which that leads us to
see them-- want to see them-- as less than human and to
organize even our institutions around that made me think that
being a public defender was in some way a kind of
extreme civil rights work, that standing shoulder to
shoulder next to the people that it's easiest and most
encouraged to revile was a way of protecting everyone else--
whether it's the Jews or other religious minorities or racial
or ethnic or sexual minorities, who some days at some
places it's safe to hate-- and saying no. I'm going to stand up for
the dignity and respect of this person and, by doing
that, protecting all of us from the dehumanization
that sometimes happens. So that was my inchoate thinking
about being a public defender. And I gave that
speech many times during my time as a public
defender because I'd very often get the
question-- so like, but what if your
clients are guilty? How can you defend those people? Why would you want to
do this kind of work? And that was the true reason-- that was the way I saw
the work and why I thought the work was so important. And it still remains
important to me. I'm still moved by that. I still do death penalty work
for precisely that reason. But the Public Defender
Service gave me some things and changed me in ways
that I did not anticipate. And it's taken me a
while even to see it and to be able to articulate it. So how did being a public
defender early in my career as a young lawyer from age 27 to
age 31, how did that shape me? Well, one thing it
did is it really helped me see more
clearly my own privilege. So I thought I
knew about poverty. I had done my share of volunteer
work at community service. But my first year as
a public defender, I was put, as all
new PDS lawyers were, in juvenile court. So I represented kids charged
with crimes for a year. And that was a lot
more social work than it was really litigation. We almost always lost our
trials because juveniles don't have a right to jury trials. They have bench trials. It's very hard to
convince a judge to acquit a juvenile respondent,
as they are euphemistically called. So we did a lot of
social work coming up with dispositional
alternatives for our clients, placements that would
be truly rehabilitative rather than having
them locked up in the horrifying
juvenile detention center. So I spent a lot of time
with my juvenile clients, with their families, with their
teachers, in their schools, at their churches. And I still remember one
client's home that was just crawling with cockroaches-- literally my gorge rose every
time I went into his house. It smelled awful. There was garbage everywhere. Then there was
another client's home that was completely
immaculate, but had almost no furniture and very
little food in the house. And then there was my
very first juvenile client who had only one pair of shoes
that were like two or three sizes too small. And so he had to fold
his toes under in order to wear those shoes. I took that kid
out and bought him a pair of sneakers that
fit because it was just so horrifying to see
him hobbling around in these ill-fitting shoes. And those images have
just stayed with me for the rest of my life and
have governed a lot about how I think about what I ought
to be doing with my life, thinking about, writing
about, working on. And those images
really stayed with me as I raised my own very
privileged children and the contrast between
my own kids' lives and my former clients' lives. In a related way, my work as a
public defender worked against my own tendency
toward know-it-all, self-righteous
characteristics, which-- I have to say--
being a law professor does nothing but bolster. No, no, really. So these kind of
arrogant tendencies were born of thinking that
my successes were largely the product of my own great
talents and hard work. And working as a
public defender made me realize how much luck has to
do with people's life stories and trajectories and how little
my own talents and hard work-- which exist, but put
them in their place in terms of creating
the future that I've been lucky enough to have. Clarence Darrow was one of the
most famous criminal defense attorneys of the 20th century-- in arguing to save the
lives of Leopold and Loeb, two teenage clients, who
had committed murder, argued to the judge, they
didn't make themselves. He was arguing for the influence
of their own background and experiences on their crimes. And being a public
defender, that is the credo. There but for the grace of
God go I. That is at the base the public defender's credo. We understand a
need to communicate the ways in which our
clients' lives, our lives, are shaped by many forces
beyond our control. And finally, being a public
defender worked against, I think, one of my least
attractive qualities throughout my life,
which was the desire to please people in authority. I was always a good girl. I was always really
good at school. Parents loved me. Teachers loved me. I won all kinds of prizes, and I
grooved to all that approbation from people in authority. And come on, you all
know it-- the H-bomb? It doesn't work very well here
where everyone goes to Harvard. But go out in the
world and modestly say that you go to Harvard. It's great, right? You get a lot of stroking
from all the people in important authority
positions for being successful in the ways that
I was successful, in the ways that you've been successful. Being a public defender-- a big part of the job of
being a public defender is pissing off the big
daddies in the robes, that you really have to stand
up for your client at times and get yelled at and go
to parties where people say, how can you do that work. You get a certain
amount of head patting within your little circle. But in the wider world, you
have to take a lot of crap for being a public defender. And that was really good for me. I really needed that. It freed me in a way from my
lifelong reliance on everyone patting me on the head. So I'll tell you a story
about this, when I really realized for the first
time how much I had moved from my previous self,
how many mirror doors I had stepped through. So my first year,
I told you, I was representing juvenile clients. And one client I represented-- we would pick up cases. We'd be assigned to pick
up cases on a certain day when the people who'd
been arrested the night before were about
to be arraigned. So in the morning,
we'd go to the lockup. The lockup was just a big
cage filled with 50 kids who'd been arrested
the night before. And I'd walk up and down
in front of the bars calling out my client's names. So I'm calling out my
client's name, Jim Jones. I'm like, Jim Jones, Jim Jones. Nobody's coming to the bars. Finally, a kid comes
to the bar, and he's like come on over here. So I go over. And he says, listen, I told
them that my name was Jim Jones, but I'm not really Jim Jones. I'm Sam Smith. I told them I was Jim Jones
because that's my half brother, and I know his social
security number. And he doesn't have a record. So I figured they might
release me if they thought I was Jim Jones. I have a record. I know they're
going to lock me up if they know that I'm Sam Smith. I'm like, all right. OK, now I'm like,
I got two minutes before I have to go
up to the courtroom and do whatever I'm going to do. So I think I know
that I shouldn't tell the judge that my client
Jim Jones is really Sam Smith. That's a secret of my client
that I'm supposed to keep. On the other hand,
I'm not supposed to commit a fraud on the court. So usually, when I
stand up in court, I would say Carol
Steiker for Jim Jones. So I was like, maybe
I won't say that. So I said what most of the
other lawyers who didn't know their client's name would say. I said Carol Steiker
for the respondent. I thought that was
a little safer. So I say Carol Steiker
for the respondent. And my mind is racing. Should I argue that he
doesn't have a criminal record so that he should get out? But I'm saved from that problem
because the prosecutor is just looking at-- these
things move really fast. I see that he doesn't
have a criminal record. The state doesn't oppose
release on recognizance. Boom. The judge releases my client. But six weeks later, the first
status hearing on the case comes. And of course, Jim
Jones doesn't show up. And so of course, the judge
issues an arrest warrant for Jim Jones. So Jim Jones, the
poor half brother who has no idea what's
going on, gets arrested. But I have a
feeling that he must have known something was
up because ordinarily, if he were arrested, I
would be immediately called to come represent him. But that isn't what happened. His family hired a
lawyer, and that lawyer hit me with a subpoena
to come to court and testify that Jim
Jones was not my client. I'm like, is that a
secret of my client? Am I allowed to go and say that
Jim Jones is not my client? And then they might ask me,
well, who is your client? So I go to my supervisor,
who was at the time the deputy director
of PDS, later became the director [INAUDIBLE]
Davis, Angela Jordan Davis. And she's like, oh, you'd
better do some research. So I'm like, better do
it fast because it's 9:30 in the morning, and I'm
subpoenaed to court at 2:00 in the afternoon. So I do some research,
about an hour of research. I can't find
anything about this. So I'm like, what
am I supposed to do? She's like, all right, we're
going to call Bar Counsel. So there's a group of-- they are the ethics
council of the DC Bar, and they are the ones
who prosecute people who steal their client's money. But they're are also
available for consultation. So I call them up, and
I explain the situation. And they're like, oh,
that's really interesting. OK, we're going
to look into that. We'll get back to you. I'm like, all right,
now it's 11 o'clock, but you better get back
to me soon because I have to go to court at 2 o'clock. So like at 1 o'clock,
they call me back and they say, yeah, there are
five lawyers in our office. We really disagree about what
the answer to this question is. Three of us think it is
a secret of your client that you shouldn't reveal. Two of us think that it's
not a secret of your client and you have to tell the
court what's going on. So that's what we got for you. I'm like, OK. So I tell my supervisor. She says, listen, you got
three of them on your side. Let's stick with this. We're going to protect
your client's secret, but she said bring your
toothbrush because the judge may hold you in contempt. I'm like, OK. So we go to court, and the
lawyer calls me to the stand, swears me in as a witness,
and points to his client. He says, Miss Steiker,
is this the Jim Jones that you represented in
juvenile court six weeks ago? And I say, I'm sorry. I'm not at liberty to
answer that question. I've contacted Bar Counsel,
and a majority of them agreed that this was
a secret of my client that I'm not at
liberty to reveal. And the lawyer does honestly
exactly what I would have done. He said, Your Honor, my
client's liberty is at stake. And so I'm going to have
to ask you to require Miss Steiker to
answer this question or to be held in
contempt of court until she's willing to
answer the question. That's civil contempt. You get jailed until you're
willing to answer the question. You hold the keys to the
jail cell in your hand as long as you comply. And this judge is a
very impatient judge, and I could see he was just very
irritated by this whole thing. When the lawyer does
that, the bailiff starts moving toward me
jingling with the handcuffs. And the judge is like,
hold on, hold on, hold on. Don't we take pictures of
people when we arrest them? Everyone's like, oh, yeah. So he says, Miss
Steiker, you can go. So I didn't get
held in contempt. And they did figure out
that it wasn't my client. But I realized in that moment
where I'm sitting on the stand and that lawyer is
calling for the judge to hold me in contempt and the
bailiff is moving toward me with the handcuffs. I'm like, do it, do it, do it. Hold me in contempt. I want to go to jail. I wasn't married yet. I didn't have kids. I thought this would
be the ultimate cred. Come on, big daddy,
send me to jail. Send me to jail. That was the new me. And I realized
that this would not have gone over well at home. I could just see my
parents-- how's Carol? She's in jail right now. But that was an example
of how the choice to be a public defender
pushed some of my tendencies further and worked against
some of my tendencies. It really shaped
me and continues to shape me to this day. So that's why I'm
saying that choices may be more important than you
think because they shape not just your skills
and your knowledge and your well of
experiences that you draw. And they really can shape your
character to a certain extent. But on to my second point-- choices may be less important
than you think they are. And to make this point, I
want to read you a poem, and also then give
you some examples. So the poem is called
"The God Who Loves You" by a Pulitzer Prize winning
poet named Carl Dennis. So I like to look at poems. I can't just hear them. So I'm putting it up
for those of you who want to read along with me-- I mean, not out loud,
but as I read it to you. "The God Who Loves You"-- "It must be troubling
for the God who loves you to ponder
how much happier you'd be today had you been able
to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful
for him to watch you on Friday evenings driving
home from the office, content with your week,
three fine houses sold to deserving families, knowing
as he does exactly what would have happened had you gone to
your second choice for college, knowing the roommate
you'd have been allotted whose ardent opinions
on painting and music would have kindled in you
a lifelong passion, a life 30 points above the
life you're living on any scale of satisfaction
and every point a thorn in the side of the
God who loves you. You don't want that, a large
souled man like you who tries to withhold from
your wife the day's disappointments so she can save
her empathy for the children. And would you want this
God to compare your wife with the woman you were destined
to meet on that other campus? It hurts you to think of him
ranking the conversation you'd have enjoyed over
there higher in insight than the conversation
you're used to. And think how this
loving God would feel knowing that the man
next in line for your wife would have pleased
her more than you ever will, even on your best
days, when you really try. Can you sleep at night
believing a God like that is pacing his cloudy bedroom,
harassed by alternatives you're spared by ignorance? The difference between what
is and what could have been will remain alive for him
even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill running
out in the snow for the morning paper, losing 11 years
that the God who loves you will feel compelled to imagine
scene by scene unless you come to the rescue by
imagining him no wiser than you are, no God at all,
only a friend, no closer than the actual friend
you made at college, the one you haven't
written in months. Sit down tonight and
write him about the life you can talk about with
a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
which, for all you know, is the life you've chosen." So I love this poem
because it shows just how you can
make yourself crazy by agonizing over past choices. And it shows you this
by displacing this pain onto a non-existent,
I think, omniscient God who loves you,
imagining how that God would suffer knowing
about choices you've made that
are less optimal. The poem suggests
that you should be kind to that God, a large
souled man like yourself. You should be kind to that God. Be kind to yourself by
not torturing yourself with all the woulda,
coulda, shouldas that you might
have about choices that you've made in the past. Instead, the poem tells us to
inhabit the present, to move forward with our choices. This is the first time-- this
is where the poem switches to the imperative. It says, sit down
tonight, directs you-- sit down tonight, and write to
that friend, the real friend that you made in college,
about your real life, about your choices. And move forward. Don't dwell. So that's one piece of advice. I'm telling you how important
it is your choices are. They shape you. They shape your life. But you can't dwell. Don't look back. Don't dwell and
torture yourself. But the poem has a
more radical meaning. It more radically
undermines the belief that choosing wisely, choosing
well leads to the best life. Think of this example here. The guy goes to his
first choice college, and he misses out on
that great roommate who will ignite a lifelong
passion for the arts. He misses out on
the wife he would have married, the
woman he would have met at his second choice college. What this suggests
is that, even if we choose as wisely as we know
how, choose the best we can, so much is luck and serendipity. Often what can seem like
a mistake or a failure is the best thing that
could happen to us. If the you in the poem hadn't
gotten into his first choice college, he would have felt
that as a failure, as a loss. But think how it
would have changed his life for the better. And I think that's an
important thing to realize. You'll never know-- none of
us are an omniscient god who can know whether our
choices were the best ones or whether our failures
were the best things that could have happened to us. So I'll give you two brief
examples from my own life. So at the age of 21, I
applied to law school. And I ended up choosing to go
to Harvard Law School over Yale Law School because I
had a boyfriend here at Harvard who was in grad
school at the time-- very dumb reason. If any of you did
that, it's dumb-- dumb reason to choose to go to
grad school at the age of 21. And of course, that
boyfriend did not last through law school. And in fact, my future husband,
my husband now of 28 years, was at Yale Law
School at the time that I was at Harvard Law
School with the boyfriend that didn't work out. Now, it turns out, I
may not have ended up being married to
my now husband had I gone to Yale Law School
at the age of-- actually, went at age 22. And I don't think
either he or I was ready at that point in our lives
for a serious relationship. If we'd gotten
involved, we probably would have gotten
involved and broken up. And who knows if I'd
be married at all or married to him at this point? So I have my happy marriage. I have myself making a dumb
choice for a relationship that didn't work out to thank for
my marriage of, coming up on, 30 years. There you go. I'm living proof of the
wisdom of this poem. Another story-- when I was
a 2L, it was the go-go 80s. I needed to earn money to
help pay for law school. That was a deal that we had. I had to earn a certain
amount of my living expenses over the summer. So I applied to
work at law firms, even though I wasn't very
interested in law firm life. But one of the law firms
that I applied to offered-- knowing that I had all this
public interest, this and that, all over my resume. And in my interviews,
that wasn't very smart. But they said,
tell you what, you can come work for our law firm. We'll pay you a
full summer salary, and you can work half
the summer for us and half the summer
for a public interest organization of your choice. I'm like sold, and
they're like, well, what are you interested in? We could help you get
a public interest job. We have lots of
connections here. What are you interested in? I'm like, I don't
really know, but I'm getting kind of interested
in criminal justice. And they're like perfect because
the two lawyers who interviewed me were a woman
named Mary Jo White, who had been a former AUSA
in the Southern District, who later became the US attorney
in the Southern District and the head of SEC. And the other lawyer
was John Koeltl who had worked with Mary Jo
White at the Southern District US attorney's office
and is now, and has been for a zillion
years, a federal judge in the Southern District. And they're like, we both
worked in the Southern District. It's the best
office in the world. We have lots of
connections there. No problem. We can get you in, and you could
work there for half the summer and work for this
Debevoise and Plimpton-- maybe I shouldn't say it-- Debevoise and Plimpton for
the other half of the summer. And I'm like, yeah,
that sounds great, because here were these
two fancy lawyers telling me this was the best job in the
world in the Southern District. Even I had heard of that, even
though I knew virtually nothing about anything about law. So I said I'm going to do that. And then I became the
head of the Law Review after I got this
great deal set up. And the Law Review
was in complete chaos. The board that was in
charge when I was a 2L-- the 3Ls graduated,
and they hadn't published four of their
eight issues, or edited them. They were all very
angry at each other. They were only communicating by
memo, and they just graduated-- [LAUGHTER] They graduated and left. And the new board-- we had four issues. This is like more than 1,000
pages of Law Review articles, many of them by professors
here, that hadn't been subsided, they hadn't been edited,
they hadn't been bluebooked. So we decided that the
seven of us on the board would spend the summer
doing all the subsiding, all the bluebooking, all the
typing in of all the changes, and that we'd do it
in a rotating thing so that each of us would
get three weeks of work. So Debevoise was not into 1
and 1/2 weeks and 1 and 1/2 weeks of splitting the summer. So I ended up regretfully
saying that I couldn't work at the US attorney's
office, and I went to Debevoise and took the money. And that was it, and I was
very disappointed at the time. It seemed like
such a great deal, and I had heard
such great things about the US attorney's office. This was the me
that relied on what people in positions of authority
thought were the best jobs. But it turns out, I'm quite
sure that PDS would not have hired me if my only
experience in criminal justice had been working as a federal
prosecutor for half a summer. I didn't do clinics when
I was in law school, to my regret today,
because I was doing all this Law Review stuff. So it turned out that that
very disappointing experience of having to give up
this cool split summer turned out to be a really
good thing for my future self. So those were two
mistakes, failures, things that didn't work out,
that ultimately, I think, were really lucky in my life
and helped create my life today, which is-- I don't know if it's happier
than it would have been. But it is the life
I've now chosen. So in conclusion, I wish you the
best in your own work and love. I hope that your choices
shape you in ways that you find pleasing and rewarding. Although you will
never know for sure if your choices were the best
ones you could have made, you should be OK with that. Accept and even
welcome the times when things don't
go according to plan because, although I
wish you much success, I also wish you
many serendipitous mistakes and fortuitous
failures and, of course, a happy graduation. [APPLAUSE]
