Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. We're going to get started. Everyone can keep getting food. We ask the people who
are already seated, if you guys could just
move towards the middle of your sections, so people
can easily find their seat after they get food. And also please be cognizant
of the camera in the back as you're in the
back of the line, just because we are
recording the session. All right, so thank
you all for coming, and welcome to the final
installment of the 2018 Last Lecture series. As such, we want to
give a few thank yous. First, this series
has been in part sponsored by the Graduating
Class Campaign, the GCC. And as you know,
this year, students can give back to their student
groups with a small donation, so we ask that you
consider giving back to the groups that
made your Harvard experience a positive one. We also want to thank ITS,
Information Technology Services, for all their help
in making sure all these events went on seamlessly. And finally, we want to thank
all of our past lecturers, Alex Whiting, Carol Steiker, and
Jody Freeman for participating. I mentioned that in the
back, after this session, we're going to have two posters,
one for Professor Butler and one for Carol Steiker,
and there'll be Sharpies. And we ask that on your way out,
if you could just sign and make a note, because that
will be a gift that we're giving to Professor Butler
and Professor Steiker after the session. So finally, today, we're here
to close out our 2018 series with Paul Butler. Professor Butler is the Bennett
Boskey Visiting Professor of Law, and we've
been incredibly fortunate to have him
this year from Georgetown, where he's the Albert
Brick Professor in Law. Professor Butler has also taught
at George Washington University Law School, where he received
the Professor of the Year Award on three different occasions. Before teaching,
Professor Butler graduated cum laude
from Yale and then cum laude from Harvard Law School. He clerked for the
Honorable Mary Johnson Lowe in the United States
District Court in New York, and then he joined the fantastic
law firm Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he
specialized in white collar criminal defense. He later served as
a federal prosecutor with the US
Department of Justice, where his specialty
was public corruption. His prosecutions included
a United States senator, three FBI agents, and
several other law enforcement officials. Professor Butler
researches and teaches in the areas of criminal
law, race relations law, and critical theory. Students here know him
from his 1L criminal law course, his upper level criminal
procedure investigations course, and two other seminars,
one on race, gender and law and one on Black Lives
Matter and the law. His scholarship has been
published in numerous journals, including the Harvard
Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and UCLA Law Review. And he's also the author
of Let's Get Free-- A Hip-Hop Theory of
Justice, and just last year, he authored Chokehold-- Policing Black Men. About Chokehold, Judge
Shira Scheindlin, who presided over the challenge
to stop and frisk in New York, said, "Paul Butler tells
the unvarnished truth about the criminal
justice system. He confronts just about
everyone-- police, prosecutors, judges, black elites,
liberals, and radicals. A must-read for those
with a serious interest in criminal justice." As a former student in his
criminal procedure course, I can say that I know just how
engaging professor Butler is in class and how he
has a unique ability to elicit thought-provoking
discussion on some of the most pressing
issues in this country. He's also written in The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles
Times, and has frequently consulted on issues of
race and criminal justice. Like many of his students,
I've had the cool experience of seeing him on MSNBC and
other channels and saying, hey, that's my professor. So finally, on behalf
of the class marshals, we could not be more
thrilled that Professor Butler has accepted
our invitation to close out our series. So please join me in welcoming
to the 2018 lecture series Paul Butler. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm 12 years old,
growing up in Chicago. Martin Luther King said it
was the most segregated city he had ever seen. I'm riding my bike
to the library, which is literally on the
other side of the tracks, in the white neighborhood. After I cross the line, a
cop car pulls alongside me. The white police officer rolls
down his window and asks, does that bike belong to you? Yes, I say. Yes, it does. And then I ask him, does
that car belong to you? And I speed away. When I get home, I tell
my mom what I'd said. My mom, who 50
years ago this month used the meager savings we had
to attend the funeral of Martin Luther King-- my mom, who also took it to
the streets with Malcolm X-- when I told my mom what
I said to that cop, she spanked me good. Didn't I know what
happened to black boys who talked to the police like that? It was one of those spankings
where the parent cries as much as the child. Now we know. During the time in Chicago when
I talked back to the police, a police commander
named Jon Burge was overseeing the torture
of 118 African American men. He had this crew-- they were called
the Midnight Squad-- of police officers
who coerced black men into making false confessions
by sticking electrical devices up their rectums and
pouring soda in their noses and burning them with irons. The City of Chicago has now
spent more than $100 million investigating and
compensating the victims. My mom was doing her
best to educate me about the consequences
of a black boy talking to the police like that. Except that three years ago
in Waller County, Texas, a black woman named Sandra Bland
found out that you don't even have to be a boy. All you have to do is ask
why the cops stopped you. And this year in Sacramento,
California, an African American man named Stephon Clark
found out that you don't even have to talk back. All you have to do is
be holding a cell phone that your black body makes
the police think is a gun. And then last week
in Philadelphia, two African American men found
out that all you have to do is be sitting in a Starbucks. Last Friday, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from where
we gather today, a member of our community found
out that all you have to do is be black and have a
mental health crisis. And then the people
who are supposed to serve and protect you beat
you up and try to block people from videoing it. There's a history here. A few years back,
the Cambridge police arrested another black man,
Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, after
they'd investigated him for trespassing on
his own front porch. President Barack Obama,
HLS class of 1991, he looked at that episode
with Professor Gates and he called it like he saw it. He said, and I'm
quoting, "The Cambridge police acted stupidly." My friends, when
the Cambridge police are called to help a
person naked on the street and obviously in a state
of mental health crisis, and the Cambridge police
respond by beating him so badly that they
leave a pool of blood on Massachusetts
Avenue, let us recall the words of President Obama. The Cambridge police
have acted stupidly. And they must be
held accountable. And we, my friends, when we
see misogyny and transphobia and xenophobia and homophobia,
we must call it for the evil that it is. We do not and we should not see
white Harvard professors being arrested on their porches. And dealing with
intoxicated students, surely that's got to be
part of the job description of Cambridge police, right? Of any police in a town that
has a large university campus. We do not and we should
not see the police staining the streets
with the blood of intoxicated white students. When it happens to students
of color, we must call it-- we must name it the white
supremacy, the evil that it is. And we have to use our Harvard
credentials and the blessings of this incredible
education that I got here, that you got here, to
speak truth to power and to hold each
other accountable. What an honor it is to deliver
this last Last Lecture. The words on the screen are
from the poet Audre Lorde. She always described herself
as a black lesbian feminist. And this is from her poem,
these words on the screen are from her poem "A
Litany For Survival," where she says,
"When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish. When we are alone, we are
afraid love will never return. And when we speak, we are afraid
our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent,
we are still afraid. So it is better to
speak, remembering we were never meant to survive." So I didn't get to hear
Professor Jody Freeman's Last Lecture a few weeks ago. But at the beginning
of the school year, I had the pleasure of
hearing Professor Freeman give what you might call
a first lecture at the orientation of the 1L
section that we both teach in, section 7. I see a number of members
of section 7 here. Thank you for being here. Professor Freeman told
the brand new law students that their admission to Harvard
Law School came with the keys to the kingdom. And she encouraged the students
to use those keys with grace. I got to tell you,
when I first heard her say that, keys
to the kingdom, I thought it might have
been an overstatement, a little bit too grandiose. But then I thought about my
classmates during the time that I was a student here. So my first year
section included Elena Kagan, Jeff Toobin, who
is the CNN legal analysis. My graduating class included
Professor Carol Steiker, Professor Bill Rubenstein,
who also teaches here, Professor Elner Elhauge, and
my dear friend Jackie Berrien, who was the chair of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That's just my class. The 2Ls and 3Ls,
when I was a 1L, included Dean John Manning,
Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, Attorney General Loretta Lynch,
the great civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, and my buddy,
the brilliant intersectional legal theorist
Kimberle Crenshaw. And then when we were 3Ls,
Michelle Obama was a 1L. Wonder whatever happened to her? So maybe there's something
to this "keys to the kingdom" thing, huh? Look to your left
and your right. 25 years from now,
we'll be celebrating the same kinds of achievements
from people in this room. I've been enormously
impressed by the law students that I've met here this year. And I'm elated at
the opportunities that you will have. At the same time,
I want to suggest that some responsibilities
come with that privilege. So many excellent,
wonderful, marvelous things are in store for you graduates
of the class of 2018, and some bad things, too. So I guess the main
thing I want to do is to tell the story
of something that happened to me that at the
time felt like a catastrophe, but turned out to be OK. So I wasn't the most humble
brother when I graduated from this great law school. I clerked after for a
federal judge in New York, and then took a job at
a fancy law firm in DC. And sorry, Cameron,
but I kind of hated it. I felt like I didn't
go to law school to help the rich people
or rich businesses who were that firm's clients,
as great a firm as it is, in terms of the
quality of its work. But I had these huge
law school loans, and I thought, maybe I can make
some progress paying them back at the firm. I didn't know quite how I was
going to be able to do it. Three years of law school, and
I owed so much money-- $30,000. Oh my god. Trust me. At the time, it seemed daunting. But I was able to
make some headway. And then I joined the United
States Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor. Imagine the feeling of stepping
into a courtroom and saying, good afternoon, my
name is Paul Butler, and I represent
the United States. I love that power. I represented the
government in criminal court in the District of Columbia. I'm prosecuting a prostitute. We're in a room a lot
smaller than this. It's kind of like a cell,
even though it's a courtroom. It's where they do the
non-jury cases in DC. When lawmakers don't want
you to have a jury trial, they just make the punishment
less than six months. Then you just get a judge,
and judges are much more likely to convict than judges. So me and this judge,
we're kind of like a team. We can do five or six-- we called them whore cases. We could do five or six of
these whore cases a day. So inside this little
room are a sex worker, her court-appointed defense
attorney, a cop, the judge, me, and my mother. It's my mom's first
time seeing me in trial, and I want to impress her. I don't know why
she went to trial. Rule number one of sex workers
in DC is plead your case. You plea because
there's no defense other than general denial. Because who's a judge
going to believe-- the witness, who's an officer
of the Metropolitan Police Department or this Vietnamese
girl who just happened to be on 14th Street at 2:00
AM in the morning in hot pants, a bikini top, and stilettos? Give me a break. And my mother's watching me? I am going to let
this whore have it. I'm now prosecuting a
United States senator. So after practicing on the
DC sex workers, addicts, and street thugs, I've
graduated to the US Department of Justice,
public integrity section. Three years in, I'm assigned
the biggest case of my career. Senator David Durenberger,
Republican of Minnesota, has come up with
this illegal scheme to get the government
to pay his mortgage. We charge him with
multiple felonies. It's one of the most
important prosecutions in the Justice Department. As a young lawyer, I'm
lucky to be on the case. I'm the second chair. The senior lawyer is a
lot more experienced. If I just get to do an
opening statement or closing statement, a couple of juicy
cross-examinations, I'm good. This is the kind of
high-profile case that can make a lawyer's career. So life for this young member
of the recent graduating class of Harvard Law School,
life for this young prosecutor is sweet. Shortly before that case goes
to trial, I get arrested. Simple assault is the crime
I'm accused of committing. There's nothing simple
about simple assault. That's the joke
that we made when we learned about how to
prosecute that case when I was a rookie prosecutor. What I didn't know then,
what I couldn't afford, given the work I
did, to believe, is that there's nothing simple
about any accusation of crime. I had to learn
that the hard way. At the beginning of
my trial, the trial where I'm the lead
role, somebody else was the prosecutor-- at the beginning of that
trial, the judge told the jury, this is a case about
a dispute between two people about a parking space. Neither one of them
actually has a car. The jurors, they had
their serious faces on, but they kind of looked
like they wanted to laugh. But it was true. When I left the law firm to
go to the Justice Department, I took a big pay cut. I had to downgrade,
so I moved to a kind of sketchy neighborhood,
not too far from downtown. And included in the
rent was a parking space that I didn't need. I had a bike that I rode
everywhere I went, so I had this bright idea. I'd rent out the parking space,
bring in a little extra money every month. Now, I noticed that
there was a car that was always parked in the space. And I saw a guy
was parking there. That's my space, dude. He said, well, I'm renting
it from a woman who lives over there. He said her name was Detroit. So I knocked on Detroit's
door and tell her politely that I need the space. She says it's her space. I put on my lawyer's voice
and I show her the deed. I said, it's my space. She slams the door in my face. She's not going to stop me. I rent out the space. And I rent it out to
this young social worker, and right away, Detroit starts-- we think it's Detroit-- starts leaving notes
on Donna's car. And Donna says I
can deal with this. But then Detroit starts
making threats to Donna. And I know from my day job,
that's a crime, making threats. But the threats are
notes left on the car. I just-- I want to
catch her doing it, and then we can make the case. So I start looking out
my window at night. Feel a little obsessed with it. I'm a prosecutor, right? Just want to get a
photo of her leaving one of these notes on the car. New apartment. It's being-- having
my floors redone. There's all these
bags of sawdust that the workmen leave
where we leave the garbage. One night, looking
out at night-- no notes. Wake up the next morning,
first thing I do now is look out the window, see
if we can catch Detroit. She's not there,
but there's bags of sawdust all on Donna's car. I go outside to inspect. No one's around. Go to the front. Detroit's outside. She's sweeping something from
her front yard, something that looks a lot like sawdust. I said, I'm calling the police. First I want to go
look at Donna's car to see if there was any damage. When I was in prosecutor
rookie school, we were told that for
whatever reason, DC police, they take car vandalism
really seriously. The joke was if your
boyfriend is beating you up, don't call the police and
say he hit me and I'm hurt. Call the police and
say somebody put sugar in my ignition, my gas tank. Cops will be there
in two minutes. So I want to see
if the car is OK. I'm looking at the car,
and all of a sudden, there's no reason
to call the police. They're there. Jump out the car. Motherfucker,
you're under arrest. For what? Simple assault. That's crazy! What are you talking about? You pushed Detroit. You ran up to her
and pushed her. That's crazy. Ask anybody in the neighborhood. Everyone knows she's crazy. Cop sees me. You're under arrest. So I play my trump card. I say, I'm a prosecutor. I work for the United States
Department of Justice. The cop says, so you
probably know this already. You have the right
to remain silent. Anything you say can and
will be used against you. And he reads me my rights. So I'm handcuffed. I'm put in the back
of the police car. I thought, this
cannot be happening. It felt like one of those dreams
that professional people have, where their most feared
public humiliation comes true. So at the police
station, that's where my privilege kicks back in. I actually know so many
lawyers, it takes me a minute to figure out which
one I'm going to call. So I called one of my buddies,
and I'm now in the holding cell at the courthouse. One of my friends comes and
says that Michele Roberts is going to represent me. She's now the executive director
of the NBA Players Association. At that time, she's known as
the best trial lawyer in DC. So she comes at some point and
says, I don't believe this, but they're going to
prosecute this case. You're going to be
arraigned in a few minutes. They probably
won't ask for bail. Let me do all the talking. So in arraignment, I'm
thinking, oh my god. The judge is going to know me. It's going to be
so embarrassing. She doesn't even look at me. I'm just one of a
hundred black men who are on the lockup list that day. A trial date is set. The judge orders me to
stay away from Detroit. And finally, I'm free to leave. My lawyer gives me
some money for a cab. I go home, and finally, in the
privacy of my house, I cry. The next day at work is worse. I'm the only black male
prosecutor in my office and I'm the only person in
the history of the section ever to have been arrested. Everybody-- everybody knows. My boss at the
Justice Department, he gets a call from
the US Attorney for DC. He says, wasn't Paul
the guy who prosecuted that guy in my office? And we had. I had. There was a guy in
that office who was selling film, government film. And we set up a little
sting operation, where undercover agent
goes in and says, how much film you got? Guy says, how much you want? $50 worth. I got $100. $250. Me and my agent were watching
this, and we're cracking up. Because every time
it goes up, this guy gets more and more exposure,
more time in prison. So finally, when he
gets to the office to sell the amount
of film that he can get like 20 years in prison,
we send the other agents in to take this cretin. That's what we called defendants
at the US Attorney's Office, cretins and douchebags. We send the agents in to put
this cretin out of his misery. And we cracked up. And now the US
Attorney's saying, I sure would liked to have
known about that case. It was embarrassing. So Paul prosecuted my guy. We're not dropping this case. So a lot more happens. I go to trial, finally. It takes the jury less than two
minutes to find me not guilty. And the reason they
found me not guilty is because I went to
Harvard Law School. We made sure they knew it. And I went to Yale. And the reason they
found me not guilty is because I had legal skills. I had literally prosecuted
people in the courtroom where I was being prosecuted. The reason they
found me not guilty is because I had
social standing. And the reason they
found me not guilty is because I was innocent,
but it didn't seem like the most important reason. People say, you should've known. Well, I had defendants
when I was a prosecutor, they say the cops planted the
drugs, the cops are lying. I'm like, Mr. Jones, you mean
this cop has nothing to do but make up shit about you? During my own trial,
the cop got on the stand and made up shit about me. I don't why he did it. But I've said that
that experience, it made a man out of me. A black man. I feel connected
to a lot of people. I learned a lot that
I needed to know. In the black church, they
say a setback ain't nothing but a setup for a comeback. They love wordplay
in the black church. I think that's where
Kendrick Lamar gets it from. It's true, though. The setback of getting
arrested and prosecuted set me up for a teaching
career, because I couldn't do that work anymore. They would have been
happy to keep me. I couldn't do it anymore. Set me up for a teaching career
that I've loved and gave me the kind of insight that I was
too proud to learn on my own. When people asked
James Baldwin how it felt to be both
black and gay, he said he felt like
he hit the jackpot. He said if you don't live
the only life you have, it's not like you're going
to live somebody else's life. You just won't
live a life at all. So why be normal? Be subversive. Be queer in one way or another. Celebrate how you are different
from every other sentient being on this planet. That's your gift to the world. And especially
with this pedigree, you're going to have
lots of opportunities to share that gift. And in the words of the
poet Nikki Giovanni, turn yourself into yourself. When I started teaching,
I had to find something to write about. Scholarship is the
coin of the realm. But I hadn't been on
the Law Review here. And I had a
first-rate education, but I took a lot of
clinical classes, so I didn't do a lot
of paper writing. But for all of my
favorite articles that I've written
as a scholar, I've written them by going the
way that my blood beats. My first big article was
based on my experience as a prosecutor, where also
in rookie prosecutor school, we were told that
sometimes jurors would know that a guy was guilty. But if it was a young
black man and it was a minor crime, a
drug crime, those jurors were not going to
send that man to jail. Even though they knew
that he was guilty, they would find him not guilty. And so when I
started teaching, I wanted to learn more
about that process. Found out it's perfectly
constitutional, called jury nullification. It's a way that DC
jurors responded when their young people were
called douchebags and cretins. It was way of walking up to the
office that called them that and slapping that
office in the face. First book, Let's Get Free-- A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice-- I fell in love with hip-hop
in New York in the 1980s, when hip-hop was being born
in the boogie-down Bronx. Years later when I
started teaching, I learned the philosophy
and theories of punishment. And it resonated, those
theories, with what the artists were laying down in tracks. And I didn't know anybody else
who could connect Immanuel Kant to Jay-Z, Lil' Kim to
Foucault. And so that's the book that I wrote. That's the book that you
have in you, the dots that only you can connect. Going the way your
blood beats will always lead you to the right place. And bring your people with you. My mom, she lives in Las Vegas. And she's flying
all the way here to attend my last criminal
law class tomorrow. She says she wants to
see me teach at Harvard. I said, you've seen me
teach at Georgetown. You've seen me teach
at George Washington. It's the same class. She said, yeah, I know,
but this is Harvard. She said, I had you
when you were 17-- when I was 17 years old, and
now you're teaching at Harvard. I want to see it. So, you know, it's section 7. They've been together
for the whole year. So it's going to be a little
bit embarrassing with my mom sitting right there tomorrow. But I have to let
her come, right? A poem by Alice
Walker gets it right-- they were women then,
my mother's generation. Husky of voice-- stout of step,
with fists as well as hands, how they battered
down doors and ironed starched white shirts,
how they led armies, headragged generals across mined
fields, booby-trapped ditches, to discover books,
desks, a place for us. How they knew what we
must know without knowing a page of it themselves. I think third-year law
students get way too hung up on what
their first job is going to be after law school. Relax. It's not that serious. Very few of my friends
are practicing, even, in the same areas
they started out in. It doesn't mean
they made a mistake. Just means that the world
changed and they changed. It's all good. Just a couple of
quick final thoughts. Some people say that what
you learn in law school is how to think like a lawyer. Growing up on the
South Side of Chicago, I didn't go to law
school to learn how to think like a lawyer. I went to law school to learn
how to kick a lawyer's ass. Lawyer thinking had
caused my friend's father to lose his pension
after working 30 years for the same company. Lawyer thinking was
why the toxic waste dump was in my neighborhood. Lawyer thinking had
created a community where I could walk
for blocks and blocks and never see a white person in
a city that was majority white. What you wrote in
your admissions essay about why you want to go
to Harvard Law School, I hope that gets you in
trouble with the king. It might lead to
some lonely places. Sometimes I wonder what
Constance Baker Motley must have thought when she was
working with Thurgood Marshall, try to defeat Jim Crow, what
Mary Bonauto must have felt in 1997 in Vermont when
these two women walked into her office and said
they wanted to get married, and she lost, in Vermont. But then she won in
Massachusetts, in Connecticut, in Maine, and right before the
1L year of the class of 2018, she won in the Supreme
Court of the United States. So get in trouble with the king. And sometimes the
king might actually be orthodox thinking
about what it means to be a progressive
or a conservative. God bless the Me Too movement. I wish it had been around for
some of the women in my life who had to leave jobs or who
had their career stunted because of men who harassed them. They felt like they
had no recourse because nobody with
power believed them or nobody with power cared. I hope that many of you
will use your skills as Harvard-trained lawyers
to crush that system, that patriarchy, so that women
will not be doubted simply because they are women. Also, from my own prosecution,
I learned that sometimes people accuse other people of doing
things that they did not do. Not all the time. Not even, I think, most of the
time, but some of the time. And so as lawyers, we should
be the first to insist on due process,
on fair hearings, on thoughtful adjudication. Think of what's happened, class
of 2018, during your time here. Right before you
arrived, I mentioned the Supreme Court decided
Obergefell versus Hodges. The cops killed,
during the time you've been here, Alton Sterling,
Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Decynthia Clements. Here at the Law School,
the black tape incident, the takeover of Belinda,
the new Law School crest, the bicentennial, the
dedication of the monument to the enslaved persons
who made it possible for us all to be in this room now. On the national scene,
just during your time here, the election of Donald
Trump, the Me Too movement, the movement for Black
Lives, the Dreamers-- the kingdom that you're
getting the keys to is a dangerous place for
most of its inhabitants. It's getting more
and more dangerous. What are you going
to do about it? Sometimes I wonder
if I have been a-- what I would have
done back in the day. Like if I had been
a slave, I hope I would have been a runaway. I hope I would have been
one of those people who led the uprisings. If I had been around back during
the civil rights movement, I hope I would have been
one of those people who sat in at the lunch counters. I hope I would have been
a person who, like my mom, took it to the
streets with Malcolm. If you, like me,
wonder what you would have done back in the
day, ask yourselves, what are you doing right now? What are you doing with
those keys to the kingdom? There's some good you can do. The African American men
who got tortured in Chicago, who got those settlements,
lawyers did that. The same-sex couples
who wanted to get married, lawyers did that. So for black people who keep
getting killed by the police, what can lawyers do? You tell me. You let me know. Five years. The transgender women of color. Female associates
who keep getting harassed by a male partner,
but they want to make partner. The influence of corporate
money or Vladimir Putin on US elections. The poison water in Flint. The occupied territories
in Palestine. What can lawyers do? I'm going to wait
to hear from you. You let me know. There's a wonderful documentary
called Street Fight. It's about when Cory Booker
first ran for office, for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. And the documentary shows
this campaign rally, and this little girl,
about eight years old, she's being interviewed. And she seems so excited. And the interviewer says,
did you see Cory Booker? And the little girl says, yeah! And she says, and I smelled him! And the interviewer says,
well, what did he smell like? And the little girl
pauses, and she said, he smells like the future. People of the class
of 2018, what an honor it's been to teach many of
you and to speak to all of you today. You smell like the future. Be careful with it, the future. And your keys to it. Remember this woman. Her name is Ieshia
Evans, and this is a photo of her being
arrested for protesting the killing of Alton
Sterling, a black man who was killed by the police. She was 35 years old
when this photo was taken, a licensed practical
nurse, and, I think, a superhero. She stood in the face of power,
brave and strong and probably a little bit scared. And nevertheless, she resisted. What are you going to resist? My career has been
about resisting our criminal legal process. When Clarence Thomas
was a judge in DC, he said sometimes
he used to look out the window of his
chambers and he'd see all of these
young black men filing to criminal court
in chains, and he would think, there but
for the grace of God, go I. President Obama,
speaking at the NAACP convention, same phrase. There but for the
grace of God, go I. My fellow members of the
Harvard Law School community, the determination of who goes
to criminal court in chains should not be so fortuitous. How well you do in this
country, in this world, should not depend so much on
race and class and gender. As long as it does,
we need all of you to use the opportunities
and the blessings that you've got here, to use
your keys to the kingdom, to resist. Thank you to the class marshals
for giving me this privilege of speaking with you today. Thank you all for being here. To the class of 2018,
congratulations. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. [SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
