Last Lecture Series | Jeannie Suk

professor at Cardozo School of Law once said once once said that Ginny sook needs no introduction I disagree with that as many of you know professor sook received her BA from Yale DPhil from Oxford where she was a Marshall scholar her doctoral thesis post-colonial paradoxes in French Caribbean writing was published by Oxford University Press she graduated from Harvard Law School our law school where she was chair of the Articles office on the Harvard Law Review she then served as a law clerk to Harry T Edwards on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court she worked as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan district attorney's office before joining the faculty at Harvard Law she's a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacDowell Colony fellowship which is described by the National Medal of Arts as the highest award given by the United States to artists or arts patrons for nurturing and inspiring many of this century's finest artists for other book at home in the law how the domestic violence revolution is transforming privacy receive the highest award profit by the long society Association the herbert jacob book prize award she is a recipient of the woman of time award which she was given in south korea and was given the National as Asian Pacific American Bar Association's Best Lawyers under 40 award she was invited to testify before Congress on law and innovation in fashion she became the first tenured Asian American woman at Harvard Law School this year 2016 marks a decade of her teaching students just like us Dean Minow has remarked that Professor Suk's excellence in teaching and mentorship is well renowned she serves as an extraordinary mentor to all of her students with a special affection for section 4 thank you which she leads with pride and integrity our outstanding scholarship combines the arts humanities and law poses provocative and mind-numbing ly difficult questions that I personally have spent my almost three years at Harvard Law School chewing on the questions are what is the legal import of emotional pain following a traumatic event is bureaucracy the antonym of desire my personal favorite is privacy a woman describing the psychic influence on which women have had on Supreme Court constant constitutional jurisprudence as it relates to our modern privacy doctrine she was never strayed from her path as an expert in literary studies applying close readings to judicial opinions she once wrote that the law is a dense structure of reasoning by text and analogy the life threat of legal decisions that strives of course to repress disorder so that legal results appear inevitable yet legal opinions simultaneously take seriously and take for granted the relation between state coercion life and death and public meanings produced through texts she also said the harm is a rich vein for legal study because it is the focus of such intense imaginative human investment beyond laws borders at the same time the law makes the home the home makes us and of course we make the law please join me in welcoming Ginny sook who threw her meaningful mentorship and prowess has influenced and shaped the minds of her students who will go inevitably to shape the world thank you so much for that introduction Yassin let me first say that I am really honored to be asked to give this lecture to the graduating class and I feel an unparalleled bond between me and the class of 2016 and I actually will be sad to see you leave this campus you have contributed so much to the school and I sincerely hope that we have done you more good than harm since the posters went up for this event around campus advertising Jeanne silks last lecture with that photo of me looking rather stoned or dazed and that sublime Wallace Stevens poem I have had some quite touching inquiries from concerned colleagues asking if this means I have a terminal illness or am leaving Harvard thanks lying I spent some of last week assuring people I am NOT in fact about to ascend to the heavens or accept a job at Stanford the reality is I am going to die in this job but hopefully not for a very long time and from here I will experience vicariously and with pride the things that you all are doing to live greatly and contribute to our world so my marching orders today were as follows give sage advice give guidance on how you should reflect on your time at HLS give social commentary on issues affecting our campus and beyond and reflect on the importance of using your career to serve others or offer thoughts on how to create meaning in your professional lives and beyond I never get nervous to speak in front of people anymore but I actually lost sleep last night over what I should say to you today many of you know that I don't allow personal narratives in my classes but one of the class marshals told me that I have to do some personal narrative in this lecture so I'll start with the bit of personal history my entire family is from the part of the world known as North Korea my parents were young children when each of their families fled to South Korea in 1951 during the Korean War my grandfather was a political dissident who publicly objected to the North Korean state established in 1951 and when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 my grandfather openly supported the northern advancement of troops led by American General MacArthur what that meant was that when the UN troops were beaten back by Chinese troops and my family knew that they'd be killed if they didn't flee their home they left along with a million refugees who fled during the Korean War my great-grandmother was lost on the way never to be heard from and my father's little baby sister froze to death on my grandmother's back my childhood memories and soul mostly consists of my grandparents weeping and sobbing over the home and the family they had left behind in the north when they fled it is possible that it is because trauma infused my family so deeply my family's entire existence was shaped by it during my childhood that in my scholarly career I became so fascinated with the phenomenon of trauma of its uses and abuses its meanings and its consequences and also the related concept of home my childhood and soul in the 1970s was also full of signs of daily life in a military dictatorship and the struggle for democracy the meanings of which I didn't understand until long after we had left when we immigrated to the United States there was at the time a national curfew routine air alerts during which people went to underground shelters I had an uncle who was tear gas and student demonstrations and classmates of my father were imprisoned and tortured as political dissidents my family immigrated to this country in 1979 and the US Congress had passed a law giving immigration preference to certain kinds of professionals so almost half of my father's medical school class came to the US and settled in Los Angeles or New York during this wave of emigration and in Queens New York I grew up with an astonishing array of children from all over the world people from so many different parts of the world whose families had such common stories stories of war displacement exile and survival probably the most formative experience of my life was as an immigrant having no English in class in elementary school feeling lost and out of my depth and lonely and frightened feeling exiled from the basic means of human community ocation a common language and to aggravate matters as a home at home as a child I was not encouraged to speak up at all and I would often be punished if I attempted to argue or debate about anything and I think that this has been a really strong influence on my approach to learning and teaching to take people who don't have fluency in a particular language and/or are constricted or don't have voice and teach them to be fluent so they can communicate with each other and with the world and to this day I can still access that feeling of alienation and fear and disconnection and then I snap myself back into connection through dialogue and through discussion I think because a linguistic discontinuity was so salient in my immigration experience I spent my educational journey obsessed with language I was obsessed with how language works the relationship between words and concepts and the relation between reason and emotion and how words help us navigate both those things and ultimately how does language shape what it means to be a human being through words we construct the narratives of where we came from and imagine what our future might be to be connected to others through language and through discussion in the face of fear has been a guiding principle for my life as a teacher when I was in Oxford in the late 1990s I wrote a dissertation on post-colonial literature by French Caribbean writers of African descent and people would ask me why are you interested in that or why are you interested in that and I think they meant that it was not obvious why a korean-american student would gravitate to study of that area of the world and eventually I came to see that in an indirect way through intellectual work I had been exploring relations and connections to my own history perhaps my interest in European colonialism had something to do with the Korean experience of Japanese colonialism perhaps my fascination with hybrid linguistic practice of French writers of African descent had something to do with my experience of acquiring a language and changing the relationship to my mother tongue and perhaps my obsession with the literary representation of home and displacement and exile by afro-caribbean writers had something to do with my experience of displacement from my family's home and exile from North Korea so when I became a lawyer I continued to think about the concept of home in another sense and as a law student I became interested in ways that the law conceptually distinguishes private space from public space and one way this abstraction was made real was in the loss treatment of conduct in the private space of the home as compared to conduct in public with the help of my mentor professor bill Stan's who sadly passed away from cancer several years ago I wrote a student paper on the concept of home in the criminal law of self-defense which would later turn out to be the germ of the book that was my scholarly project as a new law professor when I was a young girl in New York I became obsessed with an intricate yet simple work of choreography by George Balanchine an immigrant of Russian origin and I remember reading about a young Harvard University graduate of the 1930s named and kirstine who eventually became one of the most important figures in 20th century American culture Lincoln Kirsten dreamed of establishing a ballet tradition in the United States and convinced George Balanchine to come to America from Europe in 1933 to perform a to form a ballet company that Kirsten would then finance and Balanchine agreed to do this but he is reported to have said but first a school and so the School of American Ballet was created in 1934 and I became a student at that school in 1980 Ballentine's first choreographic work in America Seren odd was created as a workshop for students at the school by producing its dancers that school became the foundation for the ballet company in which was birthed the innovative modernism that came out of the tradition and technique of classical ballet and revolutionized the artistic course of dance but first to school those are words I live by and I believe in that it's a school that forms the people who will give life to the institutions that will change and engage with tradition a school is the foundation for society its practices in its norms and its aspirations and in the classroom I have tried to teach you to understand the awesome responsibilities in power that you will have as some of the most influential legal actors in the world you are people who will change our world who will evolve the way we think and secure the world's future but to do this work now in the institution that formed my legal mind and in the place where American legal education was invented while also pushing students not to accept the status quo that has been the challenge for me and that is a challenge for you you have impeccable technique you have skills you even have artistry but all of that is not enough you must challenge the way things are and imagine a world that is better and that will require a way of doing law that is better so what is legal education for it is not a credential or a pedigree it is a profound intellectual and socializing process and I think that law school can be one of the most transformative educational experiences known to man if you haven't had the experience of doubting first principles being provoked and disturbed and angered we haven't done our job here if you haven't dissected the structures of power authority and legitimacy and meaning that underlie our society we have not done our job here the ability to do that is what makes the job of a lawyer so fundamental in our society and rather than simply teach what the law is we should be teaching you how how to think about problems that don't have answers yet and your technical legal skills at this point are unparalleled but my hope is that you're not just going to be engaging in mimicry and repetition you will be entrusted with the institutions that make our society possible for better or worse you must use your imagination and have the courage to solve problems whose contours we don't even know yet and I know many of you look up to your professors and think that they have the ability to teach you answers but there's a reason we teach you through questions not answers and you know what you are going to be far more influential consequential and do much greater things than any of us here on the faculty of Harvard Law School so you have to think broadly about institutions that affect actions and how they're intended to work in theory how they really act and how they should act Robert cover wrote that legal interpretation takes place in a feel of pain and death legal interpretation legal interpretive acts signal an occasion the imposition of violence upon others a judge articulates his understanding of a text and as a result somebody loses his freedom his property his children even his life this aspect of legal language is why I am a lawyer law is performative in that words do not just describe things they actually do things in the world and that something is the threat of state imposed violence even when it is not used and unlike your counterparts in other disciplines your reasoning can also become Acts channeled through the authority of government institutions backed by state force with life-and-death consequences for real people so what keeps me up at night as a teacher the quiet what keeps me up at night is the question whether students that we teach here will become not only professionals with breathtaking technical skills which I know you all have but also people of integrity vision with the ability to critique and yes with passion who can wield the law with practical wisdom kindness and mercy people that we can trust to care for justice and devote their lives to reaching it what has been most upsetting for me the most upsetting moments for me as a teacher and I think some others on on my faculty are moments and often they occur in the second year I'm sorry in the second semester of the 1l year after you've had the first year fall is when you ask a student is this a just result and they don't know what to say or what's at stake in this case or what should the law be what is the morality of this position that you see represented it's not upsetting because I think there's a right answer it's upsetting to see that some parts of the legal education we give you here in the first year actually can have a detrimental effect on your ability by the second semester of 1l year to actually think about why how whether something is right or wrong and what kind of society we want to live in when a student just answers these questions by pointing me two words in a case or previous cases then I know that there's something about the way our first-year education works that is not quite right so but first to school it's not an exaggeration to say that our law school is directly connected to the heart of this society and I'm going to press you on your responsibility to serve the world and to question it and to change it and the students are what make the school's aspirations real you are graduating into a world on fire and more than any class in the time I've been a professor you have lived your legal education in true counterpoint with the social problems and social and justices surrounding us problems that fundamentally indict our law and call for critique of the way that you have been taught to think here in these halls you have pushed the faculty to think harder and to do better not to allow the education we provide you to conspire to hide the social structural and systemic injustice for which law itself can function to provide a cover you have helped the faculty see that there is no excuse for not exposing and confronting laws role in creating and bolstering the very problems of inequality of life and death that have moved you to action in the past several years as we send you off to make your way in the world beyond this campus this last lecture is also supposed to be providing you with some advice so let me use my remaining time to attempt to do that and I'll do that through a couple of stories more personal narrative when I was starting out as a professor here ten years ago I was really young looking and I know now you all think of me as the middle-aged woman that I am but back then I looked like any other student on this campus and I had some anxiety about not looking anything like the rest of the faculty that I joined and also I wondered whether students would accept that I was their professor and and then when I would go to the faculty dining room the staff would say oh honey this food is just for the professor's I don't worry they know me now so it's fine so I mean talk about impostor syndrome so in my eagerness to do the best I could I developed a perfection complex I thought if only I could do everything perfectly I'd be perfectly prepared write the perfect articles and teach the perfect classes then everything would be fine and my students would recognize my authority so one day in my first year of teaching my printer ran out of toner and I was late printing my notes for class and I was about three minutes late and which I felt was a disaster after all of the talking I'd done in class about the importance of punctuality and I had to run there in my perfect outfit with my perfect heels and skirt and blouse and I had my hands around a big casebook a big seating chart my notes and a seeming hot beverage and the and it was a classroom just like this and the door was in the back and there were a bunch of stairs leading down to the podium and the entire class was already seated very punctual and as I descended the stairs leading down to the front I felt my ankle slightly buckle under me and then it all went very slow motion and everything flew out of my hands my book and my my coffee and the seating chart and boom I fell right on my face in front of my students who all went well so what was running through my head at that moment um obviously my career is over obviously I can't teach these students they've seen me fall in my face um so what was there to do now well what did I do I got up wiped myself off and went to the podium and just began teaching I think if it happened now I probably would have made a joke about it but I didn't want to acknowledge that this had happened so and you know what I since that time have had multiple occasions to just thank the gods that that happened because I wouldn't be anything like the good teacher I am today if that hadn't happened the class had just spectacularly seen evidence that I was not perfect and that the class was not perfect and that it was the most liberating thing for us that term and for me going forward in my life trying to be perfect really hurts so being disabused of that perfection complex so early in my career in this kind of spectacular event was really freeing and there of course since then many moments like that in my life where it has been revealed to me and everyone else that I am not all that great and I remember Elizabeth Warren telling me she was my mentor for teaching when I when I first came here she took me under her wing and she said you know Jeannie you have to remember you're not here to make the students see and realize how good you are you are here to show them and to make them realize how good they are I also think that having a moment like that in class allowed me to have a certain approach to failure and of having everyone see that there are flaws and it actually made a big difference even in my scholarship the work that I do as a scholar it allowed me to be okay working on things and saying what I wanted to say instead of thinking well what you know how can I avoid criticism how can I avoid people thinking that there's something wrong with what I'm saying and at and so as a result I did write things early on in my career from very early on that did get me a lot of criticism and I remember as a young assistant professor at the big you know Association of American law schools conference in one of my early years I was speaking at a plenary session with hundreds and hundreds of law professors and a woman a woman got up in the back and then I realized who she was she was a feminist and I had long admired and had relied on her work for years and she got up and just absolutely denounced me and said that I was an irresponsible traitor to feminism because of the work that I had done now so that wasn't that much fun but again it made me realize you know that wouldn't have happened probably if I had been like trying to be perfect all the time and not get gained not get criticized by people I admired but you know there were some things I needed to say that I wanted to say and I did say them because I thought they were important to say and some students even today you know come up to me and they say you know God how do you feel about the fact that people get so mad at you well I do the work because I believe it's necessary and I've made peace with being criticized and disagreed with I've made peace with it and the first step was for me was early on realizing that not everybody's going to love you not everybody's going to think you're good so I think that the primary advice that I would have is to listen to your heart in looking for and engaging in work that you love to do and you want to be able to get up in the morning excited that you're doing work that you really love to do you should accept your needs and don't feel badly about fulfilling them I need to get eight hours of sleep every night I would probably have written a lot more and been more productive if I only needed six hours but I need eight and I take eight hours give yourself rewards when you meet certain goals I buy myself flowers when I write something that then complete it because I know that it will give me pleasure and since no speech by a Korean law professor would be complete without an Irish blessing may the road rise to meet you may the wind be always at your back may the Sun Shine warm upon your face and rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again may God hold you in the palm of his hand thank you you you

Channel: Harvard Law School

Views: 36,163

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Keywords: harvard law school, jeanie suk

Id: hF8_PEhw1_M

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2016