President Lloyd Elliott, Dean Jerome Barron Fellow Graduates of the Class of 1982; Professors and Members of the Faculty; Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, in being or prospective;
Dear Friends:
Last year the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court graced this school and this occasion with his presence as graduation speaker.
Sorry, Class of ’82. Progress will have to be your most important product. (laughter.)
I’d like also to thank all of you for coming.
I’m really grateful to see so many people because today is my and my wife’s 29th wedding anniversary. I told Eunice that I was going to give her a party but never in her wildest dreams did she believe we would have 4500 guests. So, please let me introduce her to you, my wife sitting over there on the right side, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. (applause.)
While the winners of all the academic awards were being introduced I noticed that Chuck Manatt had his hand hanging down behind his back and seemed to be operating some kind of an instrument. Then I figured out it was an applause meter. He has been checking the applause response for each of the academic prize winners, and has authorized me to say that he is ready to sign up for membership in the Democratic Party all those who got high marks on his meter, -- especially Michael Ginsberg... (laughter)
Today is a day of glory and joy: Glory to those who have led the class, written the impressive law journal articles, landed the high-paying jobs with prestigious law firms, clerkships with important judges, crusading public prosecutors and public defenders.
Joy for all who graduate, regardless of Class standing or jobs; joy for all parents and friends,husbands and wives, ... joy even for a graduation speaker grateful for a captive audience. So let us rejoice and be glad. This is a happy day, a day to remember, a day when it’s good to be alive.
Soon, when you pass the Bar examinations, you will become fully-authorized members of the most influential profession in the richest country in human history. Let me repeat -- members of the most influential profession in the richest country in human history. Note, I do not say the most respected profession, nor the most beloved. Nor do I say that ours is the most powerful nation in human history. The Roman Empire at its peak, the British Empire at its, the Mogul Empire, the Chinese and Islamic hegemonies were probably more powerful, with absolute authority more concentrated, more territory subdued, more subjects in dependence. We do not now possess nor have we ever sought such power. We have marched to the beat and music of a different drummer, a drummer whose beat and music have been composed for him more by our profession - judges, lawyers, and lawyers acting as legislators, bureaucrats, speech writers, teachers -- than by any other definable group in our society.
So you join a most influential and significant group. So what?
Many say that students today, law students included, see society as merely a collection of self-interested people playing a game, fixed by rules, mostly legal rules. People look upon themselves and each other as one of two types: -- those who know how to win by using the rules in their own favor, and the suckers. “Suckers” either do not know how to play the game, or worse, naively do not even know that a game is being played. Education is looked upon as a good thing, but the university, including the law school, is regarded essentially as only a stepping stone to something else, one more hurdle that a gamesman must jump.
Your joy today, then, could be viewed as only pride and elation in having jumped a high hurdle giving you entrance into the really big game, with the big rollers, the ones who realize that the so-called “rules of the game” are merely conventional.
Marxists would say our rules have been created just to protect class and economic interests; pure capitalists might say there should be no rules except the rules of the market where an invisible hand metes out fate and destiny to the survivors of the endless struggle for profits. Edmund O. Wilson seems to argue that all the rules are determined by socio-biological factors; B.F. Skinner points out that all rules, customs, and mores, even the players, can be modified, even transformed, by operant conditioning. Jacques Monod argued that mere chance is the source of all matter, all life, and therefore all rules. Others say it’s all in the genes, it’s all in the stars, it’s all in history, or in physics, or somewhere in space. Many philosophers and speakers have tried to prove that something more than self-interest is involved .. something more than mere chance. But, no matter which philosopher is right or wrong, (whatever those words mean), the smart guys need only know the rules as they exist. We can manipulate those rules, or any rules, to our self-interest, pick up the big chips, and laugh at the suckers.
So, once again, let us rejoice. We have graduated into, or we are already members of, the knowledgeable elite. We are or soon will be the success stories. We’ll always be able to take care of ourselves no matter what happens. We know the rules, and the ways to play to win the game. Just to be super-safe, moreover, members of our profession also write the rules, and interpret the meaning of what we have written. It’s nice work if you can get it. And you’ve got it.!
Frankly, I think the attitude or outlook just described may well work for many of you, maybe all of you, for quite a while, maybe a long while. But I’m also sure it will not last forever; and I would not be surprised if that outlook, that world-view, came to an abrupt finish sooner than we think.
Portents of change are numerous and sometimes surprising.
Listen to these words written by Kevin Phillips, -- author, a few years ago, of a popular book “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Mr. Phillips was an early prophet of Nixonism- Reaganism. So I can safely quote him. No one can impugn my witness as a profligate do-gooder left over from LBJ’s “Great Society”, or as a socialist, or communist-dupe, or worst of all, as an incompetent, Washington government bureaucrat, the alleged source of all our problems Kevin Phillips is a genuine, free private enterprise, tall-in-the-saddle American, eligible for membership in anyone’s country club. Here are Kevin Phillips’ words:
..."Two decades of political and economic trauma have brought this country to a point of considerable risk. Unrepentant liberalism having apparently exhausted its credibility by the 1980’s, the United States turned to a radicalized conservatism -- as many voters crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. The precarious nature of the present conservative experiment cannot be overstated. In an era of upheaval like our own, there is no way of going back, no way to recapture the past. Radical conservatism may succeed for a while, or it may be transformed, or it may break down completely. But to future historians, the early 1980s are almost certain to mark a transition to anew politics, anew economics, and a new. philosophy of governance (Emphasis added). It seems fair to say that a decisive part of the American electorate has already become post-conservative as well as post-liberal”.
Kevin Phillips is saying that we ‘are already living in a post-Roosevelt and a post-Reagan America. He’s saying that a new economics and a new philosophy of governance are not simply desirable, He’s saying they are inevitable. Why? Because the Reagan and the Roosevelt solutions no longer work. Nor do they meet the needs of a world now clearly in sight to all with eyes to see beyond the bottom line.
To which I say, and you should say, “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” Because if Kevin Phillips is correct, you can shape the future. You know the existing rules but you can change them, better them, make them responsive to a “new politics, a new economics, a new philosophy of governance”. But: Are you, all of you, any of you, even one of you, happy at this prospect?
Most of you have suffered and sacrificed to reach this moment of graduation. You can say, at last: ... “I’m home safe. I’ll never have to worry again, financially or socially. I’ve made it into the most influential profession, in the world’s richest country. I now know the rules of the game and I’m ready to play. I can manipulate and hedge, cover, run the arguments both ways, and succeed. Out of the way, suckers. I’m a winner, a single’s club sensation, a Gold Card member of American Express, a tax-shelter wizard. Let me at those $40,000 a year beginning salaries for associates, those prestigious clerkships, those paneled corporate offices. The race is to the swift, and I’m running...”
So, -- are you breathless to shape the future of a “post-liberal, post-conservative America”? Or are you breathless to run to the bank? Or both? Most of us want “both”. We want the six or seven figure salaries, and all the perks. We think our final course in law school would have been best if Edward Bennett Williams had revealed his secret route to the owner’s box of the Redskins and the Orioles, if Joe Califano told us how to spring from assistant in a government department to a Cabinet post in ten years flat, -- if David Stockman explained how to tell all to a liberal newspaperman and still hold his job. That’s gamesmanship at its best. That’s “White Shoes Johnson” wiggling his legs in the end-zone, Borg on his knees at Wimbledon, Reggie at home plate watching a 450 foot blast sail into the upper deck. Or me: Shouldn’t I tell you how to go from a warrior against poverty to a warrior for the wealthy with a Watergate address?
Maybe I should. Maybe they should. Maybe that’s what you really want. But you wouldn’t learn much from our past triumphs useful for your future challenges. Ours is the past, -- the past, which, Kevin Phillips says, is gone! There’s “no way of going back”, he wrote; no way of holding off the tides of the future; and he’s right, -- even if King Canute were in the White House ... Or is he?
Let’s put it this way -- First: Ed Williams, Joe Califano, David Stockman and I are not going to reveal our secrets. We would do that only on billable time. Sorry, Ear!
Second: I’m not going to act as if I could give you the new economics, the new politics, and the new philosophy of governance in the next five minutes.
Instead, I’m going to confess to you the only truths I have really learned after 50 years of work, and in loafing about on all the continents except Australia.
First Truth: I am sorry to talk about a somber, depressing fact, especially on Graduation Day, but nevertheless, the first truth I want. to emphasize is that death is the most important thing in life. If you have nothing or no one you are willing to die for, you have nothing worth living for.
The most important words in the Declaration of Independence are not..."Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” ... but the ending ... “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”...
More than half of all the signers of that Declaration were lawyers and judges, and a lawyer wrote most of it.
George Washington whose name adorns this University and this City was not a signator, but he, too, pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. He risked his life in battles; he endangered all his fortune including his beloved Mt. Vernon; he suffered the indignity of being called a traitor by the Tories who impugned his honor. He did not put his property in a blind trust; he sought no tax or other shelter for his property or life. He wintered in Valley Forge, not Palm Springs.
He was ready to die for his beliefs!!
Nor was he alone.
The richest man in Maryland put his name on that Declaration - Charles Carroll of Carrollton. John Hancock was no pauper, nor were many of the other famous signers.
They were all traitors against their King, -- George III who was King when being a King was big business, big power, when England was a colossus astride the world and we, those 13 original colonies, were less than El Salvador versus Alexander Haig.
Incidentally, George Washington and his troops were not fighting for the United States of America! The U.S.A. did not even exist in 1775-1776 when our forefathers and foremothers were risking death. They were putting their lives on the line not for a government, but for ideas -- for the idea of liberty; for the idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed; for the separate and equal station, they said, to which the Laws of ature and of Nature’s God entitle them.
“Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” -- that’s an interesting phrase. They didn’t teach a course on the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God at the Yale Law School back in the pre-war Days when I was there (and I mean prey WW II) I wonder how many of us lawyers would pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to support the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God today? -- In fact where could we even find those laws?
Times have changed. We don’t read the Declaration of Independence literally anymore. We don’t want to be “extremists in defense of liberty” as Barry Goldwater found out. But what do we want enough, what do we believe in enough, to die for its accomplishment?
We, you, had better find some thing or some one for which or for whom we are willing to die.
Truth Number Two: Suffering is the unavoidable destiny of every man, woman, and child in this room. That’s a platitude, isn’t it? Evil and suffering; death and destruction; pain, pain, -- mental pain, physical, social, psychological pain. Loneliness. Everyone of us, cocksure or afraid, smart or slow-witted, rich or poor, gifted or handicapped -- all of us are destined for pain and suffering.
Our century has produced more pain and suffering and death than any in history. We could become famous as “The Slaughterhouse Century”, the century when human beings killed more of their fellow human beings than in any other 100 year period. The Black Death in the 14th Century; Genghis Khan and Tamerlane; the Saracens, Hannibal, and Alexander; the Caesars and the Pharaohs; raging fire, earthquake, famine, have never caused more death than we citizens of the 20th Century have inflicted on one another. And we have not stopped!! We are not yet satiated with death. We are not content with death through violent revolutions, death in the Gulag Archipelago, death in the Holocaust, death in the trenches of World War I, the fire bombings of Dresden and other obliteration bombings of World War II; nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Korea, the Congo, Hungary, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, Biafra, Cambodia, Afghanistan; death on the highways; death in the air; death caused by hunger; death by terror; assassination; torture; abortion. From every direction, and in a hundred different forms, violent death has become the biggest business of our times.
No one can accurately estimate the numbers we have slaughtered. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions have been killed. Fear of violent death now touches the nerve fibers of ordinary women and children, not just able-bodied military men. The ancient “rules of war” grow increasingly irrelevant among nations preparing for chemical warfare, germ warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warfare, space warfare. Public opinion polls in the United States report 31 percent of the American people expect world war within the next ten years, which means in effect, that they expect the end of their world soon.
But what does this evil, this suffering and death have to do with law school, with bar exams, with courts, judges, taxes, legislation -- with us, with you and me, as professionals, as professors-exponents-representatives of a legal system, as sworn advocates of equal justice under law?
This question leads to “Truth Number Three”.
Evil, suffering, death are of immense importance to you and me as lawyers, yes, but even more so, with us as human beings.
No, I do not mean to imply that we can eliminate death, destruction, hunger, poverty, disease, war, or even taxes. I am not a utopian. The human situation includes sin and Satan, evil and hell. But I do not believe we should accept evil and sin, corruption and unfairness, or war as inevitable. I’m one of those strange birds who, foolishly enough, even today, actually do believe in the literal words and thoughts of the Declaration of Independence.
Yes, I believe -- which is to say, that I make an act of Faith, in the validity of those principles for our people in our country now. Which means that as a lawyer I believe it’s my obligation to struggle for those principles in theory and in practice. Which means that, yes, I do believe that our Government, my Government, my profession, have a positive moral and legal duty to make sure that Legal Services are available to the poor on an accessible, affordable, regular, dignified basis, and, if necessary, free-of charge.
Which means that I, as a lawyer, as a professional, believe that some significant part of my money, time, thought and energy belongs, I don’t give it, it, belongs to others, not just to me. Which means that I believe I am not wholly “independent”, not a creature whose self-interest is paramount, nor a person who must be Number One or perish.
Yes, I do believe that we the people of the United States must recapture our belief that “national survival”, not national security, depends on a communal, a common, united effort in which each one of us participates with and helps others, a community to which we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. National security without national community is a will of the wisp, a fatuous dream of the military mind.
Force never created a community, except one of despots or brigands. Force can sometimes protect a community; but history shows that the communities which last longest rely least on force. For example, the Jewish Community. Where are the Pharaohs today? Those ancient Egyptians, for whom the Jews worked as slaves, are as dead and gone as Dodo birds, Hardly any one can read their hieroglyphics; few remember their triumphs; no one worships their gods! But the Jews live on, and so does their Temple, their Torah, their Yahweh. And where is Caesar and his legions-, Augustus with hiss titles of Deus, Imperator, Rex? Christians, whose burning bodies were used as street lamps to illuminate the Appian Way, survive today, with their Jesus, and His impious Cross, the ancient symbol of disgrace and defeat; Jesus lives on; the Romans are in ruins.
Yes, I do believe that I, as a professional, (with government help if the government is enlightened, without government help if the government is obtuse) have the obligation to join with other professionals and fellow citizens to struggle against nuclear armaments, their use and possession; against poverty caused by unconscionable laws, or even by legalized greed; against pollution of the physical and mental environment; against avoidable and unfair inequities in education, health and housing against all those and other evils of our society, I must serve, not I should serve, free-of-charge if necessary, with groups in my home town organized to attack community problems: -- homelessness; hunger; teenage pregnancy; dissolute conditions; joblessness; loneliness especially of the old and forgotten.
Community action by lawyers is essential to solve community problems in our legalistic society. Without lawyers’ help we cannot build community strength, community vision, community security.
Nor is government the cause, immediate or proximate, of our problems. That idea is a canard! We cause our problems. It’s our selfishness, our greed, our neglect of our neighbors, our sloth, our lust, our pride! Communists are not littering our streets, raping our children, stealing from our banks, cheating our tax collectors, bribing our legislators. That’s what we are doing -- to ourselves -- and then blaming others - blaming most of all those who are different-looking like Blacks, or different-speaking like Hispanics, or those who live far away like Russians or Orientals.
“Does Christianity provide a way through?” asked a young Trotsky-ite boy walking in a peace parade in Edinburgh, Scotland? He posed that question to a Christian Evangelical who was astonished that such a young man could already observe the dead-end of Marxism, the dead-end of capitalist-consumerism, the dead-ends of science, technocracy, computerism, genetic manipulation, all of these new tools, these “toys” which give us more power, but power without meaning!
Of course, these new discoveries and tools produced by science and technology can help us do away with some forms of physical and social suffering and alienation. But they cannot reach the suffering and alienation caused “by our solitude, by our finitude, with suffering because of and in love, with suffering because of our mortality, because of our personal and collective guilt: - the dirty hands of our human history, with so much innocent suffering, injustice, injury, the tears of human and divine indignation”.
Science and technology, even medicine cannot touch those inner parts of our life, but the law and lawyers can! And this is Truth Number ‘Four: -- We lawyers can redress wrongs; we can secure justice for the poor; we can help to release prisoners, protect the innocent, curtail the powerful! We can do those things, provide those services for everyone. This is the heart and soul of legal practice. And the joy of that practice is without limit or end!
In the earliest days of our national effort to provide legal help for the poor, in Detroit, at a Legal Services Center just opened by the University of Detroit Law School faculty and students, I met a couple returning from an appearance in a small claims court. The husband was 71 years old, his wife 67. They were accompanied by a law student who had helped them in the court. They had just won a verdict for $68, I asked them how they felt, and the old man looked at me and said, “Mr. Shriver this is the first time we have ever won anything. The first time we’ve ever had any one on our side!” Then tears began to fill his eyes. And he took my hand and kissed it!!!
I pray that every member of this Law School Class of 1982 will experience an occasion something like that, at least once in your life. For it reveals the true glory of the law and the joy of the practice. “In Waiting For Godot” Vladimir asks Pozo: -- ‘Where are you going?’ All unwittingly, Pozo gives the Judaeo-Christian answer: ‘On’! The same answer all lawyers should give to all clients, and I give to you, -- “On” -- Onward to a just and “good” America!!
Yes, to a just and good America to which lawyers can show the way in their practice and in their lives.
