On the evening before graduation the University of Michigan Law School holds a convocation for all the students receiving honors, ranging from the top grades in particular classes to the top awards we give for scholarship, character, and public service. The students attend with their family and friends. The piece that follows is a part of the talk given in May 2004 to such a convocation

White, James Boyd

English

University of Michigan School of Law

University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2004 Schooling Expectations James Boyd White University of Michigan Law School, jbwhite@umich.edu Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/2085 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles  Part of the Legal Education Commons Recommended Citation White, James Boyd. "Schooling Expectations." J. Legal Educ. 54, no. 4 (2004): 499-503. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact mlaw.repository@umich.edu. Schooling ExpectationsJames Boyd WhiteOn the evening before graduation the University of Michigan Law School holds aconvocation for all the students receiving honors, ranging from the top grades inparticular classes to the top awards we giveJbr scholarship, character, and public service.The students attend with their family and friends. The piece that follows is a part of thetalk given in May 2004 to such a convocation.As you face the future that now awaits you, it is fair to ask: How has yourexperience at the University of Michigan Law School prepared you for it?What have you learned? Not just a bunch of legal rules and principles, noteven the mastery of sets of cases, but, as the clich6 has it, "to think like alawyer." But what is that? What have you actually learned?Let me say something of what I think you have learned.You have learned first of all that there are always at least two sides to a caseor argument. However clear your own initial response may be when a questionis put to you-say about prayer at high school graduations, or whether priceadvertising by corporations should be protected by the First Amendment, orwhether a state should be free to prohibit homosexual relations betweenconsenting adults-you know that there are arguments the other way; and youalso know that it is not your task merely to answer these arguments, but toconsider them and learn from them. Perhaps the heart of legal education islearning that on a great many issues, including the most important and vital,reasonable and decent people differ profoundly; and that law itself can be away of respecting and living with such differences.You have also learned that the lawyer works through to a conclusion not byabstract reasoning from general principles, not by the application of anideology or system, but by imagining as fully as possible what can legitimatelyand persuasively be said on both sides of a question.In discovering what can be said on each side of a question you have learnedsomething else: to look outside of yourself, outside of your own ideas andexperience, to the world. With respect to facts, for example, you know that anywitness's statement of what happened will be incomplete, riddled with conclu-James Boyd White is the Hart Wright professor of law and a professor of English at the Universityof Michigan.Journal of Legal Education, Volume 54, Number 4 (December 2004)Journal of Legal Educationsions, often self-serving; and that other evidence may well exist, other testi-mony from other points of view, that will complicate or undermine your firstimpressions. You have learned how to suspend judgment while you discoverand reflect.With respect to the law you have learned something similar: how to turnfrom the facts of the case to the world of law, a world of texts-statutes andcases and contracts and so on-to see what they say. The heart of what wemean by the rule of law is that any legal decider must turn to texts ordocuments that express judgments made by others that the decider is boundto respect. The idea of separation of powers is in this way built into the verystructure of the legal process: the legislature, for example, can say what itwants; but always someone else will say what the text it produces is to mean.You have accordingly learned how to discover the legal authorities that canbe said to speak to a question; how to think and argue about whether, and howmuch, the present decider is bound to respect them; and how to think andargue about what these texts mean, how to interpret them-for they are oftenunclear, self-contradictory, or ambiguous. You have learned, that is, how toread the law.The reading of the law is not simply a process of getting the main idea, orapplying clear principles. You know that it is your obligation, as it is your art, toconstrue notjust one legal text, but all that bear upon your case, and to do soin a way that makes sense of all of them together, as a coherent whole. In thissense you have learned to make the law, for it is only in the briefs andarguments and memos and contracts and judicial opinions that you andothers write that the law can become real as an intelligible and coherent forcein the world. Before you put it to work in compositions of your own, thematerials of the law lie around you in pieces and fragments. You have learned,that is, to become writers as well as readers of the law.I have said that in doing this you have learned to look outside yourself, andthat is true. But I hope you have learned to look inside yourself as well, to yourdeepest instincts and your own experience. Your knowledge of life and ofother people, your own experience of the world, will be important materialswith which you will think as a lawyer. One of the wonderful things about law isthat in every case the meaning ofjustice itself is at stake, and in the end theremay be no better guide to justice than the promptings of your own heart.You have learned, that is, not just a set of intellectual operations, certainlynotjust a set of rules, but something of what it means to think and live in amature and whole-minded way.But your education is not quite complete. I am your teacher after all, and Ihave you for another seven minutes, so let me offer you your last class at theUniversity of Michigan Law School, a class meant to connect the past, present,and future.Schooling ExpectationsFirst, I want you to think back to the moment when you decided to cometo the University of Michigan Law School. What did you imagine that it mightbe like?I cannot speak for any of you, of course, but let me suggest certain imagesthat may have been in your minds. First, you perhaps thought law schoolwould be a frightening experience, full of competition and abuse and fear,perhaps on the model of The Paper Chase. As for its intellectual content, youmay have thought that this would consist mainly of learning the rules of law.The law is a set of rules governing human behavior, after all, and what wouldset you apart as a lawyer would be your knowledge of what those rules are. Youwould become a rules master. Or perhaps another version of your imaginedlegal education was deep thought about crucial issues; maybe you even imag-ined yourself with your chin in your hand, gazing out the window, ponderingthe nature of property or race or constitutionalism, with the hope that youwould come to profound and novel conclusions which you could release tothe world. Or perhaps you imagined yourself glistening with intellectualpower, suavely mastering the mysterious language of the law.But this I am confident was not your experience. I assume that your legaleducation here was in the event more boring than you expected, but at thesame time more interesting-nowhere near as terrifying, but a lot harderwork. And as I have just been saying, this work did not consist only in learningrules or having deep thoughts, but was much more confusing, and much moreimportant than that, especially when you learned that both facts and law wereuncertain, highly arguable, and in the process discovered that many of yourown certainties were not so secure after all. Perhaps you came to see that inlearning law you were remaking yourself and your own values, perhaps thedeepest challenge that life offers.If I am right, then, law school was not what you expected: in some ways itwas a disappointment, in others the reverse of that. But to say that youroriginal expectations were not quite right is not to say that there was anythingwrong with you. This is the nature of life. You needed to bring your expecta-tions, imperfect as they were, to the experience that would qualify or modifythem. We all do this, all the time. Your expectations were schooled by yourexperience.I want you now to think of another moment, the present moment, in whichyou look forward to your future in law practice or some other field of life.Many of you who are graduating have takenjobs with firms or offices at whichyou have already worked, last summer or the summer before; others will go tofirms or offices that are really new to you; others will be clerking, a brand newexperience based on a brand new set of relations; still others have not settledon your next step. But you all have ways of imagining your futures.What are they? What do you see as you look forward to the next two or fiveor twenty years? Again, I cannot speak for you, and you each have your ownimaginings. Neither you nor I can know what your life in practice will really beJournal of Legal Educationlike, but I am confident that it will be different from whatever you imagine.Even if you are going to a firm for which you worked last summer, you will findthat it is different to be there as an associate-they are no longer recruitingyou!-and different, more completely than you can imagine, to be a youngpartner. Your responsibilities will be different; your role in the firm will bedifferent; your relation to your clients, and to the young lawyers then in thefirm will be different; everything will be different.But this may not entirely surprise you, for one thing that you may havelearned from your experience of law school is that your present expectations,however carefully shaped, will in some respects inevitably be wrong or mis-leading. And what this tells you is important, perhaps the central lesson of anyeducation worthy of the name: to be alert to learn what you can about thereality of your experience when it happens; to be ready to change yourexpectations accordingly; to be one of those, in short, upon whom in HenryJames's resonant phrase "nothing is lost."I would now like to ask you to shift your attention one last time, to thefuture, and to an imagined interview with a client. Let us say that he faces alawsuit, or seeks to plan his estate or build a company or sell a patent; or thathe wants to make a contract or end a marriage; or that he seeks recovery for aphysical injury. What is to be your role in talking to him? Simply to tell himwhat the law is?What I want to suggest is that your client is in fact situated much as you werewhen you first came to law school, and as you now are as you look to yourfuture: he has a certain set of expectations about what the law is, and what youcan do for him; and these expectations will necessarily be imperfect.This means that a central part of your task as a lawyer will be to help yourclient shape his expectations to his experience as it comes to him. You need toteach him that the contract you draft cannot tie the other part), down in everypossible contingency, because not every contingency can be imagined; thedivorce he seeks will indeed end his marriage, but it will not erase the time hehas spent with his wife and, at least if he has children, it will not end butreconstitute the relation he has with her; if he recovers a substantial award forthe injury he has suffered, that will help meet his economic needs, but it willnot remove the injury or the suffering or the disability if there is one. And inall of this, however good his cause or just his case, no lawyer can guaranteesuccess. Such are the hard facts of your client's situation, and part of your taskwill be to bring him to recognize them.Of course your client needs her expectations; they are the ground of hopeand action; but hers, like yours and mine, will always be imperfect; they needto be schooled by her experience. To help her face this fact is part of yourjob.I am suggesting, that is, that the practice of law can be a continuation of theeducation you have begun here, as you put to work the lesson you havelearned about the nature of human expectations, and as you help others learnthat lesson too. You will become an educator; this may in fact be your mostSchooling Expectations 503important and meaningful role; and in doing this you will establish thedeepest connections between what you have done here at Michigan and whatyou do at the center of your professional life.Having been taught, you will teach; this is a life full of promise, uncertainty,hope, and challenge. May you fare well.

Schooling Expectations

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