Thank you for the kind introduction, Dean Miles, and let me extend my own warm welcome to the JD Class of 2026 and the LLM Class of 2024.
I know this is an important moment in your lives, but you may not realize how important this moment also is in the lives of your teachers. Every new class of wonderful students at the Law School is exciting: you are among the best law students in the country, and the world, who will provoke, challenge, and teach us, your faculty, even as we provoke, challenge, and teach you. One reason this is the best job I could imagine is that I get to work with you, and I know my colleagues feel the same. So, the first thing I should say on behalf of the entire faculty is: thank you for coming to Chicago! We are excited to teach you, and excited to learn from you.
As Dean Miles mentioned, I hold a professorship named after Karl Llewellyn, one of the great figures in American law of the 20th century, who was also a faculty member here. Among other distinctions, Llewellyn was primary drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code (which you’ll hear more about in contracts), as well as the most significant theorist in the American school of jurisprudential thought known as “Legal Realism,” which you’ll hear a lot more about if you take Jurisprudence with me in the Spring.
Llewellyn was also an iconoclastic character. He was studying in Europe more than a century ago when World War I broke out, and being a lifelong lover of Germany—its language and culture—he immediately joined the German army to fight for the Kaiser, and was eventually awarded the Iron Cross by Germany!
Chicago, as you may know, is the only American law school with a former faculty member (namely, Ronald Coase) who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. We’re also the only American law school with a current faculty member (namely, Martha Nussbaum) who has won the Kyoto Prize in Arts & Philosophy, the so-called “Nobel Prize” in fields not recognized by the Nobel Committee. Less often mentioned, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that we are also the only law school with a former faculty member who won the German Iron Cross! (To the best of my knowledge, no current faculty are Iron Cross winners!)
Now Llewellyn taught at Chicago from 1951 until his death in 1962, and was a regular teacher of “Elements of the Law,” one of the distinctive aspects of the Chicago law curriculum that each JD student takes. As it happens, there is a recording available online of the first day of his “Elements” class from October 1957, which I have transcribed in part. So let me share with you how the great Professor Llewellyn, ever the iconoclast, welcomed that class to the study of law at Chicago:
Well, it’s always a delight to look upon the young, fresh, unspoiled faces of a class entering law school. I see that simple innocence is with us as it should be…However, I have the job of doing what I can to break in upon this innocence. My main job this morning is to point out to you it is not yet too late to withdraw. Stay with us a week, and you will begin to change. Stay with us a month, and you will never be the same again. You are not only entering upon a calling, you are entering upon a calling which is utterly unmatched in its power to remake the personality of its entrants…Other callings can do this, and do do it, but with nothing like the speed with which the law does. By the end of a month of law study, I repeat, you will never be the same again. Therefore, you will see things differently, you will think different thoughts, you will have different lines of judgment, you will just be different. And very difficult for your folks to recognize at Christmas.
Now my “main job” this evening is certainly not to remind you that you still have time to withdraw, far from it! I do, however, agree with Professor Llewellyn that the study of law will change you, if not in a month, then most certainly over the next few months, and definitely over the next three years of study. You are likely to become more argumentative; more likely to demand evidence in support of a proposition; to draw distinctions; to ask precise follow-up questions…again and again and again. Your folks will recognize you, to be sure, come the December holidays, but they may well find you a bit irritating. Certainly my kids grew tired of being deposed—not asked, but deposed!—over dinner about their activities.
But those are the short-term changes. Over the longer term, you will be well-served by learning the importance of skepticism about people’s motives, the importance of process, of collecting evidence before rendering judgment, of compromise, and of the need to think about long-term and perhaps unforeseen consequences over short-term advantages. These beliefs and habits of thought will serve you well in almost any line of work you pursue.
One thing we will teach you in law school, as you have probably heard, is how to “think like a lawyer.” This is less mysterious than it may sound, since lawyers turn out to have the same brains and the same cognitive capacities as other human beings. So lawyers think just like other people, except with a particular emphasis on certain kinds of reasoning, done more carefully than in ordinary life.
“These beliefs and habits of thought will serve you well in almost any line of work you pursue.”
Take, for example, “reasoning by analogy,” so central to the doctrine of precedent or stare decisis, the rule that decisions of an earlier court bind decisions of later co-equal or lower courts—but only, of course, when the cases are relevantly similar. That’s where analogy comes in: are the facts of the earlier case analogous to the facts of the case now before the court? Only when the answer is “yes” does stare decisis come into play.
This is a kind of reasoning that we use all the time in daily life. When my kids were younger, the 10-year-old would sometimes protest being sent to bed while her 15-year-old brother got to stay up watching a movie with the following argument: “It’s not fair that he gets to stay up, but I have to go to bed.” Alas, the two cases are not relevantly similar: the difference in age affects how much sleep each needs for the next day’s activities, thus the decision to let the 15-year-old stay up is not “binding” as it were on the decision about bedtime for the 10-year-old.
As law students and then lawyers, you will get very good at reasoning by analogy, and very good at finding disanalogies for “unwelcome precedents” as Llewellyn famously put it in his book The Bramble Bush. The finding of relevant similarities and dissimilarities in analogical reasoning is an art, not a science, and you will get much practice in the art over the next three years. In “Elements,” you will likely be exposed to a classic illustration of this in the work of Edward Levi, a member of the Class of 1935, who later served as dean of the Law School, president of the University, and attorney general of the United States. His 1948 Introduction to Legal Reasoning has helped generations of law students, here and elsewhere, learn about analogical reasoning.
Another aspect of “thinking like a lawyer” is a bit more distinctive to law. One way to bring this out is by comparison to my other academic field, philosophy. In philosophy, you learn very quickly that it is no argument to defend a view by saying “because Plato said so” or “because Kant said so.” In philosophy, the only thing we want to know is whether Plato or Kant had good arguments, good reasons for their views. But in law it is different: arguments from authority are not fallacious, as they are in philosophy, but mandatory. That is central to law as an institution and practice: ultimately, the basic reason for why something should be done is, “The statute said so,” “the Supreme Court said so,” and so on. A legal argument that does not bottom out in an argument from authority is an unsuccessful argument.
I do not want to exaggerate, however, the differences between law and philosophy. The fact that, in law classes here, you will often be subjected to something called the “Socratic method”—a method of inquiry associated with one of the founding figures of the Western philosophical tradition—makes the connection between the two fields obvious enough. In the Socratic method, you are asked a series of questions meant to elicit your reasons for what you claim to know, and to test whether you really have good reasons for your beliefs. It can sometimes be a frustrating process—as the fact that Socrates’s interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues often threaten to smack him suggests! As an aside, let me emphasize that it is a well-established albeit informal norm here that students should not smack their instructors!
As my colleague Martha Nussbaum has often emphasized in her writing, the Socratic method is a great equalizer: you can either give reasons for the view you hold, or you can’t. It doesn’t matter if you are the professor, or the student, or the Dean, or even the great Martha Nussbaum! What matters is that you can offer arguments for what you believe, arguments that might persuade others who are open to reasoned decisions about what to believe.
The egalitarian ethos runs deep here. There is a very old, and very “Chicago” joke, I’ve heard many times over the years, even before I arrived here in 2008. A group of Chicago faculty gather for lunch in the faculty club, and one younger faculty member says to a very senior one, “So what are you working on now?” The older faculty member replies, “Well, I got my Nobel Prize for my work on…” at which point the younger faculty member cuts him off: “No, no,” he says, “what are you working on now?” Resting on your laurels, or your status, or your pedigree, does not count here. What counts is what you do every day in the Law School: your ideas, your arguments, your research, and your oral and written expression.
That is the ideal of the Chicago legal education, and its one reason I’m quite sure this is the best legal education in the United States. We are very pleased to welcome you to it.
Original source can be found here.