Garrett Coleman '25
Executive Editor
In honor of our not getting President’s Day off, I felt obligated to write this article a week late. Fortunately, the lessons from Theodore Roosevelt’s life are always timely. It may surprise some to learn that our 26th President had a short stint in law school—just a single academic year from 1880-81. While Columbia Law School broke up the next year (classic levels of collegiality from Columbia), Roosevelt was given a posthumous J.D. in 2008. Still, our fellow lawyer’s time in school can tell us something about the importance of not getting bogged down by our peculiar career.[1]
For anyone not as passionate about Theodore Roosevelt (TR) as me, a brief synopsis of his life is in order. The quintessential American president was born in 1858 to a New York patrician family. While a sickly child, he never wanted for vitality. During the Civil War, when bothered by his Southern mother, he would loudly pray that the Union soldiers “grind the Southern troops to powder.” After TR’s father, in typical Victorian fashion, told his asthmatic son, “You have the mind but you have not the body,” TR began a lifelong obsession with physical fitness and outdoor activity. He would go on to row for Harvard’s crew team, serve in the New York State Assembly, venture out to the Badlands of South Dakota to begin a ranching business, serve as the New York City Police Commissioner, lay waste to the Spanish army with a unit of hand-picked convicts at his back, and, of course, learn that he became the President of the United States while atop a mountain in the Adirondacks. This man was fun.
But while a law student, he was something of a fish out of water. He would uncontrollably burst out of his seat during lectures, arguing for “justice and against legalism.” He found caveat emptor to be “repellent.” And he despised the “sharp practice” that he thought characterized the profession of corporate lawyers. As you can imagine—and you may be thinking of particular sectionmates at this point—TR was not universally admired by his law school class.
To me, it seems rather fitting that a man with so much energy and passion was a bit turned off by the law. Much of our education revolves around learning how to adapt to the lay of the land. We follow precedent rather than policy. When we start representing clients, their interests dictate what we can say. If we are lucky enough to become a judge, most of our work will focus on addressing problems that have already happened rather than preventing them in the first place. So, for the creative spirit that wants to build and leave her mark on the world, the law can often feel confining.
And I also find it interesting how someone who was obsessed with being the center of attention had more success outside of the law than within it. Even though many of us enjoy public speaking, law school teaches us to do so in a regimented fashion. Whether in moot court, mock trial, or a legal issue presentation to fictional partners, how we speak is severely curtailed. I imagine that this makes the real public speaking enthusiasts long for an unfiltered political speech, the kind that TR was so successful with.
This is not to say that TR was right while in law school. He was an idealistic young man with a somewhat off-putting sense of righteousness. And his second presidential campaign for the Bull Moose Party displayed his impractical and vindictive side. Law school can certainly be a place for the idealistic. Between pro bono practices, clinics that lobby the state legislature for much-needed bills, and appellate practice aimed at altering the legal practice, there are many opportunities to set your sights on an impactful legacy. But I think TR still demonstrates a good impulse that we lose too readily in law school. Question why legal doctrines are what they are, don’t quiver at the negative impression some people have of you, and be brave enough to mold your career to what you want the world to be rather than what it already is.
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jxu6ad@virginia.edu
[1] All the facts for this article are taken from Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979). To improve readability, I omitted the constant ids. However, I would hate to disrespect the greatest biographer of all time, so please read his book and the other two in the TR trilogy (yes, trilogy).