Pictured: Dean Risa Goluboff
What a pleasure it has been this past week to meet so many of you, feel the excitement you are bringing to our community, and watch you begin the transformative experience that is law school. You will come out the other side of this year the same person that brought you to UVA, but also a different person. You will have new skills, new ways of thinking, new intellectual resources at your disposal, and new lifelong friends and colleagues.
It may be hard to believe, but you are, just one week into the semester, already transformed. Think back to what you know now that you didn’t a week ago. You know silly but important things like whether you prefer to read cases with highlighters or pens, online or in hard copy. Beyond that, you have started to learn your way around the building, identify student organizations you want to join, and manage your time. You know that a “tort” is is not a type of cake and have learned any number of other words, concepts, systems, and processes. You have read and may even be starting to understand (!) the cases your professors have assigned. Many of you have already survived your first cold call and, I hope, even more of you have volunteered in class using the hand-raising we all practiced at orientation.
As I get to know each of you better, as I see you in the halls or at 1L section breakfasts, I will ask you (again and again) some variation of the question: “What do you know today that you didn’t know yesterday, or last week, or last month, or when you first arrived here for orientation?” It is one of my favorite questions, because you will, invariably, offer some variation of this answer: “So much!” I also hope you will ask this question of yourself—if not every day, at least on a regular basis.
It is well known—one might even say legendary—that the first year of law school can be challenging. That is not because anyone has set out purposefully to make it difficult. Rather, it is because you are learning new approaches to information and to life that are just that: new. They take rigor and application to comprehend, and you will need (and want) to apply yourself with zeal as you learn them.
I encourage you to measure this learning, this transformation, by what happens both inside and outside the classroom. The Law School will offer you more opportunities than you can possibly take. That is the beauty of a school that boasts students who are the best and brightest in the nation, world-class faculty engaged in groundbreaking and interdisciplinary research, experiential learning that will let you put your classroom knowledge to work, and administrators and staff at the top of their fields and devoted to your success. Join a journal, take a clinic, do moot court, engage with the Charlottesville community, take on leadership roles. As you do so, you will encounter some of the many career paths available to you, from trial lawyer to corporate executive, cause crusader to policy wonk to dealmaker. Imagine what these paths might look like for you. Try several on for size.
Just as important as what you will do here are the people with whom you will do it.
UVA Law is more diverse and pluralistic now than at any other moment in its history. Your fellow students come from different backgrounds, have had different life experiences and live different identities, hold different beliefs, attitudes, and interests, and subscribe to a wide range of political views. Your colleagues as much as your professors will regularly expose you to new ideas and approaches to the law.
The exchange of ideas that results is invaluable to the transformational process of law school. You—we all—will have to work hard every day to create and find opportunities for real and productive exchange across our different viewpoints. That will entail exposure to new and varied information and ideas, a commitment to facts and evidence, and critical thinking about those ideas and that evidence. It will take courage in speaking and generosity in listening. The ability to consider every idea, to argue for your side and engage with the other, is fundamental to the mission of the university, the legal profession, and our democracy. In other words, to become the exceptional lawyers you are all here to become, it is essential to learn how to talk and listen with professionalism, respect, and empathy.
None of this is easy, but you have, once again, already begun. You have been thrown together in small sections that have exposed you to new people and their perspectives. You already know that you may be excited to hear from some classmates, professors, and invited speakers and that you may find fault in others, sometimes passionately. It is our goal both to enable speakers to share their views and to enable those who disagree to register their dissent in ways that promote further dialogue.
Achieving those goals is possible in part because of our shared commitment to the extraordinary community you have just joined. We come to the free exchange of ideas with a shared aspiration that our differences serve as a source of humility and strength, empathy and intellectual stimulation. The relationships you build during your time here—with your classmates, faculty, administrators, and staff—will enrich your education, enhance your time at the Law School, and sustain you personally and professionally far into the future.
So when things seem challenging—when you are not quite sure of your footing or next steps—I encourage you to look back. Once you do that, I know you will feel as confident as I do in looking forward as well. At the end of this year, you will be able to see your own transformation. You will, as your predecessors have, come up to me after your last exam of the semester to say, with appropriate pride, that you now appreciate how far you have traveled, that you feel like you are a different person from when you arrived. I know that will be the case, as that is what Law School does. It transforms how we think and what we can do in the world.
I can’t wait to hear your answers to my question, again and again. And to see all you learn and all you do.