RealAudio version

Dean Perritt's Opening Remarks from the January 17, 1998, Open House for Prospective Students

Good Morning. I'm Hank Perritt, Dean of Chicago-Kent College of Law and Vice President of the Illinois Institute of Technology. I'm glad to welcome you here this morning. We're going to give you a little snapshot of what law school is like this morning. As you can see from your schedule, you're going to have the opportunity actually to go to some classes in the subjects that first-year students take. So, regardless of where you decide to go to law school, you'll learn a little bit of law this morning.

I'd like to talk to you by way of introduction about three ideas:

The first idea is that law is not static.
The second idea is that lawyers have the power to change things.
The third idea is that there is room for you in the legal profession.

With respect to each one of those three ideas, I want to describe to you what I mean, and I want to tell you how Chicago-Kent as a law school approaches the idea.

The first idea is that law is not static. You might suppose, when you look at the United States Code or the United States Constitution or when you read about an effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to decide a difficult legal question, that because our legal tradition has its roots two or three thousand years ago in the middle east and in Rome and in Greece, with that much history, there wouldn't be very much left to adapt in the law. You couldn't be more wrong if you supposed that. Because law's role is to express society's consensus about how people should behave, as society changes, law has to change also.

One reason that society changes dramatically over time is because of forces from technology.

Think about how much impact it had in the Mediterranean about three thousand years ago when it first became possible for people to take ships away from land across the Mediterranean. Think of how much difference that made in the scope of commerce. And think about how it was necessary then for people to develop some rules and some institutions to adjust disputes that arose out of that commerce. That's one of the earliest examples of a technological change provoking a dramatic change in society. In turn it gave rise to the first stirrings of commercial law.

Think about how much difference it made when the railroad became feasible in the early part of the 19th century and opened up markets. It increased the speed at which things happened; it made things like standard time necessary; it revolutionized American society. And the law had to respond. Whole new areas of the law grew up because of the impact of the railroad on society.

We can think of other examples: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television. Right now the same kind of thing is going on. You've read about cloning and other things that have become possible because of breakthroughs in genetic science -- in fact you almost certainly have heard about Professor Seed's intention to do human cloning. He announced his intention to do that right here in this room about six weeks ago.

Another thing that is changing the world, and therefore will change the law, is the Internet and other kinds of information technologies. The Internet already has become a new kind of global marketplace and a new kind of global political arena. And because some people misbehave in any kind of arena, in any kind of market, they are also misbehaving in the Internet, and that's causing worries about how the legal system ought to respond to this Internet phenomenon. And that is going to be an interesting challenge because the Internet is inherently global, it doesn't care about geography. And yet all the world's legal systems are based on geographic boundaries because all the world's legal systems are premised on the idea of nation states making law, and nation states are defined in terms of geographic boundaries. So we have to figure out, indeed YOU will help figure out, how the world's legal systems, historically based on geography, can handle this new phenomenon that's not based on geography at all.

These are just some examples of how the legal system has not been static and how it will not be static in your careers and the law. That's an important idea that shapes the way we approach things at Chicago-Kent. We understand that part of our mission as a law school is to create new ideas, to create new intellectual capital. That's done in large part through faculty scholarship. Because when you look at where new ideas in law have come from in our legal system, they have originated most often with law faculty who have the responsibility to try to understand new phenomena in society, to understand how those phenomena will affect the law and then to crystalize some options for changing the law.

A law school is several things. It's a professional school, but it's also a graduate school in a university. As a graduate school in a university, faculty scholarship is part of the intellectual engine that makes it possible for the law to respond appropriately to changes in society. We take that responsibility seriously. When we perceive special areas of revolutionary potential in society, we try to create frameworks that can connect the faculty scholarship with what's going on in the outside world and provide particular opportunities for our law students to work with faculty and to work with people from the outside world. I would like to give you two examples of those special frameworks: One is our new Institute for Science, Law and Technology, established last summer. The other is our Global Law and Policy Initiative. The Institute is a framework for faculty from the law school and from our engineering and business schools to work together on scholarship that is aware of the implications of the intersection of science, law and technology.

We have a special perspective on that because this is the only major technological university in the United States that has a law school. MIT, where I went to undergraduate school, does not have a law school. Cal Tech doesn't; Rice doesn't; you can go right down the list. But Illinois Institute of Technology does have a law school. And that gives Chicago-Kent and IIT a special perspective on law, science and technology.

It was through the Institute for Science, Law and Technology that a program was presented last December at which Dr. Seed made his announcement. It was here that the fellow that cloned Dolly the sheep was leading a seminar. It was here that the fellow who did the first test tube baby was leading a seminar. And Chicago-Kent law students were involved in putting that program together.

In May we're going to put another program together about the implications of the Internet, and the implications of the Internet becoming the same thing as the public switched telephone systems of the world, as new satellite communications technologies make it possible to disconnect yourself from the telephone system in a wired sense, but to remain in touch with other people not only through voice, but also through digital and eventually video communication as you walk, drive, fly, or sail around the world. Students will be involved in that also.

So the law is not static, and we take seriously our responsibility to generate intellectual capital through scholarship, involving both faculty and law students, to help the law evolve and respond to society in appropriate ways.

The second idea is that law has the power to change things. It is not uncommon for people in modern societies to get frustrated and to feel helpless as they see major events going on that they think they are at the mercy of. And sometimes they think there's not very much they can do about that. Well that may or may not be true for the large mass of individuals in our society, but it manifestly is not true for American lawyers.

One of the things about our legal tradition is its adversary character. That means that every time a lawyer tries a case in court, the lawyer has the power to change the law. The ideas that may have originated with a faculty law review article or a law student law review article, but they get connected up with legal institutions through the mouth and the pen of the individual lawyer representing a real client in a particular case. So, it's not the judge that comes up with the idea for a new legal rule. It's the lawyer that wrote the complaint, who wrote the memorandum, who wrote the brief that gets accepted by the judge when it is persuasive.

You don't have to be a litigator to change the law. Clients come to lawyers because they want advice about important problems. And at least some of the time they follow the advice. So, every time you advise a client, you have the power to change that client's behavior. And you don't have to be involved in an intimate personal relationship with a client to change things. Lots of lawyers -- and the label given to these kinds of lawyers is transactional lawyers -- lots of lawyers work on business deals, help legislatures and others figure out how to design new legal institutions, new administrative agencies, or parts of administrative agencies, to deal with new kinds of problems. Those lawyers are engineers, if you will. They are designing institutional apparatus that makes law and applies it.

So American lawyers always have the power to change the substance of law, to change the behavior of their clients, and to change the institutional landscape that makes up a democratic political system and its legal institutions.

We understand that power. We know that if lawyers are going to be effective in using that power, they need to understand the practical implications of the legal profession. They need to have a certain set of skills that defines us as lawyers.

I said a few moments ago that a law school has a kind of dual identity in American education. It's a graduate school of a university but it's also a professional school. Some law schools emphasize the graduate school role at the expense of the professional school role. Some law schools emphasize the professional school role at the expense of the graduate school role, but our tradition here, going back more than a hundred years, is to take both of those roles seriously and to combine them effectively.

So, at Chicago-Kent you not only see a first rate faculty doing cutting-edge scholarship, but you also see our legal writing program that was one of the first major legal writing programs in the country and still is a model for many other law schools. Our legal writing program has regular faculty who teach it. Faculty who teach not only legal writing, but also substantive courses. It has required components not only in the first year but also in the upper class years. And legal writing is not the only lawyer skill that we emphasize.

We also recognize that many lawyers spend time in court and before other kinds of tribunals litigating. And so we have a very active clinic. We're not the only law school in the country that has a clinic, but ours has an unusual characteristic to it. Much of our clinical work is fee-generating through our Law Offices concept. What that means is that in our clinical program you not only have the opportunity to do poverty law, you also have the opportunity to do mainstream law, representing paying clients who have employment discrimination claims as well as poor people who have problems with their nursing homes. You have the opportunity to deal with the problems that lawyers in the real world wrestle with all the time. What do you do if the client can't afford that additional deposition that you think ought be taken in an ideal world? How do you set the fee for the client? What do you do if the client agrees to pay the fee and then doesn't pay? Those are issues that real lawyers have to grapple with. They have to address those issues in a way that gets them resolved consistent with their ethical obligations to do an aggressive, diligent, careful, and competent job on behalf of the client. You miss all this if you are involved only in a more traditional kind of clinical program.

We also take the practical and the professional aspect of law school seriously in a variety of other ways. One of our students is going to go to Bosnia. He was in Bosnia with me about five weeks ago, and he's going back this spring. One of our professors will be there with him for part of the time, but not all of the time, and he's going to help the constitutional court of Bosnia figure out its relationships with some of the other courts in that war-torn country that we hope is now on the path to peace. When he gets done with that experience, he'll know an awful lot about how a real lawyer functions in a professional role, and he also will know an awful lot about how a lawyer can change things.

The third idea is that there's room for you in the law. Think about how many different personalities and how many different sets of strengths and weaknesses there are in this room. When you think about that you may wonder whether everybody in here is suited for the legal profession. Perhaps you're wondering about yourself. I think the answer's probably "yes" because there are lawyers who litigate and there are certain attributes of people's personalities that make them good litigators. But that's not all that lawyers can do. There are successful and fulfilled lawyers who engage in transactional work as I suggested a little while ago. And the sets of attributes of a personality that make someone a good transactional lawyer are different than those that make someone a good litigator. There are other lawyers who are successful and fulfilled who work closely with individual clients. A different set of personality attributes make someone good at that than those that make someone a good litigator or a good transactional lawyer. There are still others who are active in politics and others who are active in public interest work and others who are corporate executives and there are still others who are entrepreneurs.

So it doesn't matter if what you like most of all is to get into an oral argument with somebody else. There's room for you in the law. It doesn't matter if what you really like to do is go to the library and really get buried and caught up in some research issue and then express it carefully in writing. There's room for you in the law. And it doesn't matter if you don't like to do either of those two things, but what you really like to do is be empathetic with another human being, understand that other human being's problems, and offer some assistance so that person can be empowered to resolve those problems. There's room for you in the law.

One of the things that you want to do in law school is understand yourself better. You want to have some opportunities and some experiences so that you can get a better fix on how much you like to do the oral arguing and how much you like to do the library work and how much you like to do the empathizing with somebody else in a counseling setting. You not only want to be learning the substance -- learning how to think like a lawyer in an intellectual sense -- but you also want to be learning enough about yourself so that you can make some intelligent choices about what pathway in the law you want to pursue.

You are the only person who can make an intelligent choice about the match between your personality attributes and the particular opportunities in the law. What you want to do during your law school experience is learn enough about yourself and about the pathways in the law so that you can make that choice successfully. We understand that.

We understand the idea that there's room for you in the law. We also understand that part of our responsibility is to help you learn about yourself as well as learning about the law intellectually. We want to have a kind of partnership helping you understand those two things that have to get matched if you're going to be happy and successful in the law. It's only if the match works right that you can take full advantage of your power to change things, to change human behavior, to change the law, and to help the law adapt to the changes in society.

So we hope you'll find your day interesting, and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with many of you in learning about the law and learning about yourselves so that you can take part in the exciting activities that will be part of American Law over the next several decades.

Thanks for joining us today.

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