Orientation Address 2001

Henry H. Perritt, Jr.

Everybody who is a lawyer remembers two things vividly: one is the very first day of law school and the other is the first day of the bar exam.

I'd like to welcome you to Chicago-Kent College of Law, to Illinois Institute of Technology, and most important, to the first step in your becoming a member of the legal profession. I'd like to tell you just a couple of things about who we are and our philosophy. These two things will inform our collective experience over your next three years.

First of all, we believe in excellence. In support of that belief in excellence, the faculty and I decided two years ago to reduce the number of people that we take each year into the entering class. You should be proud that you are members of a particularly select group. This "downsizing" strategy involves taking approximately 100 fewer students each year. The reason we did that is that, from this day forward Chicago-Kent College of Law will be on all of our resumes. Therefore throughout your professional life-as mine-the way people perceive this institution will have an impact on the way people perceive you. You are entitled to classmates who not only are well qualified to participate actively in learning about the law but who also will excel after they graduate. Our downsizing strategy-which is a very unusual thing for a law faculty and administration to be able to do-will help guarantee that having Chicago-Kent College of Law on your resume will help lift your careers as long as they continue.

Our belief in excellence is recognized around the world. When people in Washington and elsewhere want help in understanding how to deal with breakthroughs in genetic science involving cloning and stem cell research, they come to Chicago-Kent. The come more particularly to our faculty member Lori Andrews.

When the American Law Institute decided it was time to rewrite Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (that's the part of the code that relates to secured transactions) it came to Chicago-Kent College of Law. More particularly to Steve Harris, our faculty member who specializes in commercial law. He became the reporter for the Article 9 rewrite project.

When the Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno, wanted an outside entity to evaluate the FBI's Carnivore System, designed for eavesdropping on local area networks, she came to Chicago-Kent College of Law and to the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute to do an outside review of Carnivore's capabilities.

When George Soros' Open Society Institute and the National Center for State Courts was interested in some new thinking about how information technology could be used to improve citizen access to the legal system, they came to Chicago-Kent College of Law. So far they and others have given us more than a million dollars to develop an interprofessional understanding of exactly how ordinary people interact with the court system as a preliminary step to understanding how technology can be used more effectively.

When the MacArthur Foundation and Chicago Community Trust decided that consciousness needed to be raised within Chicagoland and around the world on Chicago's status as a global city, and decided to launch an initiative called Global Chicago, they came to Chicago-Kent. Chicago-Kent hosts the Global Chicago project.

These examples illustrate that our commitment to excellence is not only something that we realize and pursue internally; it's also a commitment that's recognized by a variety of institutions inside Chicago and outside.

The other thing that defines who we are and expresses our philosophy is our understanding of the role that diversity plays in the legal profession and in America. Just across the hall there is a courtroom named for Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. He was a federal judge who died just this year. "Judge Abe," as he was called, was a graduate of Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1921. His life illustrates how this institution for more than 110 years has been committed to diversity and committed to being a gateway into the legal profession for people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance.

Judge Abe was a child of relatively poor Jewish immigrants. When he wanted to aspire to more than he could realize in his neighborhood, he decided the best way he could do that was to become a boxer-even though he was small of stature. He was boxing one day-getting beat up pretty badly-and a lawyer happened to be there, who came up to him afterwards and said, "Son, you are crazy to be doing this! Why are you doing this?" and he said, "Well it's the only way I can make a name for myself and make a life for myself outside the Jewish ghetto." The lawyer said, "Come on you seem to be a bright kid. Why don't you do something like becoming a lawyer," and Judge Abe said, "I couldn't possibly do that, I couldn't afford law school." The lawyer said, "Come on down to my office and we will work something out." So the lawyer sent him to Chicago-Kent and worked out an arrangement where the lawyer would help defray the then relatively small cost of law school.

Well, Judge Abe studied law at Chicago-Kent, graduated, was too young when he graduated to take the bar, so he had to wait a couple of years. Then he took and passed the bar, went into law practice, became the first Jewish State Senator in the State of Illinois, left the legislature, to become an enlisted man in the Marine Corp in World War II. Then after he returned from the war he was the first Jewish Federal Judge appointed in Illinois. He went on to long distinguished service on the bench.

Throughout the first part of the 20th Century, it was this law school in Illinois that first provided opportunities for African-Americans, that first provided opportunities for women, that had a commitment very early on to provide opportunities for a range of ethnic groups in Chicago. When this law school was set up in 1888, if you were an immigrant or the son or daughter of immigrants, you couldn't go to law school because law schools wouldn't take you. One reason this law school was founded, was to open the doors to new kinds of Americans.

We understand that diversity is a part of America's strength. I remember having dinner last spring with the guy who runs Davos (that's the annual meeting of chief executive officers and heads of state around the world). At this dinner we were talking to Mr. Smadja about the apparent conflict between what sometimes seems to be a distaste for America and things American in Europe, and the reality that Europeans seem eager to flock to the United States to get graduate degrees in law and business. He said, "that's not a conflict. The explanation is very simple." He said, "we grew up in mono ethnic homogeneous societies. We realize that Europe is changing and becoming more heterogeneous-more diverse. We don't know how to manage that but you do. When we look across the Atlantic at America, we see that your entire history has been one not only of accommodating diversity, but making a strength out of it."

What that means is that if you're male or female, native born American or foreign born, black or white, gay or straight, 25 years old or 50 years old, there is a place for you in this law school.

More than that, we want to help you understand how diverse the legal profession is. Law graduates do all kinds of things. Some of them appear in court, and the good ones understand that every time they write a complaint or draft a brief, they have the power in their pens to change legal doctrine. Lawyers also help people design institutions, corporate mergers, new nonprofit organizations, new intergovernmental organizations in the international arena, and the good ones understand that every time they engage in that transactional work, they're engaged in a creative act, building new kinds of institutions that can channel human energy.

Other lawyers have personal relationships with individual clients, criminal defendants, parties to divorce actions. The good ones understand that they have the power to change their client's lives as long as they are empathetic enough to understand the client's interests and help them figure out what outcomes they would like to pursue through the legal system.

Our graduates also run businesses, start business, run for office, and occupy salaried positions in corporations, nonprofit organizations, and in governments around the world. Whatever your individual strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, there is room for you in the law.

Part of our job while you are here is not only to help you understand the law and legal institutions, it is to help you understand yourselves. Ideally, when you graduate, you will be in a position to make a rational decision about how your interests and your capabilities best match the many different pathways in the law.

Now I have one caution for you: This is not a hobby; this is a profession. In order to get something out of this law school experience and in order to be fulfilled as a lawyer after the law school experience, you have to be serious about it. You need to be engaged. Your lives will be best served if you actually enjoy it. The grapevine-the rumor mill-says, "who could possibly enjoy law school, you are supposed to hate it," but in fact there are some people that enjoy it.

As you go through this orientation experience, as you begin your classes, if you find yourself enjoying it and continuing to feel some of the excitement that you feel today, don't feel like something is wrong with you. What you are experiencing is what you should experience. The more that you can enjoy your initial engagement in the law, the more that you can learn about yourselves, the better positioned you will be to have an enjoyable professional lifetime.

I have one more caveat. You may have expectations in terms of grades that are conditioned by other experiences in undergraduate school. It's important that you pay attention to the academic rules here. For example, in order to remain in academic good standing, you must have a GPA of 2.3 or better. The rules are more complicated, in terms of how probation works and what happens if people get disqualified after a period of probation. Now that's not going to happen to any of you, I'm sure. But just in case, you ought to understand what the rules are. That means that you have an obligation to inform yourselves on the academic rules which are contained in the Student Handbook, published on the Web site, and also to look every week at the Record, which is the official organ for notifying you of changes in the academic rules. That also appears on the Web site.

But enough of that, we ought to get on with orientation. We have an informative week planned for you, one that will also fuel your excitement. This afternoon you will observe a mock trial, as realistic as we could make it through the participants that we selected and through the subject matter and still have it happen within a manageable period of time. Then you are going to be divided into juries and actually deliberate over that case. You will come back together and discuss the process, giving you-we hope-a somewhat more concrete understanding of the role of the jury and the American legal system and the relationship between the judge and jury and their relationship with the lawyers and clients which are the most basic ingredients of the American litigation system.

Then later in the week, we are going to take you to the courthouse of the Circuit Court of Cook County and give you a chance to look at some actual legal proceedings, including some jury trials. We hope that that will help start your law school career with a more concrete and better informed understanding of what some lawyers do in the real world.

It's great to have you here and I look forward to working with you throughout your law school careers. Thanks a lot.

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