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Judge Alvin Rubin’s Commencement Speech to the Class of 1984

“Be a True Lawyer”

Thank you, Chancellor Hawkland,

Distinguished graduates and guests:

You and Chancellor Hockland honor me by this invitation to speak with you who are about to become lawyers.

You have now spent four years in college and three and one-half years in law school. You may, therefore, share the sentiment that Thomas Jefferson expressed after he had spent some months reading law, primarily Cooke’s Institutes: “Well, Page,” he wrote to a college friend, “I do wish the Devil had old Cooke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life.” Now you are done with old dull scoundrels, and only the length of this talk stands between you and your diploma.

Abraham Lincoln told of the Widow Smith’s son, Tom, who was a high school student. One summer he worked in a lawyer’s office as what used to be called an errand boy — now it’s called a paraprofessional or a law clerk. At the end of the summer Mr. Lincoln met him on the street and asked, “Tom, how did you like the law?” Tom replied, “Rotten. I’m sorry I ever learned it.” I hope that you will be glad you began to learn the law. But, unlike Tom, you should realize that you haven’t yet learned it. Learning it will take the rest of your life.

For the rest of your life you will be a lawyer. Some of you will not practice law. But most of you will. To those who elect to follow law as a profession let me urge you to be a true lawyer.

The true lawyer begins his education in law school, but does not end it there. Most of the cases that I work on today involve rules of law that I never studied in law school. Indeed, some of the subject matter was unknown. In 1942, when I finished law school, there was no subject known as “civil rights.” The constitutional law decisions we now reach rely for the most part on principles that had not been formulated or even conceived. There was little scope for the equal protection clause. Counsel was required only in death penalty cases. There were no Miranda warnings. Products liability law was in its infancy. School desegregation had not been heard of, for the Brown decision came almost three decades later. Courts had imposed no constitutional limitations on government administration of public benefits. Although the National Labor Relations Act was six years old, the West digest didn’t even have a topic for labor law. Much of what you will be doing when you have been out of law school ten years will involve legal rules or practical applications that were not yet developed when you were in law school.

The Class of ’42, in which I graduated, included Russell Long, who became our senior U.S. Senator; John McKeithen, who became Louisiana’s governor; and Gordon West, who became a federal district judge. All of them and the rest of us in that class found that, with the education we had received at LSU, we could not only follow unprecedented developments, but even assist in moving the law forward. For we had, like you, learned more in law school than transient rules. What the true lawyer learns in law school, — what you — and we — have learned —, is a method of understanding legal principles and their application to real life.

At this moment, beneath your happiness at finishing law school, there perhaps lurks some anxiety: can I really succeed in law practice? Let me allay your fears. Most lawyers are not as bright as you, most are not as well prepared as you, most do not apply themselves as they should, and as you will, if you are a true lawyer. You can see a demonstration of this in court every rule day and at almost every trial. You will be disappointed in the quality of most of what you observe but you will realize that you can do it, and do it better.

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t the things you don’t know that hurt you. It’s the things you know that aren’t so.”

You will spend much of the rest of your lives learning to identify the things that you don’t know; even more important, you will learn to question whether things are or aren’t so. That’s what the true lawyer does. Do not accept the assumptions of the crowd or the platitudes of the moment. It is the business of the lawyer’s mind, as Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, to inquire: to inquire, in order to identify the false and to find the truth. Be an inquirer — if need be, a skeptic.

In addition, to be a lawyer, you must undergo some hardships. The practice of law will not be painless. You must adjust to a new way of life, and to the economic realities of earning a living. You will learn that great lawyers are sticklers for detail, and you will find that you must dwell on each minute part of a problem, not merely on the big picture. You will find that preparation is more important than genius. You will adjust to spending your days seeing people and answering the telephone, doing the other work early in the morning, late at night, on weekends and on holidays: times when the telephone does not ring and when your family waits at home.

To be a lawyer, you must learn the business of the law. You must master the economics of office management, the psychology of client satisfaction, the technique of dealing with your peers, and the mysteries of coping with judges who are sometimes irascible and frequently unpredictable. Yet the spirit of the true lawyer is not confined by the mundane details of hourly charges and finding clients. The true lawyer also learns the grander business of the law. That business is the task of making sense out of the confusion of life; reducing it to order but at the same time giving it scope and even dignity. The true lawyer does not merely charge fees to his clients; he helps them achieve their due, as citizens, as persons, as human beings.

As you develop a practice, trying to keep abreast of new rules and develop self confidence, you will be tempted to make the details of your practice your whole life. Most lawyers do this, forgetting the dreams that led them to law school. I hope that you will never abandon or compromise those dreams. For you are entering a profession, one that you will profess for the rest of your lives. When you are asked, “What is your business?” you will not say, “I practice law” but will answer instead “I am a lawyer.” Be then a lawyer, a true lawyer, the kind of lawyer that makes one proud to say, “I am a lawyer.”

Your profession has nothing to sell but service rendered with integrity. You will be your fellow man’s agent, his alter-ego in a complex world, his attorney at law, his counselor. Whether you represent rich or poor, petroleum potentate or ghetto oppressed, only you as your client’s lawyer and the rule of law that you uphold protect the individual against the state, prevent principle from yielding to expediency, and exalt the ultimate sanctity of means over ends.

Be a true lawyer: one who recognizes that due process is not reserved only for the deserving, the well-connected or the innocent, but is guaranteed also to the despised, the unpopular, and the person indicted as a criminal. Some say they are lawyers only for those in whose cause they believe. And there are those who are lawyers only for the rich and well-bred. I urge you to follow neither course: Be a lawyer for those who need you.

Be a true lawyer, and refute the charge that a lawyer who serves those in need is a hired gun. Medical care is not reserved for those whose lives are free from sin, nor legal service for the pure of heart. The true lawyer is not a plaintiff’s lawyer or defendant’s lawyer, although he may specialize in personal injury claims. He is not a Mafia lawyer or a bank embezzler’s lawyer, although he may specialize in the defense of persons charged with crime. The true lawyer safeguards the right of every person to his day in court, for what law worthy of its name is reserved only for those who fit into preconceived patterns of desert?

If you who are lawyers do not defend privacy, who then will safeguard the privacy of the person against its invasions by bug and wiretap, by dossier and photograph, by computerized biography and intrusive state? If you who are lawyers do not safeguard the individual, who will stand with him against the massive government that by its nature seeks to arrogate all rights to itself in the name of national need — and does so alike whether it governs by popular election or dictatorship, or in the service of capitalism or communism? If you who are lawyers do not secure the year of the massive bureaucracies of government and business, who will make them listen?

As Judge Elbert Tuttle reminds us: you cannot separate yourself as a person from your professional service as a lawyer. You will never have goods to sell, only yourself. Only service rendered with integrity. You may be asked: What is the right price for this service? To ask that question is to ask what a share of a man or woman is worth. Judge Tuttle provides us with these guidelines:

If [the lawyer] does not contain the quality of integrity, he is worthless. If he does, he is priceless. The value is either nothing or it is infinite. So do not try to set a price on yourselves. Do not measure out your professional services on an apothecary’s scale and say ‘only this for as much.’ Rather be reckless and spendthrift, pouring out your talent to all whom it can be up service. Throw it away, waste it, and in the spending it can be of service. Do not keep a watchful eye lest you slip and give away a little bit of what you might have sold. Like love, talent is only useful and its expenditure, and it is never exhausted. Certainly … [you] must eat, so set what price you must on your service. But never confuse the performance, which is great, with the compensation — be it money, power or fame — which is trivial.

Be the best lawyer you can be. But, even if you aren’t great, you will sometimes win anyway. Fortunately, we old judges try to decide cases on the basis of their merit, not on the skill of the advocate. Indeed, sometimes we lean over to protect the client whose lawyer appears incapable of doing so. In a delightful book entitled Eulogy of Judges, an Italian lawyer, Pierro Calamandrei, observes: “Oftentimes, through that common desire to protect the weak against the strong, the judges unconsciously tend to favor the party who is less ably defended. If he finds a judge with a generous heart, an inexpert lawyer can bring success to his client.”

Forty-one years after I graduated from LSU I still enjoy, and still am challenged by the business of law. Long ago — even before I started law school — Justice Holmes reply to charge that the study of law is “laborious study of a dry and technical system.” He told an undergraduate class at Harvard:

[The questions that meet you in the practice of law] are the same questions that meet you in any form of practical life. If a man has the soul of Sancho Panza, the world to him will be Sancho Panza’s world, but if he has the soul of an idealist, he will make — I do not say find — his world ideal. Of course, the law is not the place for the artist or the poet. The law is the calling of thinkers. But to those who believe with me that not the least godlike of man’s activities is the large survey of causes, that to know is not less than to feel, I say — and I say no longer with any doubt — that a man may live greatly in the law as well as elsewhere; that there as well as elsewhere his thought may find its unity in an infinite perspective; that there as well as elsewhere he may wreak himself upon life, may drink the bitter cup of heroism, may wear his heart out after the unattainable.

Some of you go forth seeking but to learn a way to earn a good living. A lawyer can do that. Some of you are seeking a way to serve your fellow man. A lawyer can do that. And some of you seek a way to change the world, if only a little bit, for the better. A lawyer can do that too. And if you must choose, be Don Quixote rather than Sancho Panza. In your practice, reach for the stars. Be a true lawyer.

Then, five or six decades from now, you will be able at the end of your career in law, to say like Odysseus, “We have lived a long time in this land and with honor.” I wish you a long life in the law — with honor.

 

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