September 16, 2022
For about five years I have conveyed (and sometimes personally delivered to all 1Ls early in their first semester) my four articles about legal education and the legal profession to Harvard Law students in print and online at the Harvard Law Record, America’s oldest law school newspaper (in publication since 1946).
I have urged law students to “read these articles before Harvard Law School curriculum culture envelopes you.” Alas, there was little indication that they did so. Don’t take this personally—it is just a reflection of our screen-saturated Internet Age and today’s widespread aliteracy of university and graduate students. Students know how to seriously read when it comes to course work, but they lack interest in material that frames what they should expect from their law schools and the legal profession.
I continue to believe that these articles will help provide you with both a broader context to understand your formal curriculum and a desire to go beyond your courses into territory less explored, but which is the essence of connecting law with justice and the common good. It is no secret that most HLS graduates end up in “BigLaw”—to use the latest euphemism. These articles caution you to stop, look and listen so that you know more fully what the practice of corporate power law entails. Having a higher significance for your half-century or more of work in the law can provide you with greater gratification and peace of mind, and will help you advance justice in the U.S. and around the world.
The articles that these introductory words link to are: “Land of the Lawless,” “An Open Letter to Harvard Law Students,” “Harvard Lawless School and You,” and “So You Want to go to Work for a Large Corporate Law Firm. Maybe You Should Find More About Them Than They are Willing to Tell You.”
David Enrich, the New York Times business investigations reporter, recently published (September 13, 2022) his book on the giant Jones Day firm titled: Servant of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice. Read this book and you’ll likely wonder why the Law School doesn’t have a seminar or two on the immunizing and lethal services big law firms provide in support of corporate crime, fraud and abuse, and on the “lawlessness” they and their clients perpetuate. [Editor’s note: David Enrich was invited to speak at HLS on January 28, 2023.]
There is a motto on the bookstore wall at the American Museum of Tort Law (go to tortmuseum.org for a virtual tour of the only law museum of any kind, to our knowledge, in the world). It reads “Thinkers Read and Readers Think.” It is posted near copies of the book What Every Harvard Law Student Should Know that was widely distributed to HLS law students when it was published in 2015.
If you are to become leading architects and advocates for “justice,” which Daniel Webster called the great work of human beings on Earth, it would help for you to take some time to read what your predecessor HLS graduates have written in the Harvard Law Record (see hlrecord.org) over the past decade. They wrote in the anticipation that in the future of the profession, you will find it enabling to stand on their shoulders and take the torches into a greater realm of enlightenment within the just rule of law over the destructive forces of raw power.
Thank you for reading. Should you wish to communicate with me, please call 202-387-8030 for a conversation. And please volunteer for the Record. Learn about and convey matters that reflect the law writ large.