This year I will be using this space to consider one of the character traits that distinguishes outstanding attorneys: the commitment to continuous intellectual growth and renewal.
What defines such a commitment? It has at least three layers. At its base, it involves nothing more than a thirst for experiences that are new. Experiences that are capable of refreshing one’s outlook.
But a simple search for novelty is not enough. It is not sufficient to eat a new food every day, or to walk a different path to the office, or to wake up at a different time of the morning, or even to read a new work. Intellectual renewal implies an ongoing effort to reflect about what one has encountered, and to incorporate it into the structures one uses to interpret and be effective in the world. That means viewing new experiences as an invitation to reconsider, with care, one’s established practices, and one’s ways of living in the world.
Finally, I conceive of this trait as having a third, somewhat conservative component. To speak of growth and renewal is to suggest that the new must not simply replace the old, but must also build upon it. As law students, we struggles to tame the intuitively attractive yet maddeningly elusive notion of “precedent”; as lawyers, we personalize that struggle when we try to reconcile periods of change and adaptation with our needs for continuity and integrity. We aspire to develop, not to indulge in a rootless peripateticism.
Over the past few months, I have had the privilege of speaking with many of our graduates, at different stages of their professional careers. I have learned about the dramatic changes in the profession since I left practice seven years ago. And I have learned how the many different ways in which a commitment to continuous intellectual growth and renewal can express itself.
Many people have told me of their frustration with the extent to which their professional relationships seem to have degraded from a model of trust and mutual commitment to a model of distrust and short-term profit maximization. And yet, almost in the same breath, most of them have told me how much new gratification they are finding in their work. I have heard about our graduates’ participation in the development of new financial products; I have heard about their decisions to undertake new public service roles; and I have heard about their efforts to use new technology to make their organizations more flexible and more responsive to the people who work there. In each case, the experience has been described to me not simply as a new activity, but also as involving the incorporation of a new set of ideas into one’s professional life.
The Law School aspires to be a touchstone for its graduates’ commitment to continuous intellectual growth and renewal. We intend that the newest generation of students will, like its predecessors, carry away from Ann Arbor an appetite for new and profoundly challenging ideas. And we hope to find new ways for former students to share their experiences with us, to challenge us to become even stronger with the passage of time.
