The past ten days have reminded me how much our life in the law and legal education revolves around different forms of conversation.
First the Law School welcomed hundreds of graduates of the Classes of ’50, ’55, ’60, ’65, and ’70 back for a reunion weekend. Some saw their first law school classes in decades, others saw a faculty debate about the future of legal education, still others participated in an alumni roundtable on the profession. The Honigman Auditorium was jam-packed for a warm, funny, and thoughtful speech by Dick Gephardt ’65. (If you have a computer with a sound card that is connected to the Worldwide Web, you may listen to his talk by pointing to http://www.law.umich.edu/audio/) A football game, walking tours, receptions, banquets — even an intimate Sunday brunch for 150 at our home — each setting encouraged a different style of conversation.
Then, this past weekend, the students took the reins and sponsored two nationally significant conferences. The Michigan Journal of Race and Law launched itself with a spectacular two-day symposium entitled Toward a New Civil Rights Vision. And the Michigan Law and Policy Review launched itself with equal panache, bringing together distinguished academic and nonacademic commentators to debate the complex problems of tort reform. Each conference used panel debates to bring out the complexity of multifaceted social and legal issues.
These many different conversations — whether serious, frivolous, supportive, or fractious — shared to varying degrees a quality that bears on my theme for this year. As I indicated in my last Dean’s Message, I am organizing the 1995-96 academic year around the character trait of “integrity.” And as I suggested there, the integrity of the attorney is most often exemplified in communicative contexts, as we convey ideas to others through speeches, debates, negotiations, or other conversations.
The quality that I want to stress in this message is the quality of trust. For at least one of the dimensions of integrity, as I understand it, concerns a person’s ability to act in a way that elicits the trust of others. Two provocative recent books emphasize the critical role that trust plays in productive societies. In Trust, Francis Fukuyama argues that the most efficient economies are those where people can expect regular, honest, and cooperative behavior from one another, based on commonly shared norms. And in Work and Integrity, William Sullivan argues that the professions will only be able to thrive if their members commit themselves to promoting a climate of “positive interdependence,” aligning the professions’ norms and expectations with the promotion of social trust and mutual obligation.
The conversations in and around the Law School this fall have been successful to the extent they have been genuine. The quality of the speakers has been reflected in their integrity, in their abilities to promote an environment of mutual trust. They have built on the trust that exists when people are joined together in the pursuit of larger purposes.
And that may well be one of the best ways to think about the integrity of an institution such as the University of Michigan Law School. People gather here for many different reasons. They may wish to understand tax doctrine, to develop a new vision of civil rights, to clarify the costs and benefits of changing our tort system, or to renew friendships with other members of the Class of 1965. I find satisfaction in the idea that the Law School adds value to society by bringing individuals together for a common purpose, in a spirit of mutual trust.
