The Law Doesn’t Exist

An address, delivered to my University of Cincinnati College of Law classmates and faculty at the Class of 2022 Dean’s Reception on April 26, 2022.

The law doesn’t exist.

It’s not a “thing.” It doesn’t exist outside of our relationships to each other. At its best, the “law” represents how we agree, or are agreeing, to interact with each other. But the law doesn’t exist beyond that. It’s not a world unto itself. It doesn’t represent justice, or morality, or even business. It is simply a formula for interacting with the world, just norms to facilitate transactions between people, be those transactions of justice or dollars.

But it is so easy to get lost in the “world of the law.” After a single year of law school, we’re required to take a class, “client counseling,” which should really be titled, “how to talk about the law to everyone else in the world who isn’t a lawyer.” Because we forget, after just one year, that the legal world is just a small part of the world.

The work we do, the work we will do, is integral, I don’t deny that in the least. Even now, our work matters: ask anyone working in the Domestic Violence clinic right now, or the indigent defense clinic, or the Ohio Innocence Project, the Entrepreneurship Clinic, or even reviewing M&A closing docs downtown.

And think of the things we’re able to do with this knowledge we’ve been gathering for the last three years. Think of all the people we can help, all the deals we can facilitate, all the employers and employees we can defend.

But we forget how not to “think like a lawyer.”

I was traveling with my brother this last year and we overheard in a truck stop that two semi drivers had hit each other. My first thoughts were of liability: who is at fault? Who is going to pay? Can the gas station be liable? Does it matter if the drivers are contractors or employees? My brother’s first thought was of the people: how much shame the drivers were probably feeling, how embarrassed they were, whether or not anyone was hurt.

Why did this happen? It’s not just because my brother is a better person than I am.

It’s because my brain has been wired over the last three years to think in this way. To think transactionally, cynically, to see people as Plaintiffs and Defendants, not Rachels and Spencers.

The reason this happens is that there’s no way to do law school without fully committing. 1L year, you have to eat, sleep, and breathe the law, to think about it constantly. I didn’t understand promissory estoppel until it came to me while trying to fix my garbage disposal (unrelated).

We’ve worked so hard to get to this place: changed our brains and our lives; left behind friends, made new ones; worked until midnight searching for italic periods and the passive voice; scouring Westlaw for that case your boss is sure exists, and you know it doesn’t but you still have to spend five hours looking for it; cramming for exams we should have started studying for weeks before; volunteering our time to committees to make our school a better, happier, more inclusive space; applying for job after job after job; bombing cold calls.

Law school is, undoubtedly, hard. We all made a decision to start over three years ago, and every minute since then, we make the decision to stick it out, despite being exhausted, despite the joy and contentment thrown out of our hearts, despite dragging ourselves every inch of the way.

And what do we get? What have we earned?

We’ve earned a responsibility. A responsibility to not stay stuck in the world we’ve been living in for the last three years. A responsibility to be tools, not for the law, but for the world, to bring our own morality into the work we do every day, whether that’s in municipal court or in the sixth circuit, whether here in Cincinnati or in Chicago. A responsibility to change who gets a seat at the table, whether that’s a conference room overlooking the Reds stadium or in the prosecutor’s office. A responsibility to make the inaccessible accessible, to hold those accountable who use the tool of the law as a weapon of evil, inequality, and greed. A responsibility to make sure that the world informs the “law,” not the other way around.

So, as we finish up, as we enter into the “legal world,” I ask you to remember that we’re entering the world, and it is our job as lawyers, as those with three years of law school experience, with this knowledge of how we interact with each other, to ensure that the law isn’t what controls us, but that we listen and care for the people around us, to live up to the ideals the law is supposed to reflect—justice, equality, freedom, inclusion—even when the law doesn’t.