Legal Commentary

One of the tasks / privileges that is attached to my new (temporary!) administrative designation is the "welcome, first-year students, to law school" talk at orientation.  For my own first-year classmates and me, the "now you are off the treadmill" speech our Dean gave was, for better or worse, among the more memorable occasions of our law-school career.  I have no aspirations (or ability) to be *that* memorable, but I wouldn't mind saying *something* that was actually helpful, encouraging, and affirming, especially given the anxieties that, I have to assume, many current and new law students are fighting.

So, what is there to be said?  "The law thing" is -- notwithstanding the jokes, etc. -- an important, exciting, and even (potentially) ennobling enterprise?  The law is a profession -- perhaps, even, a vocation -- and not only an occupation, and so law students have a responsibility to allow themselves to be challenged to become not only providers of legal services, but citizen-leaders and thoughtful law-critics?  Do the reading, go to class, see the connections, talk about law with your friends?  Don't try to practice law before you are admitted to the bar and never, ever co-mingle funds?  Don't forget to keep reading good fiction?  Ideas?