I went to my brother's medical school graduation last weekend. Generally, okay. The temperature was not seething, our seats were comfy, and the ceremonies did not extend into eternity. But you know, the speech given by the undergraduate speaker really really sucked.

Now, I'm often overcritical about things, so I double-checked this with my brother.

Me: What did you think of that graduation speech, the student one?
Oliver: It sucked.

I took away nothing from the speech.

This was a far cry from the best graduation speech I'd ever heard, which happened to be one of the best any-type-of-speech I'd ever heard. Coincidentally, I'd also heard this speech at one of my brother's graduation ceremonies,² this time from college.

In this speech, a graduating law student named Yellow Light Breen talked about how people from all over the country go to the big universities in America. You know what those are, the ones U.S. News likes to tally, the ones proud parents like to namedrop. And over 80% of those graduates go to five big cities--LA, NYC, SF, Chicago, DC. (Okay, maybe Boston's in there somewhere, so maybe six.) Yellow Light Breen talked about how he admired his roommate, who was going back to Kentucky to be a public defender there.

Anyway, his point was that most people leave the other areas of the country. Or at least the "best and the brightest" do. The people who are best situated to learn at these so-called institutions of higher learning and to take back this learning to their homes don't.

And that's me. Or that was me at the time. My plan was to go to law school, stay in Washington, DC, or go back to Boston, or something like that.

And it still might be my plan. I can't pretend I don't have those same urban urges to which Yellow Light Breen referred. I'm still most at home in Cambridge, MA, or in the Bay Area. But after that speech, I started thinking a bit more about moving back to Tennessee. It was partly because of that speech that I looked for clerkships with judges in Memphis. It *is* because of that speech that I'm taking the Tennessee bar.

There's something noble, something good, isn't there, about going where one is needed, rather than just where one feels comfortable, rather than where everything is all prestigious and shit, right?

Anyway, I digress.

The speech I would have given is probably not transformative in that manner. I can't really think of any speech which would top Yellow Light Breen's, because, well, that was the best speech I'd ever heard. But here's my go at it.

Welcome.
Pithy joke relating back to the first year of law school.
Pause for laughter.
Anecdote to draw in family and friends in the audience.
Lessons learned.
Encouragement for years to come.
Conclusion.

These are the elements of a graduation speech. In law school, we've spent the last three years doing the same thing to cases, judicial opinions, statutes, legal instruments. We've been deconstructing.

By taking everything apart, we supposedly learn to become better lawyers. We learn why things are done--not just the idealistic "justice-related" whys, but the legal whys, the strategic whys, the political and practical whys.

But by doing so, we've submerged the visceral feelings that drew many of us to study law in the first place. In the same way the individual components of a graduation speech, laid bare, do not inspire us, the dissected components of law are not what motivates us.

Sure, I generalize. There is a certain thrill in figuring out a particularly nitty contract provision; there is a certain excitement in producing a well-written brief. But it's a different sort of stimulation--related more to problem-solving than to notions of achieving justice (which, I'll bet, at least sixty percent of us made reference to in our application essays.)

This is not unique to law. Patients can become tests and intellectual puzzles to the fourth year medical student. Movies can become technical conundra to the second year film student. This phenomenon is, perhaps, part of higher education itself.

But now here we are. Graduating. While our educational process is by no means over, opinions, briefs and oral arguments can again be inspirational, rather than only instructional. Parties can become human, rather than names on a page. And our daily work can and will affect others' lives, rather than just our grades.

Here we are. Graduating. We now have the opportunity to reassemble everything with the tools we've gained. We just have to remember that we can.

Here we are.