Written by Rodney A. Smolla, VLGS President
On June 6, 2024, Vermont Law and Graduate School welcomed back to Vermont the first class of Online Hybrid Juris Doctor students. These students were the first to enroll in the school’s online law degree program.
They have a special place in my heart, for two reasons. They arrived as new members of the Vermont Law and Graduate School community just as I was arriving, as the school’s new president. And I had the honor of teaching them online, every Monday night from 6:30 to 9 p.m., as their professor in Constitutional Law.
At this event welcoming them back to Vermont in person as they were completing their second year of online law school, they were more than half-way through their law school education, turning the corner, and heading toward the finish line. I spoke to them, heart-to-heart, about the ensuing transition from life as a law student to life as a novice lawyer.
The first year or two of law school tends to emphasize “book learning.” The actual practice of law, however, not so much. What will determine their future success and happiness as lawyers, I suggested, rests not in how much legal knowledge they can cram into their heads—the stuff tested on law school and bar exams—but in the extent to which they cultivate and grow habits of professionalism.
These online students, I observed, were in certain respects already ahead of the game. Almost all of them had come to the study of law later in life, already working and continuing to work full time in businesses, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. They already knew the habits of success in the real world, the simple common-sense sensibilities of showing up on time, returning messages, treating all with whom they interact with dignity and respect.
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Yet, I suggested, there are also attributes of professionalism especially salient to the practice of law. I suspect our graduates all have their special nominees as to what those attributes may be. The qualities I focused upon are perhaps not those that would come so trippingly on the tongues of most, but more of the sort that Robert Frost might call “less traveled by.” Here they are:
Courage. Courage is of course a most admirable of human traits, but not necessarily one instinctually conjures as an attribute of great lawyering. Courage is the stuff of the valorous soldier, or even the triumph of the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz. Yet courage, I think, in all matters of lawyering great and small, day-in-and-day out, is a matter of great import.
Courage manifests itself, in a manner at once mundane and momentous, in cultivating the gumption to be straight with clients. It is not easy, particularly for a novice lawyer, to deliver bad news to a client. Clients come to legal services seeking good news, after all. The ability to tell a client that, at the end of the day, it is better not to sue, or better to accept a settlement that is less than perfect but still advisable, or more dramatically, that the course the client seeks the lawyer to pursue is not one the lawyer may ethically and in good faith advance, does not come easy.
Courage may manifest itself in yet other ways—as in the courage to defend the rights of a client who is not by any objective view admirable or even innocent but still deserves due process, or the courage to advocate in good faith a change in the law that may upend precedent or mainstream sensibilities.
And while we might reflexively equate courage with outsized exhibitions of bombast and bravery, for the lawyer courage may in some instances actually reside in its seeming antithesis, a quality of calm. As lawyers we constantly represent or oppose parties engaged in passionately intense conflict. It often takes more fortitude to be a force for de-escalation, for the diffusing of tensions, than it does to add fuel to the fire. This is often personal, as we are tempted to lose our tempers when confronted with personas or positions that we find repugnant. Yet temperament must master temper. We serve our clients best, we serve society best, when we keep it under control. Rudyard Kipling advised to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Earnest Hemmingway described courage as “grace under pressure.” Both descriptions are wise advice for the wise practice of law.
Judgment vs. Judgmental. Lawyers at their strongest practice good judgment. Lawyers at their weakest are excessively judgmental. Two words, almost identical in their spelling, antithetical in their meaning. Nothing is more highly valued, in a lawyer, in a judge, than sound judgment. It is an ineffable quality, difficult to distill to any single definition. As an experienced lawyer, and experienced legal educator, I can only say that it is not something one learns from books, or from classrooms. It is the stuff of accumulated life, experience, humility, and honesty.
Oliver Wendell Holmes admonished that the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. This does not mean that lawyers ought not be logical—logic is one of our most valuable tools. It does mean that we must never forget we are servants in the service of a quintessentially human enterprise. An instinct for common sense usually matters more than knowledge of the common law. If the cultivation of sound judgment is good thing, I suggested to our law students, why is the aggrandizement of the judgmental a bad thing? Here is my answer: We live in a “pop-off” society. We live in a world in which we are encouraged to instantly make comments on social media, instantly express our views as to who is right and who is wrong, instantly size-up others, cutting them no slack, offering no context, no test of time.
But as good lawyers, as good citizen-leaders, we do better to chill. As the great philosopher Paul Simon wrote in The 59th Street Bridge Song (which also goes by the name Feelin’ Groovy): “Slow down, you move too fast.” In this polarized, fractionated society, everyone is far too apt to throw the first stone, even when inhabiting a glass house. Excessive judgmentalism is not the same as sagacious judgment. As lawyers, as jurists, we of course must constantly exercise judgment. And at times, in exercising that judgment, we must be judgmental. That is what society calls on us to do. My advice to these wonderful new novice lawyers, however, was to exercise that judgment cautiously, judiciously, humbly.
In this next generation of students, Vermont Law and Graduate School proudly expresses the hope and promise of the school’s motto, that that they will enter the arena “for the community and for the world.” I am confident they will.