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Publication Date

5-2015

Document Type

Remarks

Abstract

During the two days of the Symposium, I felt a little like a baby lamb at the petting zoo: I was not sure why I was getting all this attention, but it was certainly very nice.

It is a great honor to have people you admire-and I admire all the speakers at the Symposium and all the authors collected in this edition of the Law Review very much-to read your work and listen to what you might have to say. It is more than that, something beyond description really, for these same people to engage with that work and take very seriously things you might have said to them. This is a debt I cannot repay. All I can do, I think, is to try to pay as much attention to your work, your thoughts, and your lives as you have to mine. Of course, as you may suspect, I will need to do this in my own fashion. This paper then is addressed to all the authors of this Symposium.

You have much in common. There is, however, one commonality I would like to comment on here. Each one of you, somewhere within your writing or your teaching, and of course to varying degrees, speaks of law, or some aspect of law, including its practice, as art. Within your very large body of work, we find: law as literature, law as theater, law as poetry, law as music, and law as performance art. We also find the art of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, the art of narrative, the art of legal writing, the art of the judicial opinion and the art of reading those opinions, the art of counseling and of being present to clients, the art of speaking for others, and the art that all the virtues require, the great art of practical wisdom.

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