Recognition Ceremony for December 2002 Washburn Law Graduates
Washburn University School of Law held a recognition ceremony and reception for December 2002 graduates on Friday, December 20, 2002 in Robinson Courtroom and Bianchino Technology Center.
Professor and former Dean of Washburn University School of Law, James Concannon, addressed the graduates, their family, and friends. Professor Concannon's complete address is given below. Carol G. Green, Clerk of the Kansas Appellate Courts, welcomed the graduates to the Washburn Law School Association. Allen Easley, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, introduced each of the December 2002 graduates at the ceremony.
A portion of the audience at the recognition ceremony.
Graduates, their families, friends, and faculty celebrated at a reception following the ceremony.
Remarks Professor James Concannon at
December 2002 Washburn Law Recognition Ceremony
I am honored to be asked to make brief remarks on this happy occasion and to complete an Alpha Omega experience for graduates I initially welcomed to the law school at the start of law school orientation.
It is quite appropriate that we take this time to celebrate your accomplishments and, with you, to thank your family and friends whose support throughout these years made it possible for you to reach today's milestone. We of course hope you will remember your years here as a time of personal growth in which you prepared for a personally rewarding career and for the unique opportunity you will have to improve the legal system and render public service. More than that, I have long suggested to graduates that they will remember their years here as the least stressful, and perhaps even the best, years they will have. That observation often is a hard sell to graduates who have just completed another grueling two week exam period, who may not yet have finalized their future employment and for whom the lengthy process of preparing to take the bar exam looms near. However, when you return in five years for your first class reunion, many of you will tell me you have concluded I am right. Never again in your busy professional lives will you have the luxury of closure you have had at the end of each semester. Also, five years from now, you will better appreciate that unique characteristic of your law school experience I mentioned during orientation: many of the strongest personal and professional relationships you will have as a lawyer will be your relationships with your classmates, with the people in this room today.
A reception for December graduates is a recent innovation at Washburn University School of Law, a tradition only four years old. It resulted from those graduates' sensed need for closure and also from a seeming sense that December graduates somehow were being deprived of an essential ceremony, one devoted, as our 1987 commencement speaker Burt Neuborne put it, "to solemn exhortations by a middle-aged speaker urging a captive audience of young people to do a better job than his generation in achieving one or another worthy goal."
There is a certain irony that I would be invited to speak at an event like this since, in the anti-establishment days of the early 1970s, I elected to visit friends in Colorado rather than attend my own graduation from law school (which after all was going to be held in the undignified venue of a football stadium and in the company of great unwashed masses of graduates of other university departments). Those of you who might be tempted to follow the same path and not return for your official graduation next May 17 should beware of my experience, for I have been forced to do penance for that rash act for 29 consecutive Mays.
Neither you nor I should have any illusion that I will say anything memorable in the next few minutes. Two commencement speakers within three years, Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Christel Marquardt in 1997 and soon to be U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Delano Lewis in 1999 admitted at the outset of their remarks that they could not recall who had been the speaker at their own commencements. After the 1999 ceremony, I talked with Ed and Becky Linquist, who graduated together in 1989 and had returned for the graduation of their cousin, and they volunteered that they couldn't remember who their graduation speaker had been either. Their speaker had been Forbes magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes and the principal reason he agreed to be our speaker, besides the fact one of his hobbies was to collect honorary degrees, was his long acquaintance with the family of two other class members who were the Linquists best friends.
If commencement with Malcolm Forbes wasn't memorable, it is hard to imagine how any of them could be. He was frequently in the news at the time for dating Elizabeth Taylor. He flew into Topeka on his own Boeing 727, the green and gold plane he named the Capitalist Tool. I tried to convince him that we had renamed the local airport, Forbes Field, especially in honor of his visit. He took us on a tour the plane - there was a bedroom suite with a waterbed and above it, floating on the ceiling, was one of those helium filled balloons with little bouncing feet on the bottom. Forbes shared with the graduates the secret of his success: "I had a father who owned a business who wasn't mad at me when he died."
For those not fortunate enough to have such a father, Forbes advised, "if you're able to do what turns you on, you're going to be a success. You may not be the richest, and you may not climb the highest mountain, but you're a success because you're doing what you want to do." This "psychic income," he said, needs to be considered when evaluating job satisfaction.
Thinking about Malcolm Forbes led me to think of all the law school commencement addresses I've heard and to contemplate all the eloquently phrased, inspirational exhortations, all the insightful proposals for change in the legal profession, all the original, innovative ideas - that no one remembers. Perhaps you are beginning to see, and develop a bad feeling about where this is going. It became clear to me I should do what academics do best - research - and thereby save from the ashcan of human memory some of the pearls of commencement speeches past, sort of a law school commencement version of public television's all-star best of pledge.
We in academia of course carefully distinguish plagiarism (stealing from one source) from research (stealing from two or more sources) so I propose to sate your hunger for essential ceremony by sharing with you a few tidbits from my research.
As we near the law school's 100th anniversary next September, nostalgia increasingly is in vogue so I should start with the law school's first graduation ceremonies, held June 2, 1906. The commencement speaker for our 17 initial graduates was local lawyer William H. Rossington, one of the best-known trial lawyers in the state and one of three members of the school's initial part-time faculty who was given the title professor, rather than lecturer, of law. Times were harder for new lawyers starting out then than now but Rossington's remarks to the class may ring true even today for those who have not yet finalized employment and may be contemplating opening your own practice:
"I presume that you all intend to make the law the business and chief concern of your lives or you would not have gone to the trouble, labor and the expense of this course of preparation. I need not tell you that, like young bears, you have all your troubles ahead of you. To begin with, you will have to wait....it is one thing to express a willingness to practice law and to assert your fitness to undertake its responsibilities by hiring a small office and hanging out a sign; and another thing to bear with a cheerful heart the seeming unwillingness of clients with cases to mount your stairs and intrust you with business. If you are depending upon the law for your living from day to day, you may soon be discouraged. If you have certain versatility of talents, you may still adhere to your purpose and retain your connection with the law until you can tide over this period."
Rossington underestimated his audience. Two members of that initial class served as justices of the Kansas Supreme Court, one became speaker of the House of Representatives, another became general attorney for the Union Pacific Railroad and another Shawnee County Attorney. Yet another became district judge in the Third Judicial District, another was reporter for the Kansas Supreme Court, not to mention others who had success in private practice. Not a bad record for your slightly larger class of December graduates to seek to emulate.
Through the years there have been commencement speakers of national renown - three American Bar Association presidents, two presidents of the Association of American Law Schools, leading judges, litigators, business leaders and legal educators. Harry Blackman in 1986 urged upon graduates rather standard exhortations: to work to find solutions to the numerous problems confronting society, to hold fast to their ideals and to uphold the ethics of the profession but he did so with the authority of a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Often the more perceptive and provocative commencement observations have been those our own graduates. Dan Pinick ‘52 was executive vice president, the third highest ranking officer, of the Boeing Company in Seattle when he spoke in 1993. "I no longer think of myself as a lawyer," he said. "I am a businessman" but appreciated in a special way the power a legal education gives to those who pursue fields other than the practice of law. "Be loose, be adaptable, and be flexible," he told the graduates. "Make the best use of your legal education. It I s an excellent discipline. Your capability to assemble relevant data, evaluate it, develop options and make thoughtful, reasoned decisions will stand you in good stead whether you practice law, go into business, become an educator or enter any other field."
In 1995, Ron Wurtz ‘73, then chief public defender in Shawnee County, now the chief death penalty defender and parent of one of our current students, described the way practicing law for poor people engages your whole being, "your intellect, emotion, stamina, imagination and tolerance" and urged graduates to use "their skills for the good of the people rather than for themselves." he recalled being "taught in law school that lawyers cannot become emotionally attached to their clients or their client's cause" and "that you cannot render good advice if you are not objective." He disagreed. "The practice of law is emotional," he said, "and you cannot divorce yourself from it...you cannot counsel a client if you are intolerant, judgmental or 'detached.' you may know the law, but unless the client knows you understand and care, your advice will never be taken."
Like many other speakers, he urged graduates to work to make sure our legal system fulfills its promise but he said it particularly well:
"We lawyers must not sit by while the government decrees that the poor and weak, the disabled and the elderly, children and mothers, will not have the law enforced for them. We did not come to the bar to make the law an unfair bargain. We did not come to use the law for some and against so many others who have been forced outside the law. Our creed is an adversary system that depends upon an imperfect assumption of equal access to the law, lawyers and the courts.
I'll leave the last word to 1981 commencement speaker Joseph W. Morris ‘47. His career has touched more branches of the profession than that of any other graduate - chief judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, Dean of the University of Tulsa College of Law, general counsel of Amerada Hess Corporation and Shell Oil Company, senior partner of the Tulsa law firm of Gable & Gotwals, and active member of the American Arbitration Association. Judge Morris concluded his remarks with words we've heard him speak again, with the same fire and passion, when he has presented the GNIP-GNOP awards at the annual law journal banquet.
"I can never remember when I did not want to be a lawyer. I love the law and I love lawyers...even with all our faults and ... our ofttimes bad press coverage, I nonetheless say that in my opinion, ours is the most honorable, most influential and most public spirited of all professions – and I this I say not in derogation of other disciplines or professions, but rather simply with a sense of pride. I am proud to be a lawyer."
Our hope for you today is that you will have long and productive careers and that, at the end, you will speak with the same fire and passion as Judge Morris about your pride in your profession.
