2018 UCLA School of Law Commencement
SpeechGood afternoon, everyone. I am very glad to be here with you. To all of our friends and guests with us here today, I say: Welcome.
And to the UCLA School of Law Graduating Class of 2018, I say: CONGRATULATIONS!
As you know, I’m a stand-in — a sort of “substitute teacher.” So I implore you: Be nice to the substitute, because I still feel guilty about how I treated my third grade substitute teacher Mrs. Kullback.
I was bad — mean, in fact! — and did not listen to the substitute. Well, fast forward a few years and, lo and behold I ended up marrying Mrs. Kullback’s daughter, and she became my mother-in-law! So the moral of that story is, be good today to your substitute speaker, because you can never tell when or where our paths will cross again.
I should mention, this is not my first time being a substitute. When I first arrived at UCLA 11 years ago, I had to stand in for former President Bill Clinton at our College graduation. I will never forget how, at the start of my speech, someone yelled out: “YOU are no Bill Clinton!” After that, I was traumatized and vowed never to be a stand-in speaker again.
And yet, here I am — in part because I care about your dean, who is spectacular! — but mostly because I care about all of you, who are equally dazzling. You deserve a speaker — even if it’s just a neuroscientist who occasionally tells lawyer jokes!
But enough about me. We’re here today to focus on all of you — and you did it!
It took a lot of hard work to get here. It took sacrifice. It took struggle. And, probably, a loan or two — a sore subject, I suspect. But, you have persevered and made it to this moment.
You have much to be proud of. And I’m sure your families, friends, loved ones and professors are very proud of you, too.
All of your outlining and cite checking, all the journals and the clinicals, and All of the externships and exams have led you to this day.
Today, you become graduates of one of the finest law schools in the nation! And, once you take care of that pesky little matter called the Bar exam, you will be lawyers.
I hope you are reveling in this feeling of accomplishment. I hope you are excited about all the great things ahead of you.
Law is a noble profession, and laws should reflect the best values of our society. Lawyers ensure that those values are upheld.
This is really a profound responsibility. Many people who hire attorneys for routine matters do not take the time to stop and think about that. But lawyers really are the guardians of our legal framework — a framework that can be both durable and fragile at the same time.
Certainly the highest value of our legal system — its most sacred promise — is equal justice under the law. You are about to become defenders of that promise.
Being a guardian of equal justice may not be easy. Some of you will represent people who are not liked, and people who you too may not like. Some of you will advocate for the unpopular position. Some of you will represent people who have made grave errors.
But all of you will know that the fairness of our system, its fidelity to its promises, will be yours to protect.
Make no mistake: You have been trained to be combatants. But you have been trained to be a particular kind of combatant, a kind that society very much needs.
In order to fight effectively as a lawyer, each of you has learned that you must follow rules of engagement. Built into the structure of your profession is the recognition that in order to keep our society equitable, you too have to engage in honorable ways.
You already know that you cannot do whatever it takes to win. You cannot win at all costs. You must adhere to rules of evidence, procedural codes, rules of professional responsibility, and you must comply with the law.
There will also be times when you need to rely upon — and know where to find — your ethical compass. This will certainly be the case when evaluating expert testimony.
As lawyers, you might sometimes hear about “functional imaging,” which falls within my own area, neuroscience.
There are experts in functional imaging who might testify, during a trial or hearing, that abnormal brain scans help explain criminal behavior. Of course, you can also find other experts who will argue the opposite point of view.
As lawyers, you will quickly come to realize that, without a good grounding in statistics and an appreciation of how fuzzy the data can be in complex areas of biology and neurocognitive science, you are going to have to rely on your own intelligence and your own sense of fairness to determine whether that testimony meets your threshold for evidence.
Sometimes, as I’m sure many of you have learned, there are valid concerns about the use of expert testimony, since it can be difficult for non-experts to separate fact from supposition. Absent a strong background in that discipline, you can never really be sure how strong the data is to support an expert’s conclusion.
I should also add that those of us who have worked in the area of perceptual science understand how sometimes our nervous system can actually alter what we see.
For example, when you see a complex two-dimensional diagram with multiple lines connecting at various different angles, your nervous system may pull the object into 3-dimensional space so that your brain sees it — and you remember it — as a cube. It is commonly referred to as a Necker Cube. Our nervous systems tends to interpret the physical world by simplifying and discarding information to make “more sense” out of the sensory data— what Gestalt psychologists call Praegnantz Theory, the tendency to simplify complex visual representations.
Thus, you remember a very different object than what was presented to your retinas.
Similarly, in the phenomenon of apparent movement, you perceive lights moving and the movement seems quite real. In reality, it is nothing more than lights blinking with a particular pattern. And yet, your brain misinterprets this blinking — and you remember it as actual movement.
Okay — I see some of you are glazing over at the science! I promise I’ll stop! The point that I am trying to make is that your memory of objects, of the timing and sequence of events, can be remarkably different than what is actually happening in the physical world.
Our memories depend on many environmental and cognitive factors, and cannot always be trusted. So your witness in a trial may remember events that never happened, or at least not as they actually occurred. This is what neuroscientists call a “processing error.”
There is another type of “processing error” known as implicit bias. Of course, a leading expert in implicit bias is on the faculty of your Law School — Professor Jerry Kang, who also serves as my Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
If you are familiar with implicit bias, you will immediately recognize and hopefully compensate for this human tendency to unconsciously stereotype and categorize people and their actions, even though you might have little or no particular details about them personally.
The fact that we are all capable of doing this without even being conscious of these biases makes them truly frightening. They can lead to discrimination in hiring, as well as serious witness and juror bias in legal proceedings. It can affect every aspect of your professional conduct as an attorney.
So there is much to be concerned about. And many reasons to be vigilant. We must all strive to rely on what we know unequivocally to be true.
More and more, especially now in our culture, we hear about a war on facts, about the abandonment of evidence. People are worried about what this could mean for our society.
The assault on facts is not new. You are all familiar with the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, which targeted teaching the science of evolution in public schools.
And astrology is also still with us — and going strong in some quarters. My Aunt Millie actually wrote the horoscopes for a popular magazine in the 1950s.
Sometimes when she grew tired of her work, she would turn to me — an 11-year-old! — and have me dictate the astrological predictions that would be published! I might say something like: “Be careful of fast moving objects today” and Aunt Millie would put it in the magazine! So I learned about the so-called “science of astrology” first-hand from Aunt Millie!
Indeed, the war on facts, the pseudo-science can be discouraging.
But, today, I look out at you all and I feel hopeful and inspired. As lawyers, you will become more than representatives for your clients, more than associates at your firms, more than advocates for your causes.
You will stand for the proposition that facts and knowledge matter. I know you will make that stand loudly and proudly with all the confidence you have earned during your time at UCLA.
I am optimistic that you will stand for the best traditions of your profession.
I know that you will use your skills to deliver justice to those who have been mistreated, to set precedents that will protect generations to come.
I know that you will defend our nation’s deepest values and champion our highest aspirations.
Why am I so optimistic? Because I know what UCLA students are already doing as problem solvers and public servants. UCLA students have been traveling to Texas to render aid to families seeking asylum!
You’ve been going to Washington and helping win First Amendment and criminal justice cases at the Supreme Court.
You’re helping veterans here in LA at the Veterans legal clinic.
You’re serving on neighborhood councils and pioneering green technology.
You’re organizing Liberation Lawyering conferences and starting Disability Law journals.
You are already exercising power in service of principle. You are already demonstrating the value of a UCLA Law education. You are already making all of us proud.
I know you will continue to do so. I know you will take all of your skill and all of your will, your intelligence and passion, your strength and faith, your courage and love, and you will continue to seek, not only the private interest, but also the public good.
And, as you leave campus, know that you are not really leaving UCLA. The resources of our alumni office, your fellow graduates, and the larger UCLA family are here to support you along the way.
So, once more, I want to congratulate you! I want to wish you well. And I want to thank you in advance for all that you will do for your communities, for your profession and for the principle of equal justice under the law.
Class of 2018, my very best wishes! Go Bruins!