Read Judge Rosenthal’s 2019 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School
Judge Lee Rosenthal does us a great service by connecting the thought of Professor Agnes Callard with that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. While the judge naturally focuses on the implications of this connection for the judicial role, she encourages students, lawyers, and professors to ponder it as well. I accept her invitation.
Aspiration, in Callard’s conception, involves a quest for betterment—one that entails a leap of faith. The aspirant seeks to possess a new set of values, whose nature she cannot fully appreciate until she has acquired them. She strives to learn to appreciate, say, classical music, believing that it will enrich her life in some not-fully-anticipated way. She looks to better herself through education. But, as Callard notes in her recent book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018), “until I am educated I do not really know what an education is or why it is important.”
Aspiration stands in contrast to ambition, by which one might seek an education simply as a way to make money or achieve status. Both Judge Rosenthal and Professor Callard suggest that ambition’s motivations, without more, make for thin gruel. As the writer George Saunders reminds us, “‘Succeeding,’ whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it).” True nourishment requires an effort to become something more than one is.
All of this appears in Holmes’s work. The notion of “liv[ing] greatly in the law,” with which Judge Rosenthal opens, appears in a Holmes speech entitled “The Profession of the Law.” To Holmes, living greatly in the law involves a leap of faith: “No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen—to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach.” It is a species of aspiration. External recognition may or may not come, but the quest is its own reward.
A few pages later in the same volume of Holmes’s work appears a speech titled “The Use of Law Schools.” Even in 1886, it turns out, there were complaints—by those Holmes calls “the impatient”—that law school should provide more practical training. He is skeptical, suggesting that legal education’s best aim is to encourage an attitude that, again, corresponds to Callard’s conception of aspiration. Here is Holmes:
“Education, other than self-education, lies mainly in the shaping of men’s interests and aims. If you convince a man that another way of looking at things is more profound, another form of pleasure more subtile than that to which he has been accustomed—if you make him really see it—the very nature of man is such that he will desire the profounder thought and the subtiler joy.”
Holmes no doubt overclaims by suggesting that law schools cannot meaningfully provide practical education. But he is surely correct in highlighting the limits of what can be taught relative to the vastness of what must be learned: “no teaching which a man receives from others at all approaches in importance what he does for himself, and . . . one who simply has been a docile pupil has got but a very little way.”
All of this rings true. Looking back over my own life in the law, I write this with a deeper appreciation of the values to which I aspired than I could ever have imagined when I began. I get more today out of reading Callard and Holmes (and Rosenthal) than was possible for my younger self. Reaching this point took work—and leaps of faith. Looking ahead, I aim to continue to dig for springs I may never reach, and to heed Callard’s (and Holmes’s) injunction that “[t]urning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher.”
This response and the 2019 Hallows Lecture were first featured
in the Fall 2019 issue of Lawyer Magazine
Chad M. Oldfather is professor of law at Marquette University
