Read Judge Rosenthal’s 2019 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School
Upon hearing the subject of Chief Judge Lee Rosenthal’s Hallows Lecture, I was excited for the Marquette Law School community, particularly our students, to hear about a different facet of the legal profession, beyond the usual fare of theory, precedent, and policy. I did not, however, foresee the clarity with which it would permit me to see my own path in the law. Before Judge Rosenthal’s lecture, I had not imagined aspiration—in the judge’s sense of the word—as ambition’s natural counterpart. Ambition, I knew. The need for external validation, which Judge Rosenthal (rightly, in my estimation) identifies as the driving force behind ambition, runs rampant in law schools and practice.* When, after a clerkship, I decided not to return to private practice but instead to use my law degree to work with students, I did so as an answer to a question posed by a loved one: “Why are you letting ambition guide you?” I couldn’t quite answer the question. Even though I deeply enjoyed certain parts of my work—homing in on a novel ambiguity or discovering that magical precedent that cracks a case wide open—I always had one eye on the next brass ring. It became clear that something had to change, that I wanted to change. Still, the decision to leave traditional practice was not an easy one. On forms and in introductions, I would no longer be an attorney. Ambition asked: “Would anything else be enough?”
It would, and then some, but not for the reason I had first assumed. Initially, I thought that by leaving the fancy title behind, I was following “my passion,” trite as it may sound. And, well, that’s not untrue. I had always wanted to work with students; it’s part of the reason I avoided even the thought of law school until several years after college. But “working with students” was just a vague, amorphous idea. It got me to my position at Marquette Law School, but it does not define the value I derive from it. I do not wake up every morning, birds chirping, sun shining through my window, and raise my arms, exclaiming: “I get to work with students today!” Rather, it’s the individual law students with whom I get to work, the research on learning in law school that I get to apply to our academic success program, the efforts to prepare students for practice with compassion and rigor, the class content that I get to treat as a mini-scholarly inquiry while asking my students to open their minds and come along for the ride—this is what fuels me. I get to do this work—to interact with individuals and ideas—then apply the knowledge gained, evaluate my success, rethink my application, and do it all over again the next day. In essence, I get to learn. That is why this is more than enough.
Before confronting Judge Rosenthal’s lecture, however, I don’t think I was able to put that into words. I thought that the antidote to unadulterated ambition was the following of that sincerest interest, be it in the courtroom, the boardroom, the classroom, or elsewhere. In fact, that is only the beginning. Ambition’s real foil, the joy of it all, can be found in the learning. This is aspiration’s driving force. And it can be found, truly, in so many different roles, sectors, and practices in the law.
I thank the good judge for the lesson. I will do my best to pass it along.
This response and the 2019 Hallows Lecture were first featured
in the Fall 2019 issue of Lawyer Magazine
Anna Fodor is assistant dean of students and a member of the part-time faculty at
Marquette University Law School.
For more on this subject, Professor Lawrence S. Krieger of Florida State University has done impressive work identifying and addressing the link between the increase in students’ focus on extrinsic motivations once they begin law school and the decline in well-being among law students and, eventually, lawyers.
