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On the count of three.
All right?
One-- I'm gonna need a good smile from everybody.
It was like a flashback from 1975,
when I met them the first time out in front of the Hark.
We were all in the same first year section.
I don't even remember whose idea it was.
My first year study group meets every year.
To know that we are now in our 60s
and we are still kicking it, we are so lucky.
We are still friends 43 years later.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
How did they let you in?
I've come to every reunion of my class
since I graduated, every one of them.
You are here!
I think of people who I studied with,
who I cried with when we had a tough exam
or there were tough things going on in each of our lives.
And when you walk in a room and you see some of those people,
it just brings it all back.
It's good to see you.
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Why do we come to the reunions?
We just enjoy being here.
This is where we met.
We fell in love.
We got engaged.
We got married a week after graduation.
I mention TO people I get choked up.
So when we come back, it's not just
to see the classes, to see the professors.
We just kind of felt like we'd known each other all our lives.
It's reliving our romance is what it is.
That has now lasted for 35 years.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Alumni should come back not just to relive memories,
not just to meet their classmates,
but to see how the law school has been transformed,
how different it is, how it's changed,
not just in the physical characteristics
but in the pedagogy.
--sudden change.
It's suddenly--
It's just a wonderful every five year
taste of how a great institution evolves.
It has changed not only in terms of its physical plant
and the diversity of its faculty and its student body,
but also the way that law is taught.
Practice of law, the science of law,
the art of law, how to think creatively,
how to think in a useful fashion,
and how to think in a solutions-oriented fashion.
They prepared me for life.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here's the one.
Here's the one you really love.
There's Archie Cox.
I was born in 1954, the year of Brown v Board of Education.
And as I grew up, I admired people
like Thurgood Marshall who drove social change as lawyers.
And that's the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.
Looking back now, 40 years since I graduated,
the most important thing about Harvard Law School,
it taught me why the law was such an important instrument
for social change.
Worldwide, the name Harvard has a very special meaning.
If you ask almost anyone from a country outside the United
States to name the best law school,
the answer almost always is Harvard.
[APPLAUSE]
We're not all from the same backgrounds.
We all are not from the same political persuasion.
We're not all from the same ethnic groups, racial groups,
gender.
But we have something in common.
We went to Harvard Law School.
It makes you who you are.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This school never leaves you.
It is part of your life and part of your very being.
It has been a positive element of everything
I've done over all of my life.
It always stays with you.
You're branded a Harvard lawyer, a Harvard Law School graduate.
And it redounds to your benefit literally forever.
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[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
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