AMY WOOLFSON: My name is Amy Woolfson.
I'm LLM from the United Kingdom.
And it gives me great pleasure to introduce
this year's recipient of the Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund
Award for Teaching Excellence.
This award is given each year to a single faculty
member in recognition of their teaching ability,
attentiveness to student concerns,
and general contributions to student life at the law school.
This year's recipient is quite special.
Professor Jeannie Suk graduated from Harvard Law School
in 2002.
She served as a law clerk to David H. Souter on the United
States Supreme Court.
She worked as an assistant district attorney
in the Manhattan District Attorney's office
before joining the faculty here.
This year marks a decade of her teaching.
In 2009, Professor Suk was awarded
the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her second book, At Home in the Law-- How the Domestic Violence
Revolution is Transforming Privacy,
was awarded the Law and Society Association's Herbert Jacob
Prize for the Best Law and Society Book of the Year.
She was invited to testify before Congress
on law and innovation in fashion,
and she became the first tenured Asian American woman
on the faculty at Harvard Law School.
As a teacher, Professor Suk has touched the lives
of so many students through her expansive community
involvement, her remarkable teaching,
and her glamorous tenure photo.
And while her cold calling can at times induce fear,
it is her exceptional use of this pedagogy
that sets her apart.
A member of the Class of 2016 wrote that she masterfully
exercises the Socratic method, intertwining legal doctrine
with contextual learning in order
to transform students' understanding of how
law shapes society.
She also encourages students to think critically
about their ideas and intuitions so
that they can be better equipped as lawyers and professionals.
Professor Suk serves our law school
with extraordinary integrity as a section leader,
teacher, mentor, and advocate.
Please join me in congratulating Professor Jeannie Suk, the 2016
recipient of the Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award
for Teaching Excellence.
[APPLAUSE]
JEANNIE SUK: Members of the Harvard Law School
Class of 2016, thank you so much for this honor.
I am so grateful to celebrate your graduation with you
in this very special way.
On Class Day back in 2002, I sat where you sit now,
and I had the joy of seeing my esteemed mentor, Lani Guinier,
receive this Teaching Award.
I couldn't have envisioned myself
standing here addressing you, but now we are bonded forever.
This summer marks the 10-year anniversary of my appointment
to this faculty, I've always considered
the Sacks-Freund award the highest
honor imaginable because working with students
is what has made me most eager to get up in the morning.
I am able to do what I do because you
have been so excited to be challenged
and so fun to engage.
You have been so game to interrogate assumptions,
including your own.
You have been playful, serious, experimental, and critical
with the traditions of legal education
that were developed here.
And I must say to the parents and grandparents,
thank you for giving us the best graduating
class I have ever seen.
[APPLAUSE]
My own dad drove up from New York today to attend.
He hasn't seen me teach, but I know
what he has to be thinking.
Both he and my mother as young children
fled North Korea as refugees during the Korean War in 1950.
I was born in a repressive military dictatorship
in South Korea.
Our family came as immigrants to this country in 1979
when I was six years old.
I didn't speak English, and I was extremely shy,
and so inhibited that I went through much
of my own schooling, even in my 20s,
never saying a word out loud.
How could I now be a teacher who communicates
with so many students?
What made me grow from a silent young person to one
whose primary job it is to speak to others about law
and about democracy, no less?
One reason my father's family had
to flee their home in North Korea
was that his father was an open critic of the totalitarian
government that had taken power, and it was not
safe for the family to stay.
With this in my family's history,
I have wondered how people get the courage not just to speak,
but when necessary, to say things that may
win them disfavor or rebuke.
To express truths that resist the tide, to say no when people
expect yes, or nothing at all.
To me, that is what teaching is for.
Teaching and learning are not only about grasping a subject
like criminal law or torts or contracts,
they are about experiencing ways to engage together
in genuine conversation and critique
on the most difficult problems we face as a society,
being challenged to think the unthinkable
and say the unsayable.
Harvard Law School taught that to me.
What I have loved most as a teacher
is witnessing students' journey from fear
and quiet to find voices to engage in vital conversations,
to question each other and themselves,
to question authority, and not to accept the status quo.
The health of our democracies depend on our willingness
to do that with each other, and not
let fear be the driver of what we don't say.
Teaching is something we all do in our lives,
not just in the classroom.
You have taught me, you have taught each other,
and you will teach a world that you will influence and change.
More than any class in recent memory, the Class of 2016
has taught us at this school to question the status
quo and to ask why things should not be different,
more just, more inclusive, and equal.
Teaching that really helps make lasting change
is vitally about listening to, especially
listening generously, to voices that disagree
and considering possibilities that make you uncomfortable
and unsettled enough that you have to think even harder
about what may be right.
When you are really listening intently with openness,
it is hard to dehumanize the other.
This has been an important and telling year.
The perspectives on a world that dominates our public debates
seem so intractably divided on matters large and small.
The state of discourse on important issues
has had many of us in despair, wanting to throw up our hands
and stay home.
But it's crucial that we not stay away.
You graduates have a lot of work in front of you,
a lot of active listening and speaking, a lot of teaching,
a lot of difficult conversations with people
who disagree with you about what to do
on problems of utmost importance and urgency for our future.
With your teachers, I take to heart the role of this school
in the future of this country and the world.
And, of course, that impact depends primarily
on you, our graduates.
Soon enough, you are going to have a lot of power.
You will have responsibility for decisions
that have real consequences for other people-- people
who may be quite different from you.
When you wield that power, the trust that is placed in you
won't actually be about whether you remember the specific rules
and doctrines that you were examined on in your courses.
That is fine because according to me,
that is not what this education is for.
If you are graduating from here with more humility
and integrity, with more willingness
to consider perspectives and arguments other than your own,
and with more attentiveness to the humanity of others,
then you have received an education
worthy of this school's aspirations.
And I hope that you will try every day
to attain that for yourself, and teach it to others.
I am so excited to see what you will
do to change our world for the better,
and truly, I will believe in you for as long as I have breath.
Congratulations, Class of 2016.
[APPLAUSE]