This year on Groundhog Day, my dad turned 96 years of age. My magnificent seven grandkids call him “Super Big Nick.”
On this birthday, his incredibly robust health was failing because his body simply wore out. Let’s just say he was not buying green bananas.
My mom, siblings, relatives and I were coming to grips with knowing that he was not long for this world, so I was thinking a great deal about what I learned from my dad about success and leadership.
Later that week, I was flattered and privileged to be asked to substitute for a distinguished colleague who had planned, but was unexpectedly unable, to speak at a Southwestern Law Review symposium in Los Angeles that was scheduled to start in less than two days.
The symposium honored the career of our friend, professor Catherine Carpenter, who is a giant in all facets of legal education.
When the student law review editors running the symposium asked me for the title of the talk that I would be giving, I thought to myself, “Good question!” I was not planning to think about it and work on the talk until flying to California the next day.
They politely persisted so I told them to bill my presentation as “Law school communities are the field hospitals for the people of a wounded democracy.”
My flights were delayed, so I arrived at my hotel at about midnight Pacific time. Once in my room, I did a bit of work on the speech until 1:30 a.m. Friday.
At 3:30 a.m. I got a call from my sister Amy back home on the East Coast telling me that our dad had died.
When I spoke a few hours later that morning at the symposium, I explained why it was such a pleasure and privilege to join the deserved tributes for professor Carpenter, and to express our concern and admiration for the community of communities that comprise the City of Angels for their moving and inspiring response to the tragic fires, loving their neighbors and being neighborly to each other, often including people who they did not know.
Extemporaneously (because in the fog of a sleepless night I had misplaced my scribbled notes) I spoke about the “lessons learned from our father who now art in heaven.”
Super Big Nick taught mostly by example as a role model, not so much by what he said, but by what he did and how did it.
The Ten Commandments that he handed down to us from the mountain of his life amount to seven rules for success and three cardinal virtues for leaders:
I. Work hard. Work as hard as you can, for as long as you can, and well as you can.
II. Figure it out. This includes knowing when and who to ask for help.
III. No whining.
IV. Learn from mistakes, setbacks and failures.
V. Persevere. Keep moving ahead. Navigate, work around obstacles, overcome challenges. Never be complacent. Excise “it’s good enough” and “you don’t have to do that” from your lexicon.
VI. Celebrate success, but not too much.
VII. Repeat.
VIII. Leadership is not about you. It’s about who you help and who helps you to do it.
IX. Leaders lead. If not you, then who will? Do not count on anyone else ringing the fire alarm.
X. Leaders have courage.
Then turning to my intended topic, I focused on the importance of courage, not just courage in the face of physical danger, but courage to do the right thing without regard to political risk or self-interest.
That was, for example, the case evidenced by those patriots who against great odds called for replacing a powerful monarchy with a novel form of limited government empowered by people to do what they could not do for themselves to protect and promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Twenty-five signatories of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers. They and all the 56 who autographed that founding document nearly 250 years ago knew that, in effect, they were signing their own death warrant.
Since that time, often it has taken courage to “keep the Republic,” to borrow Benjamin Franklin’s prescient prediction of how hard it would be to hold together a nation whose founding documents and the rule of law can be boiled down to just this: The rights and mechanisms to be different and to disagree.
The kind of selfless political courage that long has sustained the unfinished symphony of our federal constitutional democracy is the subject of then-U.S. Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Profiles in Courage.”
Written after the red scare-driven era of McCarthyism, during the heightening fears of the Cold War, the book is worth rereading for its cautionary parables about what the United States of America could use more of in our present fraught times.
Concluding, I urged educational leaders to focus on value, adaptability and purpose. That is, we must do a better job communicating the value of higher education and not take for granted that people agree.
We also must work hard in pursuit of truth to transmit and expand knowledge at a time when the only constant is rapidly accelerating change. Given this reality, adaptability is both imperative and a springboard for progress such as using technology to expand access to quality affordable legal services to underserved and less advantaged people.
The most urgent purpose for legal educators is having the courage to teach, uphold and defend our constitutional democracy and the rule of law. We can and should resist and fight back against what, forgive me, feels to me like what could be the start of a Great Repression.
We may not yet be at the end of our democratic union, but we can see it from here. This is our time, as educators and lawyers, to step up. It is what we do. And we must. Now. Not just for our students, but for the public.
I am not saying we should be political. We can call balls and strikes on constitutional issues. We can have vigorous, civil, thoughtful conversations and even disagreements over what is a ball and what is strike. But when a pitch hits someone in the head, it is not a strike. And when it is flagrantly intentional, there must consequences.
We can be assertive calmly and courteously but firmly. We should stand in stark contrast to the daily threats and baseless insults by prominent powerful people attacking fellow Americans whose shoelaces the abusers are not worthy to untie.
So sad. Pathetic really. In contrast we can turn the other cheek and show a better way to lead the nation’s business.
Well, that night, after the self-administered therapy of eulogizing my dad and preaching to a brilliant choir at the symposium, I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with the honoree and her ever-supportive lawyer husband, Marty Carpenter.
Then I red-eyed back home and took care of what we could. Amen.