As you look to your left and right, please remember one more thing: this is a place where we are committed to each other. At this school, you will learn best through dialogue with one another. The people who will get you through here; the people who will teach you most about how to be a good lawyer and how to be a good person are the classmates you meet for the first time today. Your classmates will stay with you throughout your lives. They will attend your wedding, join your vacations, serve as godparents of your children, watch over you in illness, send you emails and clients, vouch for you at your Senate confirmations, and speak at your funeral.

       So if you are wondering: how am I going to make my way here? The answer is simple: Trust your classmates. Right now they are your classmates; but in time, they will be your soulmates. Think of them as your brothers- and sisters-in-law. You are all in this together, and the time to start supporting one another is right now.

       Now all of this sounds fine, except for one thing: when it comes to Law School, your classmates are novices【新手，生手】, too. None of them can answer the questions that cloud your mind（）: like, how do I get off to a good start in law school?

           Well, those are relatively easy questions. Getting oriented is what orientations are for, and this week is designed to help you figure out where things are, and who can help you solve your transition problems. Each of you is assigned to a Dean’s Advisor; let me ask them all to stand up: ……

Behind them stand many, many others whom I encourage you to meet personally. You will spend much of the days ahead learning from these new friends how the school really operates. They will tell each of you that you have the opportunity to craft an extraordinary law school experience, because you have joined a supportive community that will offer you the resources you need.

       Let me spend my time this morning discussing a somewhat different question: not how do I study law? But how do I think about studying law? That is what we like to call here: the meta question. As the late Professor Leon Lipson once said, “At Yale, we believe that anything you can do, I can do meta.”   How exactly do you think about this brave new world that you are entering? This world of Law and Law Talk?

       Well, first, the good news. As my predecessor, Dean Guido Calabresi, famously told the entering class each year, “My friends, you are off the treadmill now.” After years of carefully triangulating your course to get to this place, you’ve made it! You don’t have to do anything here just to get ahead. Here at Yale Law School, we have no class rank. All of you can succeed here. All of you should succeed here.

       But sadly, there are too many lawyers in this world who remember the day they started law school as the day they began the rat race. But in the words of Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin: “Remember that even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat.”

       I ask you to think about your law school career differently. I ask you to think about it, not as a competition, but as an adventure.

       Yale Law School is an adventure, which should have at least three elements:

       First, trying new things.

       Second, combining theory with practice.

       Third, deciding what you stand for.

       Let me say a word about each.

       First, trying new things. Experimentation. Explore the rare intellectual freedom that this school offers. We have very few rules. We have minimal required curriculum. Make the most of that freedom. Don’t spend your time repeating things you already know you can do. Instead, try things you’ve never tried.

       So if you are a good writer, try public speaking. If you are an accomplished debater, join a law journal. If you are a poet, study law and economics. And if you are a mathematician or number cruncher by training, take law and literature. By entering law school, you are not ending your education in the liberal arts; you are extending it.

        The same goes for your summers. If you have lived your whole life in the States, work for a human rights group in Africa. If you always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer, try working in a prosecutor’s office. If you are convinced you want to be a corporate lawyer, spend a summer doing legal aid, and vice versa. Exercise all your intellectual muscles, not just one.

       At Yale, we intend our approach to legal education to be interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and international. What does that mean?

       By an interdisciplinary approach, we mean to show you how the intellectual discipline of law connects with other academic disciplines, some of which you studied before you got here. Law is not the only discipline in this great university. We have a great law faculty, whose members hold advanced degrees in law, of course; but many also hold advanced degrees in philosophy, history, political science, sociology, economics, and medicine. Two of these professors will deliver introductory lectures on their subjects of specialty. Tomorrow afternoon, Professor Jules Coleman will give an introductory lecture on “law and philosophy for physicists.” On September 2, Professor Carol Rose will give an introductory lecture on “law and economics for poets.”

       They will ask you to start viewing the law through many lenses, not just one. That will begin this afternoon, when you hear the first two lectures in our Introductions series, from Professor Bill Eskridge, who will give you a tour of the American legal system, and Professor John Langbein who will introduce you to the history of legal education and the Yale Law School. Those will be followed later this week by lectures tomorrow on professional responsibility by Professor Jean Koh Peters; and on Friday, Sept. 5, on public interest law by Professor Brett Dignam. And in the weeks ahead, you will also hear from two accomplished graduates of our school who made their mark in different fields: one, Ben Heineman, who became corporate counsel of one of the largest economies in the world, the General Electric Co., speaking on values and vision in legal practice, and another, Margaret Marshall, who was born in South Africa, but after her JD here became Chief Justice of her home state of Massachusetts.

       Please attend these introductions. They are designed to cast new light on your coursework. You will find them fascinating and useful in seeing how law relates to other concepts in the world of ideas.