My Success Has Never Been My Own

This is a fine draft: it's cogent and forceful, and both illuminates and enlivens the subject. I think the best route to improvement is to tilt its emphasis from past to future. The antinomy around which it is organized dissolves by passing through the boundary between law school and the world before. Once here, there is no longer a question whether you allowed to earn money. Your wits, sharpened to the work by law school, will now always enable you to make whatever living you feel you need doing whatever work you feel you want to do. So now the question shifts to what you want that work to be and with and for whom you want to do it.

The second of the current draft's major points, that you are in no sense bound to any particular social commitments in that work, is also firmly resolved here in a fashion different from that of a sociology teacher. Whether you are more like Thurgood Marshall or William T. Coleman, Jr., like Vernon Jordan or like Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Jones or Lani Guinier, your practice will be one that meets your material, intellectual, moral, social and political needs. The job of the school, and of each of your teachers, is to add to your resources what will best enable you to build that practice, whatever you want it to be.

We do so by providing ideas and skills that fit inside the metaphorical container we call "the license," and by introducing the people, "the network," that will assist you in providing services to your clients and bringing clients who will buy your services. Let's try a draft in which we can begin doing what "Planning Your Practice" does, by defining what it is that you will need from law school and planning how to get it. If you can say more about

• Where you wan to practice;
• What you want to do;
• With and for whom you want to work;
• How much you want the practice to produce for you; and
• Why that practice would fulfill your material, intellectual, and other needs

you would vastly have empowered yourself to make law school do its best for you.

I think this current draft also illuminates why we have so far not quite connected in our vehement agreement with the positions you here advance. I have apparently fallen, despite my absence of agreement with the outlook, into the role of the sociology teacher, for which I am not professionally suited. I knew, admired, and worked for or with Thurgood Marshall and Bill Coleman, Elaine Jones and Lani Guinier. I taught Kathleen Cleaver. (With Vernon Jordan I have had no more than a passing acquaintance.) I know you could be any of them if theirs were the practices you chose. It's not my job or my pleasure to shape other peoples' lives, only to help them shape their own.

I look forward to reading the next draft.