This year’s Convocation marked the last time that Dean Richard Revesz, who stepped down from his deanship on May 31, would preside over the festivities. He said he related to the feelings of all the newly minted graduates: “As my tenure ends I share with you that mixed sense of pride regarding what’s been accomplished, relief that it’s over, and more importantly, excitement for what is to come.” Speaking to an audience of lawyers, Boies cited personal contribution to the justice system as perhaps the most important criterion for professional success. “The law can be written down. It can be in books,” he said. “The law in the Soviet Union was just like our law. The law in to combine legal educations from their Castro’s Cuba was just like our law. The home countries with US training, for what difference was whether it was enforced he called “the finest of legal educations.” by lawyers and by judges.” Weiler gave a close reading of a passage Later in the afternoon, University Pro- from Genesis 18, which he described as fessor Joseph Weiler, Joseph Straus Pro- “one of the founding moments of the develfessor of Law and European Union Jean opment of the notion of justice in Western Monnet Chaired Professor, praised the civilization.” In the passage, Abraham asks gathered LLM and JSD graduates, many of God, who is about to destroy the cities of whom are not American, for their decision Sodom and Gomorrah, whether God would
also destroy the righteous with the wicked. Parsing the passage, Weiler argued that since Abraham has not yet received divine instruction in the ways of justice, he is presumed to know it in his very constitution as a human being. “In real life…we typically know what is the right moral choice,” Weiler said. “The problem is not to know what I should do but to have the courage to do that which I know is the right thing to do.”
Graduates with a Global Edge A member of Singapore’s Parliament addressed the 37 graduates at the NYU School of Law and National University of Singapore Dual Degree Program convocation ceremony at the Asian Civilisations Museum in March. The ceremony marked the penultimate convocation for the program, which will end in 2014. Indranee Rajah, senior minister of state for law and education and a graduate of NUS Law, stressed the unique advantage of the NYU@NUS graduates. “You will return to your different countries, but the fact that you can pick up the phone or send an e-mail and say, ’I want to do this deal and that is going to have some impact on your country; can I check the laws there?’ or ’Can I work with you on this deal there?’—that is going to be invaluable.” Student speakers Ellie Siu of Hong Kong and Jared Kaplan of the United States also expressed gratitude for having a global perspective in their education. “While much of the rest of the world has been reactionary,” said Kaplan, “the students of the NYU@NUS program have taken the vanguard, not accepting to be a mere cog of the status quo but an instrumentality of embracing change.” For the first time in the program’s history, a student, Sudeshna Chatterjee, was hooded by her husband, Jitesh Kumar Shahani ’11.
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