Learning Law in the AI Age

Leslie Kendrick: Today and throughout your time here, go hard on ideas, go easy on people. You are here to make a transformation. You’re about to go deep into the intricacies of the American legal system. You’re going to be asked to read pages and pages of dense material. You’re going to face tragic facts and repugnant ideas. You’re going to work your way through all of that because that’s what lawyers do. But while going hard on ideas, go easy on people. And let’s start with going easy on yourself. What you’re about to do here is difficult — there’s no way around it. But don’t make it harder than it needs to be. You’re going to learn through success and failure because success in this profession is not perfection. Success is resilience. And while you’re going easy on yourself, go easy on other people. You come to us, in short, with an incredible variety of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.

Your differences are one of your strengths. How boring and pointless would it be to learn with people who are all exactly like you? Be good to each other. Recognize that everyone here is learning, working out their views and goals in real time. Even when your differences are deep and serious, still treat each other as neighbors. If you want to live in a world where people can have real conversations and treat each other humanely, this is your chance to make one. Go hard on ideas, but go easy on people, including yourself and everyone else in this room and this building.

Professor Risa Goluboff: What is a constitution? Is a constitution just a system of government? Is it the rules of the road? Is it just the structure laid out there? Is it an aspiration of how we treat each other in our political community? Is it an aspiration of values? Does it have values? Is it value-neutral? Does it just have processes? 

What is it? Who interprets it? Should the other branches also interpret it? Should Congress ask itself whether something is constitutional when it passes a law? And should it define constitutionality the same way the court does? Or should Congress have its own views of constitutionality? 

And what about outside of government? Shouldn’t all of you be interpreters of the Constitution? We, the people, aren’t we all interpreters of the Constitution? 

As lawyers, aren’t you especially interpreters of the cons — so who interprets the Constitution? What is it? Who interprets it? 

And how do we interpret it? Right? That’s a question you’re gonna spend lots of time. Every case is about how we interpret the Constitution and constitutional law. 

[Scenes from the 2025-26 school year flash by as Djo’s “End of Beginning” plays.]

Ronald Petersen ’27: Come with me to Belgium to participate in an international tax moot court. Hi, my name is Ronald. I'm a 2L at UVA Law and today my team is off to Leuven, Belgium, to participate in the oral rounds. [music] We flew out of D.C. for a very long flight. Did some prep work on the plane. We were exhausted, but we were ready to hit the ground running in the beautiful city of Leuven, Belgium. Shoutout to Virginia Tax Review. Before we knew it, it was day one of the competition. How do you feel? Wonderful. [music] Great job, guys. We took a quick celebratory dinner before preparing for day two while we walked [music] around the city. All right, round two done. How do we feel? Great. Glad it's over. [music] Quick fry dinner before we wait for the results. Okay, everyone. We just found out we made it to the final. How do we feel?

[music] At this point, we had beat out 14 other teams from across the globe to participate in the final two and argue before some of the most important names in international taxation. Okay, guys, you just argued in the finals. How do you feel you did? We'll see. Guys, we just won the entire competition. We had dinner to celebrate being the fourth UVA Law team to win this competition. [music] And before you knew it, it was time to go back home to Charlottesville. After a year of working on this problem, it's crazy that it's over. Obligatory running through the airport footage. But don't worry, we made it back home and I was reunited with my dog, Emmy, as an international tax champion [music].