Laura Taylor Swain, chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, will serve as the graduation speaker at Fordham Law School’s 115th diploma ceremony on Monday, May 23. The ceremony will begin at 10:00 am at Edwards Parade on Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. In case of severe weather, the ceremony will be moved to Lombardi Fieldhouse.
Dean Matthew Diller and Fordham University President Joseph M. McShane will confer degrees on 634 graduates – 401 of whom will receive J.D. degrees, 61 of whom will receive M.S.L. online degrees, 12 of whom will receive M.S.L. degrees, 158 of whom will receive LL.M degrees, and two of whom will receive S.J.D. degrees.
Ms. Swain, a graduate of Harvard Law School, clerked for Judge Constance Baker Motley in the Southern District of New York from 1982 to 1983. She then worked in private practice until 1996, during which time she served for a decade as a member of the New York State Board of Law Examiners. In 1996 she became a United States Bankruptcy Judge for the Eastern District of New York. President Bill Clinton nominated her to be a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York in 2000. She was confirmed in June of 2000 and became Chief Judge in 2021.
Event: Fordham Law School’s 115th Diploma Ceremony, Judge Laura Taylor Swain addresses students
Date: Monday, May 23, 2022
Time: 10:00 am
Location: Edwards Parade, Fordham University Rose Hill Campus, Bronx, NY
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Remarks from Hon. Laura Taylor Swain Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Fordham Law School Diploma Ceremony, May 23, 2022
Father McShane, Dr. Jacobs, Dean Diller, members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty members and guests, parents and friends of the Class of 2022, and the graduating class of Fordham Law School, good morning. It is a tremendous honor to have been invited to join you in person on this glorious day for the 115th Diploma Ceremony of Fordham Law School. It is an incredible honor to have been made an honorary Doctor of Laws of Fordham University Law School, and I shall treasure this day and this honor for all of my days.
We have all gone through extraordinary experiences, and we’re still living in extraordinary times. I congratulate today’s graduates for navigating the challenges of this living laboratory, and for coming through it in strength and ready for service. You’ll be challenged to use your talents in recognizing and responding to problems and embracing opportunities that were not foreseen when you began your studies. I know that you are up to that challenge.
I had the privilege of meeting with a group of students a few days ago in preparation for today’s ceremony. They impressed me with their intelligence, dedication, energy, and vision, and together constitute living proof that Fordham’s community is nurturing and invites the collaboration of those who will be leaders of the profession and other fields of endeavor as well. They already have quite the inventory of accomplishments. I met the editor in chief of the Law Review [Tatiana Hyman’ 22], a young black woman who has also served as an officer of the Black Law Students Association; leaders of the Jewish, Latin American, LGBTQ+ and Black law student organizations; and others who have played equally significant roles in this academic community, including a mother of two who works full time, has been president of the evening division for the past two years, and brings enormous energy and creativity to improving support for her fellow evening division students [Dianna Lam’ 22]. She has also forged connections between her fellow Asian law students, the Asian American Bar Association, and, during the pandemic, members of the bar who were in a position to provide assistance to Chinatown residents who needed help in navigating government rental assistance programs.
When I asked the students what has been most meaningful to them about their experience at Fordham, they didn’t focus on their individual achievements. Instead, and across the board, they spoke in terms of bonding with others, creating and strengthening community, learning to lead collaboratively, their joy and being able to advocate for their peers, and their experiences of mentoring and being mentored. Clearly, this institution has supported each of these students by nurturing their individual potential and helping them become and see themselves as leaders.
Mentoring, given and received, was a particularly frequent theme. The students were open about their understanding of the importance of mentorship, confident that they are deserving of it, and humble enough to acknowledge their own need for it. Students and young lawyers, especially women and people of color, don’t always have access to networks and information that can open doors of opportunity for them. How refreshing it was to hear [from] a broad range of students whose daily practice and professional plans include not just excelling in their own endeavors, but seeking out others whom they expect will help and guide them. And, pointing to Fordham Law’s strong tradition of alumni involvement in student support, they were quite firm about intending to pay it back by helping others walk through doors that had been open to them.
Hearing them invigorated my sense of gratitude for mentoring and for the work of trailblazing leaders who also took the time to touch my life — professors, judges, and fellow lawyers, whose leadership practices embraced other voices, prized mentoring, and aimed to enable others to develop and devote their talents to public service, opened doors for me. They’ve inspired me to pay forward their investment in me, and I urge you to make these values pillars of your own professional lives as well.
Let me tell you about the difference they’ve made in my life. I stand before you today as the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Now, don’t get too excited about me — I achieved this position by dint of timing and seniority. But, you can be excited for me. It is an enormously significant responsibility to be the leader and representative of the federal court that has served Manhattan, the Bronx, and points north for more than 230 years — since the first Tuesday of November following the enactment of the Judiciary Act of 1789, in fact. And I am only the second woman and person of color, but, rather amazingly, the fourth woman in a row to serve as chief judge.
I have the opportunity to serve as I do today because of the care, vision, generosity, and grace of God and of those who have mentored me. The first woman and first person of color to serve as chief judge of the Southern District was Constance Baker Motley, who was also the first black woman ever appointed to the life-tenured federal judiciary. She was appointed in 1966. And she was also the first woman to serve as a judge of the Southern District.
Now remember, the court was established in 1789. It had been an all-white, all-male institution for 177 years before Judge Motley joined the bench. Her amazing talents as a lawyer, her history of leadership in civil rights litigation, her sound judgment, and firm presence in grace enabled her to show the court and the country that the seat on the court was rightfully hers.
Judge Motley became chief judge in 1982, and I had the honor of serving as one of her law clerks during that first year as chief judge. I was able to learn about the administration of justice and judicial temperament at her feet.
For those of you who don’t know about her life, “get thee to a library,” or Google, or a bookseller. She published her compelling autobiography in 1998, and there’s a great new biography out. I’ll share just some of the highlights: Judge Motley was born in the early 1920s, grew up in a Caribbean immigrant family, shocked her family and her community by announcing that she wanted to be a lawyer, impressed a local philanthropist with a speech about civil rights while she was a teenager, went through college and law school through the support of this mentoring philanthropist, and then, while she was still a law student at Columbia, joined Thurgood Marshall’s legal team at the NAACP. She represented James Meredith and Autherine Lucy in the cases that desegregated the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama. She wrote the complaint and one of the cases that went to the [U.S.] Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education. She was the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court, and she won outright nine of the 10 cases that she argued, and she won the 10th when the Court came around to accept her position that race-based peremptory jury challenges in criminal cases are unconstitutional two decades later. She went on to make political history in New York and then was appointed to the Southern District. She achieved all of this before she reached the age of 45.
My life has been enriched over and over again by deepening knowledge and appreciation of her accomplishments and by her support over the years. After seeing her in action, I never had a moment’s doubt that a Black woman could become and excel as a federal judge.
Now, she didn’t choose me based just on my grades and writing sample. My law school professor and mentor Derrick Bell — yes, Derrick Bell, the author of Race, Racism and American Law, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and other groundbreaking critical race scholarship — had worked with Judge Motley at the NAACP. She hired me sight unseen on the basis of his recommendation after reviewing my submission. Although my own father was a lawyer, I had never even heard of federal judicial clerkships until Professor Bell urged me to learn about Judge Motley and apply to her.
Throughout my career, I have been the beneficiary of outreach by people who have opened doors for me to extraordinary opportunities in public service. For another example, a partner in the law firm I joined after my clerkship called on me to be the secretary of a bar association committee. That bar association later recommended me for appointment to the newly-expanded State Board of Law Examiners, and, with the support of New York State Court of Appeals Chief Judge Judith Kay, I became the first woman, first person of color, and, at 27, the youngest person ever appointed to that board, which prepares and administers the New York Bar Exam. (But I can’t offer you any tips about this summer’s test, since I left the board when I became a judge.)
In fact, I aspired to be a judge from the time I clerked. I found my happy place in that job, where everything that I did mattered in real lives, and my principal duty was to help the judge reach right decisions that fairly discerned and applied the law. I was appointed to my first judgeship at the age of 37, after a colleague from my bar exam work urged me to apply for a bankruptcy judgeship. The merit selection committee had sufficient imagination to recommend me for the judgeship — even though I was an ERISA lawyer, not a bankruptcy lawyer — and I commenced my judicial career in the Eastern District of New York as a bankruptcy judge with a vertical learning curve to navigate.
[U.S.] Senator [Chuck] Schumer’s judicial selection committee sought me out three years later to apply for consideration as a district judge in the Southern District, and, on the senator’s recommendation, I was nominated and confirmed and able to return as a federal district judge to the court where I had clerked. Judge Motley swore me in, and I had the incredible blessing of sitting as her colleague until she passed away five years later.I do my best to learn and do as much as I can as well as I can, and to be rigorous in legal analysis, clear in communication, and respectful of the lives and dignity of others. I recognize that whatever I do affects others and reflects on others. Sitting as a federal judge inherently provides opportunities to give back and to broaden [the] vision and opportunities for many. A significant one comes from the obvious facts of my gender and racial heritage. By presiding in the courtroom and doing my job well, I show those who appear before me and the rest of the community that women and people of color can attain and perform well in positions of high authority. I’m always delighted to meet with high school students, many of whom may have never even met a lawyer or a judge before.
Remember that you too can be inspiring examples as you go out into the world. Mentoring, regardless of where your professional work leads you, is an important responsibility of each of us as members of the legal profession. A great joy and privilege of being a judge is the ability to work with law clerks. Just as Judge Motley taught me about the practice of justice through her example of unyielding excellence, young lawyers early in their careers can do significant public service in judges’ chambers by assisting us in all aspects of our work, while having an incomparable perspective on the practice of law, the work of the courts, and the impact of the law on lives and social and economic relationships. If you haven’t considered clerking, you really should. Even if you’re not an aspiring litigator, many of us prefer to hire clerks who have some work experience after law school, so it’s not too late to apply, even if you’re graduating or already practicing.
My work as a federal district judge presiding over civil and criminal cases is wide-ranging and always challenging. Every case is always important to the people and entities involved — and to me. And unexpected opportunities for additional meaningful service have continued to come my way. After I became a district judge, my prior brief sojourn as a bankruptcy judge blossomed into [an] appointment to, and ultimately the responsibility of chairing, the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure. That work led to a call from the chief justice of the United States when Puerto Rico decided to commence a case for a bankruptcy-like debt restructuring under new federal legislation, PROMESA [Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act]. That legislation calls for oversight of the court proceedings for Puerto Rico and all of its restructuring instrumentalities by a single federal district — not [a] bankruptcy judge — whom the chief justice had the responsibility to appoint.
The appointment to preside over the Puerto Rico cases has been life-changing for me, and I definitely didn’t see it coming. Can you imagine receiving a phone call from the chief justice with a new work assignment? It is a singular privilege to preside over the process of finding sound and lawful economic footings on which Puerto Rico can move forward from its debt crisis and towards a brighter future. It’s also incredibly challenging, presenting issues with first impression all the time, appeals on almost every significant ruling, and, ultimately, a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the statute. Conducting the proceedings in a manner that shows respect for the people of Puerto Rico and will be as comprehensible as possible to non-lawyers is a constant priority for me as well.
My career path has taught me that keeping your imagination open to visions that others, who know of needs and opportunities you might never have perceived, have for you can help you to build an interesting, varied, and useful professional life. Experience has also taught me that the best sort of leadership is supportive, collaborative, respectful, and empowering of others. Setting a tone of respect, appreciation, and generosity, helping to raise others up, and empowering them to bring the best of their skills and creativity to lead their own spheres of responsibility strengthens institutions and communities. Leaders should also be listening carefully to the voices of those with and for [those] whose benefit they work, and, in particular, the voices of stakeholders who may not yet have regular representation at the table. One of the many lasting impressions that I took away from my meeting with members of your graduating class is that you, Fordham students, get this.
Class of 2022, you go into the world of work and service well prepared to have exciting, challenging careers that further the cause of justice. Carry forward your leadership experience into confident work with mentors, colleagues, and mentees, help to lift up the voices and lives of the members of our broader community, and continue to shine.
Thank you.
