‘It is Worth Taking Risks for the Truth. It is Even Worth Taking to the Street.’
Professor Richard McAdams at the 2025 Midway Dinner Lecture
Thank you, Dean Miles. Very kind. This is the tenth year that Tom Miles, as Dean, has introduced the Midway speaker, and it is a little sad to reach the end of this era. It will be very difficult for the next Dean to fill your shoes, Tom, so, I propose a toast to you and your service. To Dean Miles!
I’m very pleased and a little surprised at how many of you are still here, given my competition. This building, Ida Noyes Hall, is the home of Doc Films, the oldest student film society in the nation. Doc Films screens a movie every night of the quarter. Tonight’s film, playing right now, is Woo-Ping’s “Drunken Master” with Jackie Chan. So, martial arts vs. after dinner speech. Action comedy there, lawyerly sobriety here. Thank you for staying.
I apologize in advance for the fact a human wrote my speech tonight and that human is me. To be current, I had thought the University’s PhoenixAI should write the speech. So, I asked it for a sonnet. I asked for a haiku and a limerick, even a story in the style of Dr. Seuss. About the Law School and the midway. About Dean Miles and myself. Yet, however disappointing my remarks might be, PhoenixAI was worse. It’s not yet up to the task.
The topic for tonight is the midway of the esteemed JD class of 2026. What is the connection between 2L year and the midway? Well, I couldn’t get PhoenixAI to write a good poem, but I am partial to this very short one from Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits.”
“We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
From a legal perspective, the downside of poetry is all that pesky ambiguity. What is the Secret? What exactly does it know? But with poetry, the enigma of meaning is part of the point. Which is not actually inconsistent with how we think about law. Poetry does not have the law’s coercive force and a poem like this is not making a specific factual claim. So, one can admire poetry and still want law to be unambiguous (mostly), and want legal applications to be grounded in fact.
Many people have offered different interpretations of “The Secret Sits,” which I will not relate. My point is that one can reasonably value more than one competing interpretation. Which means I might not be entirely wrong to offer this interpretation. The middle, in the present context, obviously refers to students in the midway of law school. 1Ls and 3Ls dance around in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits with the 2Ls who know.
Robert Frost was Poet Laureate of the United States in the 1950s, though it was then just called the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The current Poet Laureate, since 2022, is Ada Limón. (At least that was true when I wrote the speech. I haven’t checked this afternoon to see if Elon Musk has fired her.)
You are in the middle because you are half-way through your time here. Exactly four and half quarters in. We mark the occasion between your 1L dinner, just before you began classes, and your 3L dinner, just before you graduate.
That’s the temporal midway we celebrate. There’s also a looming geographic midway. The term midway, as probably everybody here knows, was first used in Chicago in the 1893 Columbian Exposition to describe this great open space between where we are now and the Law School, the Midway Plaisance. For the Exposition, the Midway was designed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, whose second-best accomplishment was designing a park somewhere in the center of Manhattan.
When you cross the Midway—perhaps in coming to dinner tonight—you acknowledge the important truth that not only are you part of a great law school, well, the greatest law school, you are part of a great university. And you are entitled to take advantage of this great university. I mentioned Doc Films, which is extra-curricular, but you can also take classes up here north of the Midway.
Indeed, you can earn up to 12 non-law credits towards the JD. The courses must bear some relation either to your future legal practice or to the study of law in general. Given the Law School’s historic emphasis on interdisciplinarity, a great many classes have been approved over the years. Predictably, law students have taken a wide array of business and language courses, and public policy and economics, but also courses in Computer Science, Creative Writing, a Crown Family School course on “Dying, Death, and End-of-Life Care”; assorted Divinity School courses; an English course, “Critiques of Humanism”; a history course, “The Roots of the Modern American City”; courses in Human Rights, Philosophy, Political Science; a sociology course, “Introduction to Critical Social Theory”; a Psychology course, “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Morality.”
And there are two brand new units on campus to consider. In 2022, the University created the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. For example, one course they’re offering this spring is “Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization.” This past October, the University launched the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, which includes as faculty our own Professors Hajin Kim and David Weisbach. They start offering courses next fall.
But you can start this spring. As a recent law graduate said, don’t wait for your 3L year to try something across the Midway.
The midway. The midway. On reflection, I fear I might have oversimplified. You see, I knew most of you as 1Ls, but you are not 1Ls anymore. You are capable of far more precision. And I admire that because precision is important when seeking the truth. And truth is important. The very idea of truth is important. As someone once said, “Believe in truth. . . . To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”[1] Out in the political world, you can believe in facts because you have good evidence to believe, or because it feels good to believe, or because someone tells you to believe it. It is important to note the difference. In law and in the university, evidence matters.
So I thought I would illustrate that point with a parable. Parables are not literally true but can illustrate the truth, like a poem. Here goes.
Some of you probably are sitting there a little resentful that I have been imprecise in my remarks—when claiming that tonight is the temporal midway. Just before I stood up to speak, one of you made the following point to me. “Yes,” you said, “the winter quarter of 2L year is the middle of 9 quarters. But”—and here is a really nice question—“what is the middle of the middle quarter? What is the midway of the midway, as it were? Is it really today? Because,” the 2L said, by their count of the 44 class days of winter quarter, “the precise middle was this past Monday, Feb. 3.”
“Well, look,” I admitted. “No one wants to have a big class dinner on a Monday night, so this Thursday is close enough. Isn’t it?”
The 2L said, “Maybe, but let me ask, professor, did you at least toast the class of 2026 on Monday night? Even without a big dinner?”
I admitted I did not.
And the 2L’s face expressed disappointment, even a little judgment.
So I said, “OK, wait. I can count better than that. You aren’t done here until you graduate, and the date for that hasn’t been formally set, but a reasonable guess is Saturday, June 6, 2026. Now bear with me, because you are a 2L and don’t mind getting into the weeds, to be precise about facts. Your first day of class was September 26, 2023.” What a day that was! “So,” I say, “isn’t the real midway the halfway point between your first day of class and the day you graduate?“
The 2L gave me some side-eye and said, “Fine. And by that new calculation, is the midway today, Professor, the night of the 2L dinner?”
I said, “uh … no. As there are 984 days between Sept. 26, 2023 and June 6, 2026, the midway point is, well, it was, January 30, last Thursday.”
The 2L’s eyes here flashed a weird kind of smug disappointment. And they said “And what did you do that day, Professor? On January 30? Did you toast us then?”
And I said—“Uh, of course I did. I toasted you. I am the Midway speaker for the class of 2026. How could I not toast you at the precise midway?”
The 2L here radiated skepticism, giving off such negative vibes that I was tempted to resort to a cold call. But the 2L appears to have taken trial advocacy and honed the art of cross-examination. So, with an imperious tone of disbelief, the 2L asked: “Where, Professor? If you really toasted us, where did you do it?” As if I would just confess that I didn’t toast anywhere.
But instead, I said, “Well, I was a 2L once, and so I too am capable of some precision in the pursuit of truth. So, on January 30, before I toasted the class, I first had to decide, just as you say, where to do it. And so I asked myself an obvious question.”
The 2L said, “What question?”
“Well, you started this contest by asking what is the temporal middle of the middle quarter, so I had to ask myself”—and to be perfectly honest here, it may have helped that I had already been practice-toasting a bit before I thought of this question, but I asked—“what is the geographic midway of the Midway?” I mean, how could you not ask that question?
And it’s easily answered. East to West, the Midway extends from Stoney Island to Cottage Grove, a width of one mile. The half-way point, half-mile from either end, is our overused but essential street, Woodlawn. And the middle of Woodlawn is the central lane marker of Woodlawn. That’s East-West. Now, north/south, the center is halfway across the Midway bridge on Woodlawn. So, north and south, east and west, the midway of the Midway, is right here:
This, I decided, was the proper place to toast the class of 2026 on the true temporal midway of January 30. Fortunately, it wasn’t too cold last Thursday. So, that day, I went to the Woodlawn Bridge.
But for the sake of truth, I had to be precise. It is worth taking risks for the truth. It is even worth taking to the street. So, I decided to risk everything and step into traffic, to stand on the center line of Woodlawn, halfway across the Midway bridge, and toast—you—all.
You are now more than half-way through your precious 984 days as University of Chicago law students. Make the most of your second half. I look forward to toasting you at your 3L dinner when you have taken all your classes, in the law school and across the Midway.
[1] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century 65 (2017).