First, you have taught me that advocacy is only as effective as the credibility and charisma of the speaker. At the moment that the audience ceases to hear or believe that speaker, the ethos of the message being conveyed is irrelevant. A judge slogging through a pile of amicus briefs, a netizen arriving briefly at a web site, a professor reading one of 120 similarly-phrased essays – each of these audiences demands that one who would persuade must first maintain interest and credibility.

Second, you have taught me that reality is the true benchmark against which to judge legal learning. The plaintiffs I met in first-year classes were often fanciful creations – thin-skulled children whose poorly manufactured bicycles tragically and gratuitously collided with stones kicked up by tractor-trailers that hadn’t yet installed the newest anti-debris mechanisms – but the parties I met in Evidence are real. Instead of taking pride in dismantling relationships and assigning liability within a purely fictionalized setting, you taught me that real problems supply the "hypotheticals" from which to learn law. In part, I realized, this is a function of the course. Evidence is a trial subject, and the Rules can only be understood in the context of real litigation. But I also came to understand what you so often implied: the trial itself creates a new reality, and those who shape that reality must understand how the world really operates.

To this end, you taught me the subject with examples drawn from past trials; you told me what lawyers actually do in the courtroom. And most importantly, you introduced me almost everyday to real people who were, even as we spoke to them, waging legal battles in which a great deal was at stake. I appreciated that you trusted us enough to let us become integrally involved in projects that you clearly cared a great deal about. And I appreciated the ambition necessary to maintain this base of reality within the general unreality of the law school. This emphasis on reality, I also learned, carried important lessons for my education as a lawyer, and I discovered how inextricably linked to your first lesson was this second lesson. Within the rhetorical space of the courtroom, the reality that will prevail and maintain a speaker’s credibility and an audience’s interest is that one to which real people – judge and jury alike – can relate.

But you also taught me how reality is changing – how the traditional forums for recreating the truth are giving way to more collaborative, connected environments. I learned something about how to transfer the skills of advocacy from the old forums to this new realm of the Internet. In our final group projects – the type of collective effort that we knew this medium would demand – we tried our hand at persuasion in the new Internet reality. We saw both its powers and its dangers, as truth becomes the accumulated contributions of those who wish to voice their views.

Finally, and most importantly, you showed me the importance of these lessons – maintaining interest, credibility, and reality -- to my development not only as a lawyer, but as a person. You made it clear that just as an advocate must remain interesting and credible in the eyes of his audience, a person must maintain interest and credibility in himself and his work. He must always be engaged in what he is doing, or he simply won’t do it well. And for the same reason, a person must believe in the message his life is conveying. Maintaining reality in this realm is even more important; I should always ask, you suggested, why I really desire some prize, and why I really work toward some destination. Is it for family? For ego? For love? For vanity?

These questions, I have come to realize, should be asked more frequently in law school than elsewhere. The path of the law is a raging river, all too often carrying those who brave its waters to roles in large law firms that they never planned to fill. Paddling against the current by constantly questioning the reality of one’s motives is the only way to find those streams and tributaries that promise interest and credibility. You taught me that these questions were the right ones to ask, in life as in the law. I concluded that I have unwittingly made mistakes only where I failed to keep asking them.