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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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Boies was introduced at Commencement by Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, and received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from NYU President John Sexton, who described Boies as “arguably the lawyer of the century.” Indeed, Boies’s case for the legality of same-sex marriage was also arguably the most widely watched of the Supreme Court’s term. And, at the time of the ceremonies, the decision had yet to be rendered.

Boies, a Law School Trustee, remarked on the inevitability of clichés in commencement speeches: “We tend to talk on a day like this in platitudes. Change the world. Don’t be afraid to fail. The problem is that it’s too easy to dismiss platitudes.” But, with a nod to his historic Proposition 8 case, he quickly pointed out how important they nonetheless are: “One of the platitudes of our country is that all people are created equal. One is that every person has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are engaged today in a civil rights struggle to try to end the last official bastion of discrimination in this country.” Mentioning the violence and officially sanctioned discrimination that gays and lesbians have historically faced, Boies said, “We’ve come a long way since then, but we have a long way still to go.”

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 Castro’s Cuba was just like our law. The difference was whether it was enforced by lawyers and by judges.”

Later in the afternoon, University Professor Joseph Weiler, Joseph Straus Professor of Law and European Union Jean Monnet Chaired Professor, praised the gathered LLM and JSD graduates, many of whom are not American, for their decision to combine legal educations from their home countries with US training, for what he called “the finest of legal educations.”

Weiler gave a close reading of a passage from Genesis 18, which he described as “one of the founding moments of the development of the notion of justice in Western civilization.” In the passage, Abraham asks God, who is about to destroy the cities of 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.”

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Just two days before a local swearing-in ceremony to celebrate his resounding win in New York’s recently redrawn Eighth Congressional District, Jeffries delivered the alumni luncheon’s keynote speech to a crowd of more than 300.

In that speech and in his inaugural address, Jeffries addressed the challenges of finding common ground in a multicultural democracy. He observed at the luncheon that although the issues have changed—he rattled off the current problems of the stagnating economy, a difficult immigration policy, and gun violence—the need for compromise, he said, has not.

The congressman reinforced this point by observing how the Republican-Democrat pendulum has swung back and forth every two years in recent elections. With no party achieving consistent primacy, working across ideological divides is more important than ever. “In politics,” Jeffries said, “it’s often been said that there are no permanent friends, there are no permanent enemies. All there should be are permanent interests. I believe that we as members of Congress have a sacred charge to make sure we advance the permanent interests of the people of the United States of America.”

He has been appointed to the Judiciary and Budget committees as well as a bipartisan House Judiciary Committee task force on over-criminalization. During the 113th Congress, Jeffries has stated, he will work on economic growth, reforming the criminal justice system, preventing gun violence, and assisting neighborhoods in his district—which is anchored in Brooklyn and parts of southwest Queens—that were devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

Jeffries, who spent six years in the New York State Assembly before running for Congress, was born in Brooklyn and raised in Crown Heights. He attended New York City public schools and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton, as well as a master’s in public policy from Georgetown and a JD from NYU Law, where he graduated magna cum laude and served on the Law Review.

After law school, Jeffries clerked for Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Before being elected to the assembly, he practiced law for several years at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and served as counsel in the litigation departments of Viacom and CBS.

Jeffries’s prepared remarks at the luncheon were polished, and his response to a question from the alumni audience regarding his position on gun control showed glimmers of a passionate public servant and representative. Jeffries replied that he recently asked for a meeting with the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) after a string of fatal shootings occurred in his district. “In New York City, in Brooklyn, in the district that I represent, I don’t see any gun manufacturers,” he said. “Every single gun that comes into the Eighth Congressional District, it seems to me, is a gun that’s flowing in from the Deep South, up the I-95 corridor, and is being illegally trafficked in. I thought it was relevant to figure out what the ATF is doing, because if the ATF is not in Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, the South Bronx, Harlem, I’m not sure where they are.”

His passion was also evident at his local swearing-in, surrounded by family, friends, neighbors, and some of New York’s political power players. He dared to be funny about bringing his Brooklyn culture to a more buttoned-up Washington, DC. He noted that he represents much of the district served by the legendary seven-term Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Assuring the crowd that he’ll do his best, he said he imagines her voice in his head, saying, “Young man, we sent you down to Washington to stand up, so don’t go down there and act up.” And in a nod to his extraordinarily diverse constituency, he said he was grateful to receive Jewish, Muslim, and Christian prayers—“I am exponentially blessed!” he quipped—adding, “I’m down there with John Boehner and Paul Ryan, I need all the blessings I can get.”

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Kelleher was in New York for the launch of the NYU Leadership Series in Law and Business that evening, where he received the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Medal, the Law School’s highest alumni award. The organizers of the series, the Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business and the Pollack Center for Law & Business, had Kelleher in their sights for the debut interview from the very start. And why wouldn’t they? Kelleher’s incomparable achievements derive, above all, from his insights about leadership, which the evening’s audience would listen to with bated breath. But first, his student lunch companions would have a crack at him.

Kelleher’s accomplishments at Southwest—where he spent 20 years as president and CEO—are well documented. Starting with three airplanes in 1971, the airline was fielding 694 planes performing more than 3,400 flights per day by the end of 2012. The company has never had an unprofitable year, it has never furloughed an employee, and today it carries the most originating domestic passengers of any US airline. Shareholders have profited, too: From 1972 until 2002, Southwest delivered the highest return of any S&P 500 company, at 26 percent per year.

What is less known? That Kelleher spent 25 years as a corporate lawyer before founding Southwest, and that he views that experience as the key to his later success, not just something that came before it. If he hadn’t had a talent for legal tussle, he explained, Southwest would never have left the gate—Kelleher spent 10 years litigating with other carriers before the airline flew a single flight. In one six-year period, he endured 31 administrative and judicial proceedings.

One profound observation Kelleher offered was that the value of a law background resides purely in how a lawyer chooses to use it. Too many lawyers, he said, spend their time telling their clients (or themselves) why they can’t do something. “But that’s the comfortable answer,” he said. “The best lawyers are those that help you to do anything you want to do, by rearranging—within legal, ethical, and moral bounds—any obstacles to the outcome you seek. You can’t let people who are too scared or too negative control your actions.”

The chance to found Southwest, he added, came because of that openness to possibility, which led to his founding a San Antonio law firm to help clients start entrepreneurial
ventures. It was over a drink with one of those very clients that the original plan for Southwest was sketched out on a cocktail napkin. And while he clearly harbors no regrets, he did admit to missing a few opportunities, such as passing on the chance to own 10 percent of two clients’ ventures in exchange for waiving a $75 incorporation fee. One went on to invent roll-on deodorant, and the other, the strip that unwraps cigarette packs. (As a chain-smoker, Kelleher continues to pay for that second mistake daily.)

If there was a common thread between Kelleher’s lunchtime chat and his evening interview with Gerald Rosenfeld, co-director of the Leadership Program, it was that the airline really is about people. While some of Southwest’s success can be attributed to pure business decisions—such as using a point-to-point model versus traditional hub-and-spoke, and operating one model of airplane instead of several—both discussions returned to the idea that the most successful corporate leaders remember what made them successful in the first place. And in Southwest’s case, that was people.

Southwest, Kelleher explained, was founded with the understanding that the best businesses respect the worth of every person who works for them, not just as employees but also as human beings. Southwest succeeded by never losing sight of that premise. “There were those who predicted that our ‘family feeling’ would go away as we grew bigger,” he said, “but that didn’t happen—because taking care of people remained our primary focus.” In 1973, Southwest instituted the industry’s first profit-sharing program. “It was easy to do when we had no profits,” he said with a laugh. But it showed that the company was willing to put its money behind its motto.

In distilling his insights on leadership, Kelleher quoted the great poet Robert Frost: “Isn’t it a shame that when we get up in the morning our minds work furiously—until we come to work.” The secret at Southwest, he insisted, was to make sure that didn’t happen. And how did they do that? With another counterintuitive insight: that work and fun are not mutually exclusive. “Most people don’t want to look like they’re having fun at work for fear of getting fired,” said Kelleher. “But at Southwest, we’ll fire you if you aren’t smiling and having fun.” When the interview was over, Kelleher suggested that everybody join him at the bar for a drink—of Wild Turkey.

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