On May 16, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin (MD-08) delivered the commencement address at American University's Washington College of Law. These are his remarks as delivered:
Washington College of Law
Commencement Address
May 16, 2026
Good morning, Class of 2026! I’m very honored to be invited to spend the next hour and 45 minutes with you providing my analysis of the rise and fall of substantive due process jurisprudence between Griswold v. Connecticut and the Dobbs decision. Take out your notepads.
Graduates, Moms and Dads, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, husbands and wives, friends and cousins. Nico Menacho-Foronda, that was quite a speech man, that was really quite a speech. President Jonathan Alger, Provost Vicky Wilkins, Dean Heather Hughes, your very cool Board President Charlie Lydecker Members of the Board of Trustees, Trustee Mehdi Heravi, Members of the President’s Council, faculty, staff, graduates, and families, and above all, residents of Maryland’s beautiful 8th Congressional District. Professor Stephen Wermiel, Professor Brenda Smith, Adeen Postar. And fellow Emeritus professors, “emeritus” being Latin for “you no longer have an office, but you can keep your email address.”
I know a great story about Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famously absent-minded professor and Supreme Court Justice who was taking the train north from Union Station. When the Conductor came down the aisle collecting tickets, Justice Holmes could not find his ticket anywhere—he’s checking his pockets, his suit coat, his overcoat. But the conductor recognized him and said: “No problem, Justice Holmes. You ride all the time, and we know you have a ticket.” He walked on but Holmes kept searching, under the seat, overhead, on the floor. The Conductor returned and said: “Justice Holmes, honestly, we know you have a ticket and you need not worry another minute about finding it.”
And Holmes said to him: “Good Sir, you seem to think the problem is where is my ticket? The problem is where am I going?”
So where are you going today? It’s the question of the hour. But before we get there, permit me to say something personal about WCL because I was a ConLaw professor here for 25 years when our kids were small and my career was just starting out. With the sainted Tom Sargentich, I co-founded the Program on Law and Government. With Steve Wermiel, a luminous teacher, constitutional patriot, and WCL graduate himself, I co-founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project. I was adviser to the American Constitution Society and to the Federalist Society. I had remarkable students, not to mention great Dean’s Fellows, moot court advisees, and, most importantly, very reliable babysitters. All of these fine WCL grads today are judges, public defenders, prosecutors, managing partners of law firms, lawyers who make me proud, business people, and an impressive array of elected officials including a Boston City Councilwoman, a Nebraska State Senator, a Member of Congress I serve with from the Virgin Islands, the Majority Leader of the Maryland State House, a D.C. City Councilman and the Shadow Senator from the disenfranchised Capital City. I served with extraordinary Colleagues under remarkable Deans. I wrote books and law review articles. In fact, I was even the Academic Dean myself for awhile, although I confess I never figured out what I was supposed to do be doing in that job.
But I left the safety of our dazzling new campus in January 2017 to go to Congress, the same day Donald Trump was elected President. And since leaving the warm, supportive, and intellectually vibrant environment of WCL, I have lived through the following public events:
- A mass violent insurrection and attempted political coup at the Capitol;
- three total government shutdowns and two partial ones;
- a global pandemic;
- an unconstitutional war and several failed War Powers Act Resolutions;
- a Judiciary Committee hearing with the Attorney General of the United States who called me “a washed-up loser lawyer” and “not even a lawyer;”
- and a presidential assassination attempt several weeks ago just down the road a bit in April, during which I got thrown to the ground by a Secret Service Agent;
So my main message is, hell no, do not graduate. Stay right here at beautiful and safe WCL. Get an LLM or an SJD. Stay as long as you can! In fact, do you guys know whether they’ve found someone to take Steve Wermiel’s classes in the Fall yet? because I’ve brought my resume with me today.
But, alas, for both you and me, and fortunately for your parents, time rolls on, it stops for no one. You can’t stay on campus in the glory of youth forever. Academia has its place in our lives, and it dwells close in many hearts, especially the further away you get from it. But I assure you that there are other ways to keep learning and perhaps even better ways to contribute, to make your life count.
Now, distinguished graduates of 2026, maybe some of you believe we inhabit a Golden Age of peace, prosperity and fairness for all. And if you do, well, all I can say is more power to you.
But for the rest of you, I don’t need to tell you that we’re in the fight of our lives today to save constitutional democracy and the rule of law and freedom, which are in danger not just in America but all over the world. The dangers of authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism and fascism loom large, but other perils are on the near horizon too, including climate change—which is the overhanging crisis of civilization, and Artificial Intelligence, which can be part of our salvation and progress or an instrument of our disempowerment, dehumanization and even extinction, depending on how we manage it.
So I want to tell you—in the few minutes left before you graduate—that the most important thing you need to know to be prepared to join this fight is something you have not yet been taught in law school.
You’ve learned the body and content of essential legal subject matters. You know criminal law and civil procedure. You have had the chance to become expert in the Socratic Method and the Platonic Relationship.
But here’s the thing—nobody can ever really teach you or impress upon you: Nothing in the profession you are about to embark upon is self-executing. That is, the law of war is not like the law of gravity. It doesn’t work on its own. If someone commits war crimes, they just commit war crimes. If someone commits human rights violations, they just commit human rights violations. God does not strike them down. An indictment does not appear suddenly under their pillow like a dollar from the tooth fairy.
Every part of the Constitution just sits there on paper waiting for a citizen, a lawyer, to come along and make it real. The Freedom of Speech, the Establishment Clauses, Due Process, Equal Protection, the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, the 15th Amendment, the 25th Amendment. The laws of the country—anti-trust, civil rights, voting rights, the laws against rape and sexual harassment—they all mean nothing unless and until citizens and lawyers decide to use them to fight for justice—in court, in the legislatures, in the streets. As my friend Dar Williams sings, “it’s a long road from law to justice.”
And that is where you come in—your values, your dreams, your convictions. The law in 2026 will only be as strong as your understanding of it, your physical and mental energy to engage with it and, above all, your moral and existential courage to fight for it.
Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialists were right about this: the choice is yours.
I know a funny story about this that I learned from my Dad. The young Bobby Kennedy—a different Bobby Kennedy than the 21st Century version—was an attorney with the Senate Committee on Racketeering and he was questioning the mobbed-up union boss Jimmy Hoffa. He said, “Mr. Hoffa, as President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Secretary-Treasurer of the Teamsters Mid-Atlantic Pension Fund, a man of your great power and resources is capable of doing both very great good and very great evil.” And Hoffa leaned into his microphone and said: “I intend to live up to both of my responsibilities.”
Now, I know Professor Wermiel has taught a seminar on what has happened to constitutional law in the Trump era. Someone else should teach a professional responsibility seminar on how lawyers have responded to the ethical dilemmas and political traps of practicing law in these mad times.
Some attorneys in Trump’s employ have acted like in-house mob lawyers who work not to stop their client from committing crimes and transgressions against the Constitution, but to facilitate and encourage them.
There was a coterie of lawyers who helped Trump try to steal the 2020 election, which Joe Biden one by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the Electoral College. Sidney Powell pled guilty in 2023 to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to interfere with elections.
A law school classmate of mine, whom I served on the Law Review with and who was a research assistant to Professor Laurence Tribe, pled guilty to a felony count of conspiracy to commit the filing of false documents in the fraudulent elector scheme. Jenna Ellis pled guilty in 2023 to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and perjury. Stewart Rhodes, Yale Law School graduate and founder of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison before Trump commuted his sentence. And he now wants a piece of the $1.7 billion pie at the new slush fund at the Department of Justice.
Rudy Guiliani was disbarred in New York and Washington in 2024 because he made knowingly false statements in multiple frivolous court challenges to the 2020 election. As he admitted outside of court, “we have a lot of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.” Law Professor and former Law Dean John Eastman was permanently disbarred in California for his role in the scheme to nullify and overturn the election. Numerous other lawyers have been sanctioned across the country for participating in the counterfeit electors’ scheme and making false statements in court alleging electoral fraud, claims that were rejected in 60 federal and state court decisions.
Look, politicians can, alas, lie freely in politics, but the Supreme Court has found that lawyers are officers of the Court and cannot knowingly lie to the bench. Indeed, nobody can perjure himself or herself in court. The law is not agnostic about the existence of the truth, which is why witnesses swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” And this is why we have evidentiary standards in court that revolve around proof beyond a reasonable doubt or clear and convincing evidence: we assume that the truth is actually true, as Daniel Berrigan once said of Dorothy Day and her approach to life. Our entire system of law and justice depends on the actual existence of that most beleaguered and endangered species, which we call facts.
In the current presidential term, the lawyers thrust most dangerously into the maelstrom have not been the couple dozen who chose to go to work for the President but the thousands he has targeted for their politics, their clients or their workplace.
Right after taking office, Trump unleashed unprecedented financial shakedowns of law firms he felt had wronged him, either because one of their lawyers had investigated him, like former Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Jack Smith, or because they simply represented people that he didn’t like. Or because they did their jobs and helped prosecute 1,600 rioters and insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol. Trump issued unheard-of Executive Orders targeting thousands of lawyers who had done nothing wrong for government sanctions. He ordered them to be barred from federal contracts, federal employment, federal security clearances and federal buildings, including courthouses, which makes it difficult to practice law. It was like a really absurd constitutional law issue-spotter.
Now, here’s the remarkable thing. When I heard about these Executive Orders and shakedowns, I said to myself, “The firms are going to fight back and win. The Executive Orders were imposed on innocent lawyers without any Due Process. They impose mass collective guilt and guilt by association, and blatantly violate both the client’s right to counsel and the lawyers’ own rights to freedom of speech and association. They’ll fight and win. They’ll become heroes.”
Well, here’s the thing. That’s not what happened. A lot of the most prestigious law firms in the country, like Paul Weiss in New York, didn’t fight back at all. They said they could not afford to alienate the President. Their clients might suffer the consequences or they might leave the firm, and the partners could lose a lot of money. Some partners earning tens of millions of dollars per year reportedly complained they might have to take a pay cut of a few million dollars if they fought back. So they caved in and they signed themselves and their Associates up for the staggering assignment of doing free legal work for the President of the United States and his ever-expanding legal docket. So many targeted law firms worked to appease the President’s wrath that he pocketed nearly a million hours of promised pro bono hours, worth nearly a billion dollars, to be used for whatever purpose Trump chose, for his policies like unilaterally imposed tariffs, undeclared wars, illegal deportations, lawless political slush funds, and unauthorized demolitions of federal buildings belonging to the people.
But not all of the law firms buckled under. They followed the inspiring actions of Danielle Sassoon, a conservative Federalist Society Lawyer who had clerked for Justice Scalia and was the Acting U.S. Attorney in New York. She refused to participate in a corrupt order to terminate a criminal indictment handed down unanimously by a Grand Jury for purely political reasons. She and her entire staff decided to fight back, choosing to resign instead of to participate in that illegality from the White House.
A number of the law firms affected by these retaliatory Executive Orders like Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and Wilmer Hale caucused, rallied their lawyers, did real legal analysis and they chose to do what lawyers are trained to do when necessary—they sued. Hundreds of other law firms not directly targeted—thousands of solo practitioners—signed statements in support of the firms who stood up against the threats.
And the law firms that sued won sweeping victories in every case, in every federal district court. Right here in D.C., four different federal judges—John Bates, Richard Leon, Beryl Howell and Loren Alikahn—issued orders blocking the President’s blanket retaliatory punishment of these firms, with Judge Alikahn calling the Executive Order against Susman Godfrey “unconstitutional from beginning to end.”
What can we draw from this remarkable episode?
Well, first of all, it’s hard to predict how any lawyer or any person will react in a moment of moral, political, legal and existential crisis, and the powers of self-rationalization are formidable, especially in lawyers, mind you. One lawyer whose firm complied justified it by saying that it really wasn’t unfair because the Administration was cracking down on all law firms that had defied his will, firms with both Democrats and Republicans working there.
That reminded me of a story about a friend of my Dad’s, named Sidney Morgenbesser, who was a philosopher at Columbia University. And he was subpoenaed for jury duty and in the voir dire process, the judge said, “Professor Morgenbesser, this is a case about police brutality and before we put you on the jury, we want to make sure you haven’t had any experience with the police that was unpleasant or unfair.” And Morgenbesser said: “Well, I did have one experience with the police and it was unpleasant, but it wasn’t unfair.” And the judge said, “Well, what happened?” And he said, “Well, I went to this civil rights rally in Central Park and these two police officers started beating me over the head with billy clubs.” And the judge said, “Well, that’s awful, but why do you say it was unpleasant, but it wasn’t unfair?” And he said: “Well, when they were hitting me over the head, it hurt a lot, so it was unpleasant, but they were doing it to everybody, so it wasn’t unfair.” I guess that you could say, in that sense, that these Executive Orders weren’t unfair.
I have tried to talk both to lawyers who fought back and to the lawyers who succumbed. Many knew each other from practice or law school, and they all wrestled with the same issues when they were trying to deal with this onslaught. And they were all torn about what to do because decision-making under authoritarian circumstances is agonizing and confusing.
But the ones who fought back clearly saw our profession as a calling to improve our common social and political life. They believed that the rule of law must be an instrument of justice for society and not just a form of private business activity, much less a tool of official repression. They saw the choice facing them as a moral and existential crossroads, and not just as a financial and business crisis. They saw the Constitution as foundational to their work.
It seems to me and this is not rooted in any kind of formal study—but hey it’s a Commencement Address—it seems to me that the lawyers who hung tough for their rights were the ones who had not lost touch with the values that drove them to become lawyers in the first place. They remembered the promises they had made to their friends, their families, their classmates, their professors, themselves. They considered themselves part of a profession, yes, but also part of a community. They did not place newly acquired status, money and power above the dream of professional excellence and effective community service. They kept their personalities and their consciences intact. And, in fact, amazingly, at least so far, they have been rewarded with more clients, more job applicants, more public acclaim and more pride in our profession even as some of the fanciest law firms in America have suffered a public disgrace and the dramatic loss of clients and moral standing within the Bar. Sometimes—just sometimes—the brave thing to do is not only the right thing to do but the popular thing to do as well.
I’m not saying that this was an easy decision for anyone or that people’s careers and livelihoods have not been affected by this lawlessness from the top, and I am definitely not judging anyone in this situation. One thing we have learned is that ethical and personal decision-making in a time of authoritarian stress is extremely difficult. I clearly have my sympathies, but in the situations of legal, moral and personal exigency that multiply furiously under tyranny, we are all torn between our longing for personal integrity and the struggle for personal survival and the survival of those we love.
But in that see-saw battle between integrity and survival, just remember when you are out on the battlefield my friends, that we swear an Oath. An Oath to support and defend the Constitution, an Oath that can sometimes tip the balance when we are in a moral and civic emergency and a professional quandary. That’s what the law is for. As lawyers we are not just making decisions for ourselves but, in a very deep sense, we are deciding for everybody else too. So choose wisely.
My son Tommy loved a passage from Wittgenstein, in which the philosopher said that “the truth of an empirical proposition is whether it corresponds to empirical reality, the truth of an analytical proposition is whether it corresponds to the rules of logic, but the truth of a moral or ethical proposition is the courage with which we act to make it real in the world.”
I want to express my hope that you will act with courage in your career to make democratic truths real, to stand on the side of justice rather than on the side of power if they come into conflict when the times have found you. My father used to say: when everything looks hopeless, you are the hope. I see a lot of hope out there today, tremendous talent, boundless promise. I pray you all become instruments of justice in your careers and shower happiness and love on your families and friends every day.
I got a late-night call one night from your Dean of Students and my former student, David Jaffe, last year. Because a WCL alum, Diane Seltzer, was running for President of the D.C. Bar and he asked whether I would meet with her and consider endorsing her. Well, of course, I said, I had heard of her already as a renowned employment lawyer with a law firm in downtown Bethesda in the heart of the Eighth District, and I always lean to the WCL candidates anyway. After I met her, I was incredibly impressed by her commitment to public service and equal rights of everybody. No surprise, I suppose, given her alma mater, which is one of the Top Five law schools in America for students going into public service and to government.
But of course, I had to do my due diligence. Who was she running against? I feared it might be another WCL grad, since WCL has dominated the D.C. Bar since the days of Emma Gillette and Ellen Spencer Mussey. But it turned out that her opponent was one Bradley Bondi, a University of Florida grad and brother of none other than the then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the one covering up the Epstein files, the one who had called me a “washed-up loser lawyer” and “not even a real lawyer.” Brad Bondi was the subject, I learned, of news reports that, since his sister had become the AG in 2025, he had suddenly and miraculously settled several high-profile cases worth tens of millions of dollars on extremely favorable and unusually rapid terms with the Department of Justice.
Say no more. For the very first time, I publicly and enthusiastically endorsed a candidate for Bar President, not that she needed my support anyway. President-elect Seltzer won more than 90% of the vote in an election that had a record-breaking turnout of the Members of the Bar. She will be the President of the D.C. Bar who swears you in when you all pass the Bar in D.C. if that’s the one you’re taking. The moral of that story: Don’t mess with WCL. Don’t mess with David Jaffe.
I hope you all go out in your glorious careers and follow the path of Diane Seltzer and Steve Wermiel, Judge Reggie Walton, Brenda Smith, Adeen Postar, Emma Gillette and Ellen Spencer Mussey, and not Rudy Guiliani and Pam Bondi. But that’s just my personal preference. The choice is yours.
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