Leadership is a key component of other professional schools, particularly business and policy programs. But it’s less emphasized in law schools. Should it be taught in law schools, and what are the most important elements for them to learn? Another critical question is whether leadership training will make a real difference for lawyers as they move into the profession.
In this episode, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is joined by three expert leaders to talk about what’s happening and what law schools can do to make an impact in this area:
- Christopher Edley, who spent 23 years at Harvard Law School before leading Berkeley Law as dean from 2004 to 2013. He recently finished a term as interim dean of the UC Berkeley School of Education and has a public policy portfolio, including government service, stretching over four decades.
- Janet Napolitano, who served as president of the University of California from 2013 to 2020, as the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, and as governor and attorney general of Arizona. She’s now a professor of public policy at Berkeley and director of the new Center for Security in Politics.
- Donald Polden, dean emeritus and a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he was dean from 2003 to 2013 and helped develop its curriculum for leadership education.
Want to know more about the leadership courses offered by Berkeley Law’s Executive Education Program, including Leadership in the Legal Profession, a groundbreaking 10-week leadership course? Click here to see a course description and find out when applications for the spring 2024 cohort will be accepted.
Have a question about the law, or a topic you’d like us to cover? Send an email to morejust@berkeley.edu to tell us your thoughts.
Episode Transcript
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Hello, listeners. I’m Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law. And this is More Just, a podcast on how law schools can help solve society’s most difficult problems. Leadership is a key component of other professional schools education, particularly business schools and public policy programs. But it’s less emphasized in law schools.
Is this something we should be teaching law students? If so, what are the most important elements for them to learn? Also, will leadership training actually make a difference for lawyers as they move into the profession?
At Berkeley Law, we’re proud that we offer leadership programs for alumni and for practicing lawyers. In this episode, I’m joined by three experts to talk about this. I cannot think of three better people to talk about training leaders in law school.
Chris Edley spent 23 years as professor at Harvard Law School before leaving Berkeley Law as its dean from 2004 to 2013. He’s just completed two years as the interim dean of the Berkeley School of Education. He has a public policy portfolio, including government service stretching over four decades.
Janet Napolitano served as president of the University of California from 2013 to 2020. Before that, she was the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama. Before that, she was governor and attorney general of the State of Arizona. She’s now a professor of Public Policy at Berkeley in the Goldman School and director of the Center for Security in Politics.
Donald Polden is Dean Emeritus and a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. He was dean there from 2003 to 2013. He played a key role in developing its curriculum for leadership education.
Welcome to the three of you. My enormous thanks to you for doing this. Let me start with, I think, is the most basic question. Should law schools be teaching leadership in some separate subject or program? Don, if I could begin with you.
DONALD POLDEN: Absolutely. And thank you for letting me participate in this. This has been a part of a long history that I’ve had in teaching. I’ve been teaching leadership development courses now at law school level for 20 years. And I can say without reservation that yes, law schools should be doing more. And they have been doing more.
And so the ALS for example, about six years ago created a new section on leadership. It’s about training development, leadership development in law schools. And so that is a very positive sign that these institutions believe that leadership should be taught. My students and I have regularly have classes, 30 to 50 students. They all say the same thing. I want to take this course because I know that developing leadership skills will be important to my success as a lawyer.
Secondly, I have a history high school, college, work, or what have you of rudimentary or basic leadership situations. And I want to develop those skills. I want to be better at it because I think that will help me and my work as a lawyer.
And third, I’ve just noticed a tremendous increase in research and scholarship on leadership development by lawyers for lawyers by law firms. And so I think more is better in this case. So I look forward to seeing this develop even stronger, more pronounced in legal academics as well as in the profession.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Janet, Chris, you’ve each spent your careers in leadership roles. You’re exemplary in that regard. Would it have mattered for you to have courses in law school with regard to leadership? From your perspective, would leadership training in law school make a difference? Janet?
JANET NAPOLITANO: You know, I think a leadership course in law school would have been useful. I think the question for me is, in a leadership course for lawyers, for upcoming lawyers, what exactly is going to be taught? Is it a theory of leadership? Is it tactics of leadership? What is the outcome expected of such a course? And what expectations does it create amongst the students for themselves and for the profession?
I’ve been in so many roles in so many organizations. And when I look around as to who’s the chair or who’s the president or who is the leader of the group, more often than not, it tends to be lawyers. To the extent that law schools can improve the quality and kind of leadership they provide, I think that helps us all.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Chris?
CHRIS EDLEY: It’s interesting. I certainly would defer to Don about the content. He is really a scholar of the field of leadership, particularly in the legal context. And I confess that I have to fall back on autobiography when thinking about the problem. But I think I come down on the side of yes or perhaps yes but.
I can think immediately of three particular domains in which I think some exposure during law school would have been helpful to me understanding that I never anticipated actually being a practitioner of law in the usually understood retail sense of practicing law. I knew I wanted a career that had a lot to do with public policy and politics.
That said, from my very first job after graduate school, which was working on domestic policy issues in the Carter White House, it became clear to me within days that certain habits of mind that I had been prepared with from law school were extraordinarily useful to me in the various roles that I played at the White House. And I’d say just about uniquely useful in the sense that I felt as though I had some skills because of my legal training that others around the table didn’t have or certainly had less rigorously.
I mean, for example, we’re taught from probably day two if not day one of law school the importance of seeing multiple sides of an issue. Taught that it’s important to try to understand the best argument being made by your opponents or by others in the room. Being taught to try to understand the weakest parts of your own argument. All of those turn out to be extremely useful leadership tools, especially if you’re leading in a field in which you yourself don’t have extraordinary expertise.
So I think there are a number of skills about being that we learn in being lawyers. And teaching law students who aspire to leadership positions just what it is about being a lawyer that makes them plausible as leaders, that can make them successful as leaders, I think would be valuable rather than my having to discover it myself as I held various jobs.
Let me just add one more while I’m at it. I always think that really good lawyers have some intellectual humility. They know that they have to look for what they don’t know. And they are prepared in both an ethical sense as well as a substantive sense to accept that the other side has some validity to their point of view, to their perspective.
The way we think about truth finding is important. And frankly, is superior to what many other professionals might bring to a meeting. Economists always think that they have the answer, for example. Lawyers tend to realize that while they may be an advocate, they know that there are other positions that have to go into the balance.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Let me ask a quick follow-up. Why do you think law schools haven’t then done this? You were a dean here for a long time and tremendously successful in that role. You’ve been a law professor for decades. Why is it that law schools don’t whereas business schools and public policy schools have had leadership training programs for a long time?
CHRIS EDLEY: I think there are two principal reasons. One is that I think the legal profession, let’s say the institutions of the profession, bar associations, and the like, as well as law schools have a very narrow view, an overly narrow view of the roles that law graduates will play or could play in society. Whether it’s a law student’s view taken from television shows about advocates or whether it’s the fact that law professors only experience with being a legal professional tends to be clerking and maybe a few years of practice.
They haven’t been in politics. They haven’t been in policy making roles. Then by and large, it’s rare that you find somebody who’s worked as a staffer on Capitol Hill or worked in a political campaign or tried to mediate a dispute between scientists. So I think it’s an overly narrow understanding of what the profession actually does in the real world. And we need to broaden out our curriculum and recognize not only the multiple roles, but now I think the much richer set of aspirations that law students hold compared with when I was a law student.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Don, I want to come back to you. For me, Janet asks exactly the right question. What do we mean by teaching leadership? What’s the content of a good program or lessons with regard to leadership?
DONALD POLDEN: Well, I think it’s about a set of behaviors, skills, attitudes that can be taught. And therefore, they can be learned. And they prepare one for the responsibilities, the techniques, and the attributes of effective leadership. And so for example, I use a lot of the empirical work that’s been done in management and leadership areas to look at what some of the fundamental skills and attributes of effective leaders are. And then translate this in the terms of lawyers.
And so applying the same approach that Chris has just indicated, we talk about role models who are lawyers who have been effective as leaders in politics, government, law firm administration, et cetera. And so that’s an effective way of explaining how these empirically based skills could apply to the students.
There’s a rich– so I taught a course at The Judge Advocate General’s School in Charlottesville to 100 military lawyers. And they had a course that they had to take in leadership skills. And so I thought I don’t know if I should be teaching this or taking the course.
But I did have a chance to see the US Army’s leadership manual. It’s a 250 page, very detailed description of why leadership is important in military settings, how it’s demonstrated, how it should not be demonstrated. And I thought these folks whose lives depend on effective leadership, they have really drilled into a level of depth and understanding on the essential attributes of these skills, attitudes, and behaviors. So I developed some of those.
I’ve been using the leadership challenge approach, an effective five practices for leadership development. Encourage the students, learn what these are, and then put them into practice, and thinking about your own leadership experiences in the past, the ones that you’re having. And I’ve also used it in some consulting work I’ve done with law firms and getting associates and new partners into thinking about how they can become more effective in their relationship with clients, others in the firm, and even to some degree in their transactions in litigation.
It’s a people business. Leadership is a people business. Law is a people business.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Janet, when I asked you earlier, you said you thought you would have benefited when you were a law student from having more leadership training. What did you have in mind? What would you most want to see law schools do?
JANET NAPOLITANO: I think I would have benefited from being put into some actual scenarios where decisions needed to be made and executed oftentimes or usually without all the time in the world to reach the so-called perfect solution, but a solution. And then to move forward. We do this in Security Studies where we give students a crisis to resolve. And then as they go through the day or two of the scenario, we keep changing the facts on them as they go through them, which often occurs as you know. I think some early lessons in how to manage that and how to deal with it and how to lead a team through that would have been very useful.
Now that requires to be successful the right kind of faculty. It’s something that Chris alluded to, which is to say it’d be most helpful to have faculty who themselves have occupied various types of leadership positions and can share and inform the students with their experiences. Because I think experience does matter here. And finally, I think in addition to that, some grounding in leadership theory. What do we believe makes a good leader? How do you learn leadership?
I think we all know people who have natural charisma. We call them a natural born leader or what have you. Most people don’t fall in that category. But they can be educated to be very effective leaders. What theory goes into that? And what therefore should be included in any kind of course?
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: If I could persuade you to come teach a leadership course at the law school. What would you put into the course?
JANET NAPOLITANO: I’d start with asking the students themselves to define what they view as a good leader and who in either current day life or in historical life they would put up as a model. And then kind of drill down into that. Well, why? What did he or she do? How did you come to know about that person? And what information do you really have?
And then I might, all humility aside, give the students a few examples from my own experiences where my leadership was questioned and where I thought I actually ended up making good decisions and where I thought I went awry. And then how I kind of dug myself out of that hole.
And then I would do some like I suggested some really intensive scenario work where students are divided into small teams and have to work through a problem set. And with each set, the students would be given different types of roles and to see what they come up with. So those are just– I’m spitballing. But those are a few ideas.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Terrific. And Chris, if I could ask you the same question?
CHRIS EDLEY: Well, first, I’d take Janet’s course. Well, let me make a counter proposal to you. I mean, I think an ideal course from my perspective would be something called public purpose leadership. And it would combine law, public policy, education, at least perhaps public health, students and guests from all of those domains. But perhaps having breakout sessions that were more substantively focused in particular areas. Because I think there are some common themes that exist or should be developed.
I also think that our students may not know in what area, in what domain they hope to be leaders. So opening up their mind to possibilities and contexts could be useful. I mean, let me just give you one example. I have a hypothesis that in most fields, most professional fields certainly, you spend graduate school focused on what’s the right answer. But I think starting day one in law schools, you start learning how to do research, so you can find out the right answer. And that’s kind of different.
I think that when I– I mean, my favorite hobby, for example is being on or chairing study panels for the National Academy of Sciences. And it’s my favorite hobby because I always know less than everybody else in the room. And I can learn a lot. And the reason they keep tapping me for roles like that is because I know I don’t know anything. And I know that my principal obligation there is to try to find out where a consensus might lie by eliciting from people more expert than I am their view about what the right answer is rather than trying to lead by being the most certain of anybody else around the table.
That to me is something that I learned in law school. I think it’s something that has been useful to me in many, many contexts that have nothing whatsoever to do with people in black robes. And it’s the sort of thing that I think applies in multiple domains.
So in brief, I’d say while I often say that lawyers should lead everything because we have certain useful habits of mind, I’ll back up and say at least that lawyers know things that could be helpful to lots of people and know ways of thinking, ways of proceeding, have elaborate instincts about what is fair, about what processes are effective that can be useful to leaders in many contexts. And teaching a course that allows us to develop that more explicitly and make the students feel more confident in the capacities they have.
I used to teach a case study about auto safety. And it was an old case study. And one of the characters was Lloyd Cutler during the ’60s, an eminent Washington lawyer in the traditional sense. And one of the things that he’s quoted as saying in the case study is, a reason why lawyers often have power when it comes to negotiations is because it’s usually a lawyer who’s the first to pull out a sharp pencil.
Now, of course, that was back in the days when people knew what a pencil was. But his point was that there’s a certain kind of leadership that wants to reduce a discussion, an answer to words, and then argue about the words, and whether they capture the right meaning. That’s not something that sociologists do. It’s usually not something that MBAs do. But it is a quintessential lawyerly skill that I think leaders can mobilize.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: This was such a wonderful discussion. I want to try to make it even more specific. If I think about some of the skills that make someone an effective leader, I would point to having a vision and being able to articulate it, because you can’t lead people unless you have someplace you want to take them. I would say there’s an interpersonal dimension.
One of the things I try to explain to students is they can play a leadership role without having a formal title. It’s how they persuade others to be going along with them. And of course, there’s the interpersonal that if you’re in a designated leadership role, there’s still persuading people to come along with you and sometimes the managerial role. And I would say that there’s a decision making aspect to being a leader. That there are times when you have to make decisions about what to do.
First, do you agree with me that the vision, the interpersonal, the decision making are key components of being an effective leader? And then my question to each of you is, if you agree, how do you teach those things?
DONALD POLDEN: That for me when I started teaching leadership courses for law students was a big question. I knew the course couldn’t effectively work by lecture or format. Here’s what Gandhi said about this sort of thing. It really had to require them to embrace situations in which they could understand about how they could make a difference through the demonstration of certain leadership attributes and skills.
A moment ago, I was listening to Janet. And I realized that she has stolen the secret sauce of Don’s leadership class when she described how she would put a class. And one of the first things is just ask the students to describe an exemplary leadership experience that they had, use an examples from other people, and then developing scenarios are critically important.
And then you can build those around those situations and leadership skill requirement like exercising good judgment. Hard to teach without using scenarios or examples of good judgment, bad judgment making, teamwork, team building. Those are all critical leadership skills and settings for lawyers.
But they’re also ones that these students have had experience with. And they want to be prepared for the big leagues. When they get out of law school, they want to be able to effectively manage a team if called upon in their law firm setting to do so. So, Erwin, back to your question here. I think that the list you started on there are exactly the kind of leadership skills that law students need to work on and develop some self-confidence in their ability to do those things when they’re called upon to do them.
CHRIS EDLEY: If I could teach anything, I wish I knew how to teach good judgment. And I have no idea how to do that.
DONALD POLDEN: Well, you know the old saw that’s attributable to– and I forget his name now. He was a key advisor to John F Kennedy. And it was about judgment is all about making mistakes and then learning from them. That’s kind of a dismal look at judgment. But I think that like leadership, it can be revealed and opportunities presented through looking at scenarios.
How would you for example work? So we’ve developed a number of case studies, factual scenarios that we put our students through, have them work on them, discuss them. And then perhaps through this discussion, this reveal as the magicians would say, they can come to some greater understanding about why it’s important. How they have some insights now.
But it’s hard, especially for law students because we know from general counsel and others, they’d love to hire direct out of law school students. But they’ve told me they just don’t have the judgment. They don’t have the experience. So how can we do that in a classroom setting? This is a start.
JANET NAPOLITANO: Erwin, I want to circle back to your comment about what makes a leader. Your first statement was to have a vision, right? And then the ability to persuade people to go along with your vision, to work with you on accomplishing your vision. That’s where I distinguish between being a leader and being a manager.
A manager makes the trains run on time, get the paperwork in. If you’re a litigator, gets the filings in in a timely fashion, et cetera. But a leader is someone who is able to maybe even take a step back and create a broader sense of what is to be accomplished. And that’s particularly important in the public policy realm where there will be a dozen different approaches to any sort of issue. Yet somebody has to set the tone, set the vision to use that word again, and then be able to bring along the team and the public where that’s concerned.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: I agree with you, though, the only thing I’d question is, can you be a good leader without also being a good manager?
JANET NAPOLITANO: No. You got to have those management skills. You have to have the ability to delegate.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Yes. Can you teach that to people? I mean, each of the four of us has had experience where we’ve had to learn how to delegate and when to delegate and when not to. Is that too something that can be taught?
CHRIS EDLEY: I’d say a qualified yes. I mean, some people do it more naturally than others. But it’s also– I think the way to get the best out of people is often to, forgive the word, empower them to do some decision making, exercise their own judgment, et cetera, and lead them. So I think you can– I think the same thing with judgment. I think it’s quasi teachable in the sense that I can certainly identify some things, some habits that will make it less likely that a decision will reflect sound judgment if you approach things with a fixed ideology and don’t search for evidence, don’t search for legitimacy, whether it’s a political legitimacy or participatory legitimacy of some sort.
I mean, there are ways in which you– you can’t paint a good picture if you don’t use all of the colors on a palette. And I don’t think you can exercise good judgment unless you’ve been open to a whole range of plausible inputs. I mean, you have to be parsimonious at some point that you can’t learn everything, can’t know everything. But I think judgment is possible. And in many ways, you could say judgment is what’s required because we can’t know everything. Decision making under uncertainty.
One other thing I’d mention is that it’s like being a nice person or a good person, you can’t teach somebody how to be a good person. But you can teach them the Golden Rule. And people will vary in their ability or willingness to adhere to the Golden Rule. But in that sense, I’d say it’s quasi teachable. No guarantees. But we can improve.
And then there’s something called the common law. When my public policy friends started talking about continuous improvement as an important element of policy design, I immediately thought of, oh, like common law. We may not get the rule right the first time in the 15th century. But we keep at it and try to have continuous improvement and adapt to new developments and new understanding. And that’s something that’s teachable and ultimately a component of good judgment.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: I think you put your finger on something very important. Too many law students come to and go through law school thinking they need to be mean and nasty and horrible to opponents in order to succeed. And one of the things that I think we have to show them that that backfires. I say to students at orientation that I heard a judge and the chief judge of the Tenth Circuit asking the audience, what’s the most important part of a lawyer’s brief?
And there are guesses about things like the facts, the issue. And he said, no, the most important thing for me is the name on the cover of the brief, if I know I can trust the lawyer. It’s a very different thing. And certainly, all of us tell stories of lawyers because of poor reputations really getting slammed. And those who had good reputations getting the benefit of the doubt.
Well, let me ask as a follow-up to this. My hope is that deans and law professors are listening to this podcast. And they’re going to say, yes, we need to create more leadership courses at our law school. But if we don’t have that effect, but there are law professors listening individually, are there things that can be done within the existing curriculum, within the existing courses to better train with regard to leadership? Don, I’ll start with you.
DONALD POLDEN: I think the answer to that is yes. There is a lot and to some degree, we do it too as a group professors to various degrees of success. So for example, to be an effective manager of others, you have to effectively manage yourself. And so one of the most important things I think that occurs throughout legal education is developing in students a sense of their own scope of their talents and abilities.
We encourage time management. So if you want to manage yourself, your time, commitment to time, which of course, will be very important to those that go into law firm practices where time is perhaps the most valuable commodity, encouraging them to develop their skills in that way. Encouraging in class discussion of behaviors, what behavioral experts call emotional intelligence.
Lawyers always blanch. They break out in rashes and that sort of thing if you say emotional intelligence because they think it’s kind of mushy. And yet there is probably no more important set of insights and competencies that people can have other than to strengthen their own emotional intelligence– self-management, management of others. So that’s another set of opportunities for teachers to strengthen those behaviors that will assist their students when they graduate. So that’s been our mantra now for a number of years.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Janet?
JANET NAPOLITANO: Yeah. I think leadership can be raised and explicitly so in many different types of law school classes. What came to mind immediately was constitutional law and you’re studying Brown versus Board of Education. And then you learned a little bit about how the then Chief Justice Warren managed to get unanimity amongst the court, which did not start off unified in any stretch. That was leadership.
And then you can compare and contrast. They then took a duck and said, well integrate it with all deliberate speed without defining those critical terms. And the effect of Brown wasn’t felt as immediately as it could have been. You can discuss that too. So that’s just one kind of an example of where really thinking about how leadership played a role and what it is the students are studying and can be incorporated into a course.
CHRIS EDLEY: A great example.
DONALD POLDEN: That’s a great example.
CHRIS EDLEY: I think that– I mean, I sort of have it easy in that regard because my bread and butter courses has been administrative law. So that’s a circumstance that– I mean, that’s a course in which you move from case to case. And you’re going from social security to energy regulation to workmen’s compensation to wage and hour regulation and on and on. And it gives you such a wide view of what the public sector is about and how it goes about, how the public sector goes about doing things, enforcing things, regulating things, et cetera.
That breadth allows you to be creative, allows you to be creative when you are advising or when you are trying to make public policy design institutions. You have so many examples in your mind that you can enrich a discussion by thinking horizontally in a way that I think is very helpful in leadership. But it’s not just in the public context.
I mean, Don, you do business law. And if you take something just like a corporation’s choice between equity and debt with its financing something, I mean, the more you know about the ins and outs of that choice, the better you’re in a position to advise a corporate client about how to go about building its future. And that intellectual flexibility, that hefty quiver allows you to exert not just influence but even leadership in shaping the way those important decisions get made for that kind of organization.
So I think that whenever we’re teaching something that is equipping our students with a creative appreciation for substantive complexity, we are arming them for leadership roles in that domain. And we can be more explicit about the fact that we’re doing that. I certainly do that in administrative law. You could design it this way or you could design it that way. Compare this agency with that agency. Which works better, why, what would you recommend.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: We’re just about out of time. I have one final question for each of you. Some of the listeners of this podcast are law students. Now, the takeaway from this is if you’re at a law school that offers a course on leadership training, take the course.
But beyond that, is there any advice that you’d give to law students who are listening who want to learn more about leadership, may not have a course to take? What should they most do? What’s the advice you’d give them? If you could each offer just brief thoughts on that before we finish. Again, I’ll start with Don, and then Janet, and then Chris.
DONALD POLDEN: Well, I think, to reflect on your own leadership experiences and think about why they’re important to you and how they’ve led you to want to become a better leader, how to develop those skills in a more refined, robust way going forward. Secondly, go to any airport bookstore. And there’s like 30 or 40 dozen books on– [INAUDIBLE] used to joke about leadership for Attila the Hun was her famous punch line on leadership books in there.
But there are some that are used commonly in leadership programs. Enrich your understanding by looking at some of the research, and what smart people are writing about leadership roles and responsibilities. And third, find occasions to step up in it, step up into it. Take a role in law student program.
A few years ago, I taught a course that was for law school leaders. And I designed it to strengthen their leadership skills using their own experiences in law school, managing people, leading programs, student groups. As they told me, this is a lot more important than just the pizza that you use to get people to show up at these things.
So those are some ways to get started on this, if you’re a student and you want more. And of course, you can always storm the dean’s office and demand [INAUDIBLE] Chris stormed the dean’s office and demand that you put a course on leadership in the curriculum.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Janet, what do you think? Your advice to students?
JANET NAPOLITANO: Yeah. Mine builds off of Don’s last one, which is, my advice is in a way is to raise your hand. And I don’t mean just in a classroom setting. I mean, raise your hand to help run a legal clinic, help captain a moot court team, help edit a journal, law review, or environmental law or what have you. Because nothing informs leadership in a way than exercising it and getting that muscle memory in place. And I think there are opportunities in law school for law students, even if they don’t have a leadership class to begin that practice.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And finally, Chris?
CHRIS EDLEY: I have to say, I’ve only taught at pretty elite institutions and have never felt a dearth of aspiring leaders among the students. What I think has been more challenging, is more frequently challenging is finding what it is you want to accomplish, what it is you want to contribute. If you can decide that or at least narrow that to a short list, it will help you identify what attributes of leadership are most important for you to master, what attributes of leadership will help you get to where you want to get with your life. Because at the end of the day, we want our graduates to have passionate careers and rewarding lives. Leadership is at the end of the day, a tool, I think even more than it is a way of being.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Chris Edley, Janet Napolitano, Don Polden, thank you so much for this terrific and important discussion. Listeners, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of More Just. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a topic you’d like us to cover, please send an email to morejust all one word M-O-R-E-J-U-S-T at berkeley.edu. Until next time. I’m Berkeley Law Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky.
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