Message from the Committee Chair

Academic careers are more like landscapes and less like ladders. They have ins and outs, tos and fros, lights and shadows. Depth, in sum, not just length and height. Notably, they also have time. They may last and, rarely, even endure.

Like landscapes, then, careers may boast the lushness of valleys, the grandeur of summits, the perilousness of canyons, the barrenness of deserts, the serenity of lakes, or the impetuousness of shores. And like these, they may be full of life. Indeed, above all, careers are lives.

A perpetual, named lecture series represents a pinnacle in any academic life. The Siegfried Wiessner Human Flourishing Distinguished Lecture Series is proof that Professor Wiessner’s legacy spills over the pages of journals and books, echoes beyond university halls, and rises in our horizons with the quiet majesty of mountains. Nay, some legacies are not even landscapes: they are sky. Like the prophet Elijah, they take to the clouds, becoming fixed stars.

Just like those heavenly compasses, the abiding legacy this Series celebrates steers our dialogue about the law in the direction of human dignity. Pointing to true north, it shines as bright as lightning, nourishes like rain, and speaks with the voice of thunder. Unyielding, it grows hoarse in our deserts with a timeless cry: human flourishing for all. One as old as the prophet Ezekiel’s, warning us to “justly pursue justice, that [w]e may live.”

But justice not only for “father and mother,” but for the “fatherless,” the “widow,” the “poor,” the “needy,” and the “foreigner.” A command to expand, if not our own circles, at least those of the law. An ideal embodied by Wiessner’s advocacy for making neighbors out of strangers, especially the least among us—asylum seekers, indigenous communities, political minorities. Justice Louis Brandeis once remarked that, “[i]f we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.” Without a doubt, Wiessner’s work has done just that, both nationally and internationally.

We look forward to the many who will lecture in the Series, and whose own legacies of excellence show that they have not only heard but also heeded that cry. One for loving more people more of the time, and making our law bear witness. One for actively helping, rather than merely not hurting, another’s growth. And one for good law over both bad law and law for the sake of law.

Christian Lee Gonzalez-Rivera, J.D., LL.M.
Associate Professor of Law
Chair, Series Committee