By Michele Gorman

Law360 (May 29, 2020, 7:12 PM EDT ) With invocations of legal trailblazers past and present and encouragement to find opportunity in trying times, 2020 law school commencement speakers urged graduates to address the long-standing issue of inequality made even more apparent by the coronavirus pandemic.

Among recent virtual speeches to graduating classes across the country, former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, stressed the future lawyers' responsibility to remake the world.

Law school commencement speakers called for graduates to find opportunities from the COVID-19 pandemic to reshape and rebuild the practice of law. (Annie Pancak | Law360)

Meanwhile, Selendy & Gay PLLC co-founder Faith Gay called on students to embrace the darkness, similar to solider Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote angry and compassionate poems about World War I, and author Zora Neale Hurston, who portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South.

Here, five speakers share their advice for law graduates entering a legal industry that in the past months has seen courts close, law firms furlough and lay off staff and states postpone bar examinations.

Joe Biden

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and 47th U.S. vice president

Former Vice President Joe Biden warned the graduates at Columbia Law School that the people "tasked with enforcing the rule of law are abusing their powers ... weakening the very principles that make our country work."

"As we know, power corrupts, and democracy doesn't just happen," Biden said during the virtual commencement on May 20. "We have to earn it. Defend it. Forge consensus. That's a tradition you're part of."

The remarks came as the question of whether and how states should reopen after the height of COVID-19 became increasingly politicized.

Biden, who will likely face off against President Donald Trump in the general election this fall, encouraged the graduating class to protect the foundations of democracy and trust in self-governance.

During his speech, Biden cited advice he said Franklin Roosevelt as governor of New York gave graduates during the Great Depression: They aren't tasked with making their way in the world, but rather with remaking the world in which they will enter.

Biden pushed this year's law graduates to turn trauma, chaos and cruelty into a greater measure of healing, progress and hope for the future.

While nurses, doctors, grocers, warehouse workers and public servants help the country overcome the immediate crisis, Biden said, people will then look toward these future lawyers to remake the world "as it should be."

"You have to be the second wave in the front lines, as advocates, policymakers, community leaders, making sure that their sacrifice was not in vain," he said, adding that the grads can set the terms for health care, education, immigration and justice systems that uplift "more people of every race, gender and generation."

"Recovery is going to be long," he said. "But because of you, we can come out of this even stronger, more empathetic and more united."

Faith Gay

Founding partner at Selendy & Gay PLLC

This dark time caused by the pandemic is a crucible not unlike those experienced by others in history, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, trial lawyer Faith Gay said.

Gay, who has been lead counsel in more than 30 jury trials and co-led Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP's national trial practice before leaving the firm with several other partners to found Selendy & Gay in 2018, described her own recent darkness: her bout with COVID-19.

During her address to the graduates at Northwestern University School of Law, she told the class to embrace and learn from the overall global darkness, and then improve the world.

"I am reminded that times of human tragedy are times of utmost inspiration, creativity, value assortment and opportunity, dare I say it," said Gay, an alum of the university. "Our best genius does not come in sunshine."

Speaking to the graduates on May 15, Gay said the world needs lawyers and advocates perhaps now more than ever to help reshape and rebuild. She encouraged them to reinvent bankruptcy law, find a way to fix tax law to incentivize everyone from top to bottom, attack student debt, expand the right to education, protect access to the polls or enforce religious freedom in a coherent and equitable manner.

She concluded by saying, "What kind of world we have now is yours to decide, not mine, in your acts, in your words, in your rock-solid commitment to each other in the face of this demon pandemic that forces us to see that we must deal and we are connected to each other, whether we want to be or not."

Eric Holder

Former U.S. attorney general

From the basement of his home in Washington, D.C., former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. challenged UCLA School of Law graduates to use the current situation as an opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the world.

"Do not bemoan your fate," he said during the virtual May 15 commencement. "Ask instead how you can improve the lives of those who are suffering through this health and economic emergency. Ask how you can help to address long-standing issues of inequality, injustice and unfairness that this pandemic has helped to make even more apparent."

Instead of looking negatively at the situation, he asked the graduates to view the pandemic as a rare chance to strengthen the structures and rules that govern society and to find the most innovative and effective way to combat injustice.

"Your duty is to make certain that what might be possible does not become what might have been," said Holder, who is now a partner at Covington & Burling LLP.

During his speech, Holder also acknowledged that young attorneys might doubt that they can make a difference. But since the country's earliest days, young, dedicated lawyers — including some of the framers of the U.S. Constitution — have used their knowledge and training to stand up for justice, he said.

"Young people are uniquely qualified to reimagine," Holder said, "and in doing so to reinvigorate the law and the world."

Chief Judge Robert Katzmann

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

If anything is certain, it's uncertainty.

That was the message of the address given by U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann, chief judge of the Second Circuit. Like other commencement speakers this year, he reminded graduates at Fordham University School of Law that they are well-equipped to deal with the unpredictability of the future, to confront and solve problems and to think analytically about the best way forward.

"With uncertainty comes opportunity," he said in his May 18 address. "Life is not a straight line of predictable events."

He urged the students to follow their passions, embrace "the road less traveled," remain open and curious, and find and seek guidance from mentors.

Judge Katzmann, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1999 and assumed his current position in 2013, said the pandemic has reinforced that there are many people whose vulnerabilities are particularly acute, and, as lawyers, the graduates can use their skills to help those in need — from an immigrant to a community member in danger of eviction.

During his own career, Judge Katzmann has witnessed "the inadequate legal representation of non-citizens and its adverse impact on the fair and effective administration of justice," according to his court biography.

"When you help someone in legal need, when you serve the ideals of fairness and justice for all," he told the graduates, "you can make all the difference, a tangible difference for that client, that client's family."

Jeffery Robinson

Deputy legal director and director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality at the ACLU

Citing the opening stanzas in Pink Floyd's "Time," Jeffery Robinson of the American Civil Liberties Union challenged University of California, Irvine School of Law graduates "not to miss the starting gun."

The rock song describes time slipping by without people realizing what's happening until it's too late.

"You already are behaving as if you have heard [the starting gun] go off," Robinson said his virtual speech on May 9. "You have completed your law school education under trying circumstances. The world needs you now as much as ever."

But he warned the future lawyers against anxiously waiting for a "return to normal," because that likely won't happen; the pandemic has revealed inequalities including those in the country's health care and criminal justice systems that will be hard for many to avoid looking away from.

"You are going to be in jobs, in roles that will decide which way this country goes on these critical issues," he said.

Robinson, who for nearly three decades worked at Schroeter Goldmark & Bender LLC, throughout his career has represented clients on charges ranging from shoplifting to first-degree murder and has tried more than 200 criminal cases to verdict, according to his bio.

In closing, Robinson said he looks forward to the graduates joining the legal profession, pushing seasoned lawyers and making a world they feel comfortable leaving to future generations.

"I'm not saying that you can win every challenge that you take on," he said. "But I am saying the challenges that you do take on can be won if somebody takes that first step."

--Editing by Brian Baresch and Alanna Weissman.

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.