To the New Lawyers: You Are the Change Agents We Need

An excerpt of Abigail Dillen’s remarks at the Vermont Law and Graduate School’s 50th commencement ceremony:

You made the right choice, throwing in with the change agents. Because even if you wanted just to be your best selves following your time-honored path, I don’t believe that’s a thing anymore.

I don’t have to tell you that we are hitting all kinds of tipping points for our planet, and the consequences will continue to accelerate over our lifetimes:

• However artificial intelligence develops, however it is governed or not, it will change human work – and therefore society – in profound ways that even its developers cannot begin to predict.
• Our democracy is backsliding, perhaps landsliding. And that’s not only in the U.S., it’s the case in countries around the world.
• And the world order, if that’s really an appropriate phrase, of the last 18 years, is gone. And the next geopolitical arrangements are TBD.

We know we’re not the first people to live in tumultuous times. But in this new weather, I think our species is having a new collective experience. It’s a very human response to downplay this feeling and to just hope that it will go away. And, honestly, I relate to that some days.

But there is another human response: to rise to challenges and protect and nurture what we love.

We see how capacious and practical that love can be: in the everyday facts of hospitals, fire stations, libraries, and schools – and choosing this mission-driven school in doing all the work that your degrees reflect. You have deliberately prepared yourself to work in service, to see and understand the big problems, and to act to solve them. Not just to weather change, but to catalyze it.

Working at Earthjustice these days, I get a lot of grave “how are you’s?” As in, “No, really – how are you?”

I think people want to know some basics: How hard is this administration coming at us? Whether the lawsuits are working or not. How much we – and I mean all of us – are losing. Whether the damage can ever be repaired.

The question is genuinely, “Are you okay?” But it’s also, “Are we okay?”

And I think the subtitle is always, “Are you afraid?”

My new standing answer to this intense “how are you?” is: “I’m not sure.”

The attacks on Earthjustice, and even on our clients, are serious, causing disruption, but they are manageable so far. But, for everyone in this room, the weaponization of the Justice Department, and the cooperation of the majority in Congress, should alarm everyone to the maximum.

The lawsuits are working. The lawyers are filing them (we’re filing them more than ever at Earthjustice). And judges of all political stripes and ideologies are doing their jobs.

But when it matters most, when the stakes are highest, this SCOTUS is reaching down faster than it ever has into the lower courts, and not only accepting, but advancing, the president’s abuse of power.

And sometimes I meet people who say, “Things are shaping up.” No. They’re not. What we stand to lose in this time is incalculable. Already, we are losing time and that means irreparable damage.

But we are winning cases, and we are stopping so many bad things, and that will continue.

So are we OK? No, not yet! Am I afraid? Yes, very.

But I am also activated like I’ve never been before. And my guess is you are too.

We, the collective we, and the we at Earthjustice, are giving new life to doctrines that were taught to me as sideshows. The public trust doctrine. State constitutional rights to a clean and healthy environment. The at-last recognized international human right to a clean and healthy environment. We are bringing the historic opinion of the International Court of Justice to bear in actual judgments abroad.

In so many ways, smart new policies are finding their way into law. I’ll offer Climate Superfunds as a shining example.

This time is creating the imperative, and therefore the space, to reimagine government. When have we had more conversations about how government can deliver? It’s thrilling!

And we are looking at law reform no longer as a “some day” aspiration, but as an urgent today priority. The smartest, most practical people are rolling up their sleeves and thinking about how we do this. And you know what? Smart people in Congressional offices and state houses are saying, “Can you hurry up? We’re interested.”

Having lived with the limitations of old laws for many years now, I’m excited to draft new ones. Having spent so much time suing the government, I genuinely want it to work better. Having watched the erosion of support year over year for environmental regulation, I am beyond ready to catalyze the new politics – a politics that can produce a new and improved social contract so that we have justice in this country, and we can survive and thrive for the next century and beyond.

For people who want to make change in the world, this is the time for that – and you are those people.

As you set out to do important, purpose-driven work of many kinds, I’m going to take this platform you’ve given me to offer three exhortations.

First: Let’s please be thoughtful about preserving what isn’t broken. Even as people are feeling the pain of a lawless government, there is still an ascendant narrative that laws and regulations are our problem. Your training gives you the skills to explain and demonstrate why deregulation is not a prescription for achieving abundance of social goods. People are better at everything, including innovation, when there are some effective and fair rules in place.

Second: Always remember it’s our job to seek the truth, and to tell the truth. The habits of legal inquiry, whether you are getting a JD today, or whether you are getting a master’s, have never been more important.

To be able to persuade, you actually have to understand. And to understand, you have to doubt that you are right and hear your opponents. The rigor of fact-based, evidentiary legal work is what we need in all things. It’s not enough to just have an opinion that is reached through intuition or bias. We need to speak in facts, and we need to understand what’s wrong with our position.

The process of doing that does two things: It engages us in open inquiry. I have never actually been in a litigated proceeding where I did not come to deeply respect – and like, and even enjoy – my opposing counsel. Things are a little less civil these days, so I don’t know if that’s always true. But it is a model, and it’s one that we need now outside of litigation proceedings.

And the other thing it does is that when you work so hard to reach your true assessment of what’s going on and what the remedy is, you can stand in it. No matter what winds come at you.

Two years ago, we had a president who was committed to climate action and to environmental justice. Now we are in a situation where a new president says those things are “un-American.” And a lot of people are being very quiet about that, making the assessment that it will hurt them to say the things that they were saying just two years ago. And I will tell you, at Earthjustice, we know what our truth is and we are saying it. We have never had more support and we have never been stronger. Trust your truth.

I lifted up this passage that I happened to be reading in a George Saunders book about his short-story class. And I had to share it with my team and I want to share it with you:

“The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf. But inside us is something that Hemmingway called a ‘built-in, shockproof, shit detector’. How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing [and, I will add, argument] refine into sharpness.”

AI will never do that for you. Don’t begin to let it.

Third: Embrace this labor of love that you are choosing, because the recompense of a labor of love is love. I love a rom-com so much more than the next person. But I will tell you, sitting in a folding chair at 7 o’clock in the evening at a public hearing, in a windowless room with mad people with grievances, and someone stands up at the podium, and you think, “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for!” That’s the kind of destiny that you never get over.

One of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs has the lyrics “When I fall in love with you, I think it’ll be forever.” And that articulation always confuses my husband – the when and the it. But I know: It’s about public interest work!

Wherever you find yourself, whether it’s at a firm, or at an NGO like mine, don’t forget that you are making your own lifelong love story. Look back and be proud about your choices. And along the way you will doubt yourself, because this work is hard. It is hard now, and it will be hard for you over the foreseeable future, and you will wonder whether you can make a difference.

So, find those touchstones that you can come back to over and over again. I’m going to give one to you that was given to me by my friends Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine Wilkerson in their anthology All We Can Save. This is Adrienne Rich:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”

Congratulations class of 2026, good luck!