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:

Thank you, Dean Bromberg, Dean McCormack, Chair Berger, and the entire Vermont Law and Graduate School community. It is a tremendous honor to be here on this milestone anniversary for the school and on this momentous day for all of you.

As you know, your school has an official call to action: Become a Catalyst for Change! You chose to answer that call. And you made the right choice, throwing in with the change agents. Even if you wanted just to be your best selves, following a 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 can’t begin to predict. Our democracy is backsliding, potentially landsliding, and that is the case in many other countries too. The world order of the last 80 years is gone, and the next geopolitical arrangements are TBD.

Of course, we are not the first people to live in tumultuous times. But, in this new weather, I think our species is having a new collective experience. I feel it in my bones, or maybe the soft tissue is more accurate. I can imagine you do too.

It is a very human response to downplay this feeling and hope it will go away. We are seeing a lot of that, and I relate 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 fact of hospitals, fire stations, libraries, schools. In choosing this mission-driven school, you deliberately prepared yourselves 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, I get a lot of grave how-are-you’s these days. As in, no really, how are you. People want to know how hard the administration is coming at us, whether the lawsuits will work, how much we — and I mean all of us — are losing, whether the damage can ever be repaired. The question is genuinely: Are you OK. And it is also: Are we OK. Maybe 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 are so far manageable, but the weaponization of the Justice Department and the cooperation of the majority in Congress should alarm everyone in this country.
• 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, the Supreme Court is accepting and even advancing the President’s abuse of power.
• 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.

Are we OK? Not yet.

Am I afraid? Yes! Very.

But I am also activated like never before, and my guess is you are too. Am I right?

The Pulitzer Prize just went to Jill Lepore’s We the People, which if it weren’t too big to fit in a suitcase, I would be holding up for all to see and read. It makes an irresistible, popular case for the necessity of constitutional amendments, which have been presumed out of reach for my entire lifetime.

We — the collective we and the we at Earthjustice — are giving new life to the Public Trust Doctrine, enforcing state constitutional rights and 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. So many 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.

Having lived with the limitations of old laws, I’m excited to draft new ones. Having spent a lot of time suing the government, I genuinely want it to work better. Having watched the erosion of support for environmental regulation, I am beyond ready to catalyze the new politics that can produce a new and improved social contract. At this very moment, I’m excited to be at this school that is uniting law and policy with a practical emphasis on real world results.

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

So, 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 — to really seek the truth — and to tell the truth. The habits of legal inquiry 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 just to have an opinion that is reached through intuition or bias. We need to speak in facts, and we need to understand what may be wrong with our starting positions.

The process of doing that does two things: It engages you in open inquiry, and it grounds you in your truth. When you work so hard to reach your true assessment of what the problem is and what the remedy is, you can stand in that. 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. But I will tell you, at Earthjustice, we know what our truth is, and we are telling it. We have never had more support, and we have never been stronger. Trust your truth.

Several months ago, I came across a passage in George Saunders’ book about the short story class he teaches. I had to share it with our team at Earthjustice, and I want to share it with you today:

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 Hemingway 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 let me tell you, nothing is quite like the moment when you look across the room at a public hearing and find yourself leaning forward in your folding metal chair. It’s late in the evening, in a windowless room. Mad people are taking turns at the mic. And then, out of nowhere, someone you didn’t know before, someone so right, comes up to the podium, and begins to speak. And you think, “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for!” That’s the kind of destiny that you never get over.

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. 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. 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!