Indeed, as every recent study confirms, the University of Chicago law faculty is by a wide margin the most scholarly law faculty in the nation. I want to emphasize, however, that the Law School is, at its core, an educational as well as a scholarly institution. Our mission is to educate future lawyers, government officials, investment bankers, judges, scholars, entrepreneurs, and all the others for whom a legal education offers a set of unique and important practical skills. To meet our responsibilities as teachers, we have several goals. First, we try to make our students comfortable with uncertainty.
Most students enter law school with little experience with uncertainty.
By the time our students leave the Law School, uncertainty should be as comfortable to them as air. There are no answers because there are no answers. The list is staggering. Of course, we do not aspire to make our students expert in each of these areas. But we do hope to make them at least literate in as many fields as possible, for such literacy is essential if they are to function intelligently within the profession and if they are to recognize subtle but often serious problems before it is too late to do anything constructive about them.