Adrienne B. Koch Law Day Speech: If Civilization is to Survive, It Must Choose the Rule of Law

Remarks of Adrienne B. Koch
Law Day 
May 1st 2025

Every year the ABA gives us a theme for Law Day.  This year’s theme is The Constitution’s Promise: Out of Many, One.  The ABA explains that this theme “urges us to take pride in a Constitution that bridges our differences” and to “explore and renew our duties to one another under the Constitution and our democratic norms.”  

At first this came as more of a challenge than an assist.  Our country feels almost irretrievably polarized – so much so that we literally can’t even seem to agree on what is fact anymore. And the rule of law – the golden principle we celebrate on Law Day – seems to be under constant and increasing threat. 

Can our differences really be bridged?  Can this particular “many” ever truly be “one”? Under a Constitution in which “We the People” are sovereign, we need the answer to that question to be yes.

But how do we get there? One way may be to look at what was going on in 1789 when our Constitution first took effect.  The country had just finished fighting a revolution for its independence – a foundational act of protest.  Its original organizational plan, the Articles of Confederation, had proven profoundly unworkable.

When the 13 states set out to craft a replacement, each one had its own constitution and its own set of laws.  Individual states were negotiating directly with foreign authorities and even raising armies. 

Rhode Island refused to show up for the constitutional convention, and it wasn’t clear that the other twelve states would be able to agree on anything. 

Yet from that dissent emerged something extraordinary: a Constitution written in the first-person plural, “We the people.”  And it boldly and ambitiously declares that its purpose is “to form a more perfect union.” 

Our country was born of protest and founded on dissent.  Protest and dissent have consistently fueled some of our greatest advances.  They don’t impede our ongoing project of forming a more perfect union; they further it. 

As Congressman John Lewis so aptly put it, “Protest is an act of love, not one of anger.”  

What, then, are the “duties to one another” that this year’s Law Day theme urges us to “explore and renew”? 

The words President Eisenhower used when he inaugurated Law Day back in 1958 point us to one answer.  He said: “[T]he world no longer has a choice between force and law.  If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.” 

I’d like to suggest that we lawyers have a special duty to help ensure that we as a nation continue to “choose the rule of law” over its opposite, force. 

The protest and dissent that are so much a part of our nation’s essence are not inconsistent with this.  To the contrary, it’s our duty to raise our voices in protest or dissent when we see force threaten to overtake the rule of law. 

It’s an act of love. 

And it’s part of our own role in the collective “We” that is ultimately sovereign under our bold, ambitious, first-person plural Constitution.