After giving a talk on the nobility of our learned craft and the power of lawyers to help bend Dr. King’s moral arc of the universe toward justice, a listener said to me, “Oh, you’re such an optimist.” It sounded less like a commendation than a critique, in the ways that optimism can be perceived as naive or even foolish. I replied, “No. I am a conditional optimist.” We were all on to the next appointment of the day, and the conversation went no further.

Had there been time, I would have empathized with the sentiment that, amidst the furies of our time—the decline of civility, the divisiveness of political and social spheres, the rise in hate crimes, and the vitriol spewed on virtual platforms, to name a few—complacent optimism is misplaced.

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