Michigan Law
Lawyers who actively work for systemic change tend to have the happiest and most productive legal careers, Professor Eve Brensike Primus, ’01, told a student audience recently.
“Every system that exists in the world of law is broken or imperfect in some way…whether it’s the criminal legal system, our civil rights system, our patent system, or our tax system,” Primus said.
“The lawyers who recognize that and take steps to bring about change…are the lawyers who wind up the happiest. Why? Because they’re not cogs in the wheels of the machine of the law. They’re leaders who go into a field they care about and try to make it better.”
Primus, the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law, spoke at an informal “blue jeans” lecture as a winner of the 2024 Faculty Award for Innovative, Interdisciplinary, and Inclusive Teaching, one of the annual student-nominated awards presented by the Law School Student Senate.
The founder and director of MDefenders and Michigan Law’s Public Defender Training Institute, Primus also directs the Data for Defenders project, which promotes creative and evidence-based criminal defense advocacy. She co-authors one of the nation’s leading criminal procedure textbooks and writes about structural reform in the criminal legal system.
Primus related a story from her time as a law clerk, when she worked with a judge to try —unsuccessfully—to stop the execution of a death-row inmate with incompetent counsel.
“Even when you don’t win, you plant the seeds for the victory that may happen down the line,” she said. “Today’s dissent can be tomorrow’s majority.”
She noted that systemic change does not only come from impact litigators, high-profile cases, and large class actions.
“It is also about the individual work that you do in your cases, because you are setting precedent in front of your judges,” she said. “Part of being a systemic change agent is recognizing that you don’t have to do everything the way it has always been done.”
Primus identified three qualities that help the fight for systemic change:
“There is no silver-bullet solution to systemic problems. Systemic problems exist because they have grown up over time in lots of different areas of the law and in society more generally,” she said.
“You are not going to be the person who comes in and says, ‘I have the one thing that will always fix a systemic problem.’ Rather, you’re going to need to chip away at it step by step.”
“Sometimes you have to push for things to work and you will lose,” she said. “Powerful systems and regimes exist because they resist change and they resist challenges to their authority. The legal system is like that, too. You need to be patient, but you also need to continue to fight.”
“Sometimes thinking about how to change a broken or flawed system means thinking outside the box of just filing lawsuits,” she said. “Part of being a change agent and fixing problems in any area of law is figuring out…where are the right levers to push to move the system forward”—even if those levers are in the legislative or executive branches rather than the judicial system.
Primus punctuated the talk with examples from her own work, illustrating the importance of continuing to try even in the face of setbacks. “Sometimes you don’t know what the time horizon is, but if you have patience and resilience and innovation and creativity and you keep fighting, you wind up bending the arc of the system toward justice and toward your desired outcomes,” she said.
Primus closed the lecture with some advice to students on how to prepare for “a happy career as a systemic change agent.”
“I hope that you take classes here at the Law School that teach you how to think creatively about finding solutions to legal problems,” she said. “Learning how to investigate systems is really important.”
Second, “I hope you’ll practice resilience by fighting your imposter syndrome. So you had a crappy cold call; you bombed it. There are worse things. Pick yourself up, raise your hand in the next class, and show what you can do.”
Finally, when having a bad day, “I always tell myself, it is worth the fight because I might win if I continue down this path and really achieve something good that I believe in and that I believe is important. And even if I don’t win, I’m going to plant the seeds for the future. I’m going to be part of the army of people who stand up and say, ‘We will hold the line against those who will oppress others.’”
