By Annie Hagstrom
Michigan Law
Professor Eve Brensike Primus recently spoke to a student audience about navigating the legal field as a budding professional. She encouraged the soon-to-be lawyers to continue fighting against injustice even in the face of difficulty. Primus, the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law, delivered her informal “blue jeans” lecture in tandem with her reception of the 2025 L. Hart Wright Professor of the Year Award, a student-nominated recognition given annually by the Law School Student Senate.
“I am humbled and honored to receive this award, and it means so much to me that this comes from you,” Primus told the students. “It’s important to think about how you want to spend your legal career and what you’re passionate about. For many of you, that might mean entering challenging fields. That’s why I wanted to talk about how and why to keep fighting, even when it’s hard.”
At Michigan Law, Primus is the founder and director of MDefenders and the Public Defender Training Institute, as well as the director of the Data for Defenders project. Before joining the Law School, she worked as a criminal investigator, then as a trial and appellate public defender. Her scholarship is regularly cited by the nation’s highest courts and has had a profound impact on the landscape of criminal procedure and indigent defense reform.
Through sharing her own experiences, Primus offered five guiding principles in sustaining the fight against injustice.
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The importance of harm reduction
Primus recalled a felony drug case she worked on as a public defender. Her client had been pulled over while driving, and his vehicle was searched—something she believed to be unjust and predicated on racial profiling. A search of the vehicle uncovered drugs, spurring a charge against Primus’s client. She filed a motion to suppress, arguing that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated, but she lost.
When the motion was denied, Primus looked at her client, who was beaming from ear to ear with a smile. At first, she was confused, then she wondered, given the swift, jargon-filled interaction, whether her client knew what had just happened.
“I turned to him and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but we lost that motion,’” she said. “He told me, ‘Miss Eve, I don’t care that we lost. You called out what those officers did and how they mistreated me. No one’s told my story like that before; no one’s stood up for me in that way.’”
She continued, “I will never forget it. You can’t undervalue how much standing beside someone means to them, regardless of the outcome.”
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Michigan Law
Professor Eve Brensike Primus recently spoke to a student audience about navigating the legal field as a budding professional. She encouraged the soon-to-be lawyers to continue fighting against injustice even in the face of difficulty. Primus, the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law, delivered her informal “blue jeans” lecture in tandem with her reception of the 2025 L. Hart Wright Professor of the Year Award, a student-nominated recognition given annually by the Law School Student Senate.
“I am humbled and honored to receive this award, and it means so much to me that this comes from you,” Primus told the students. “It’s important to think about how you want to spend your legal career and what you’re passionate about. For many of you, that might mean entering challenging fields. That’s why I wanted to talk about how and why to keep fighting, even when it’s hard.”
At Michigan Law, Primus is the founder and director of MDefenders and the Public Defender Training Institute, as well as the director of the Data for Defenders project. Before joining the Law School, she worked as a criminal investigator, then as a trial and appellate public defender. Her scholarship is regularly cited by the nation’s highest courts and has had a profound impact on the landscape of criminal procedure and indigent defense reform.
Through sharing her own experiences, Primus offered five guiding principles in sustaining the fight against injustice.
—————
The importance of harm reduction
Primus recalled a felony drug case she worked on as a public defender. Her client had been pulled over while driving, and his vehicle was searched—something she believed to be unjust and predicated on racial profiling. A search of the vehicle uncovered drugs, spurring a charge against Primus’s client. She filed a motion to suppress, arguing that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated, but she lost.
When the motion was denied, Primus looked at her client, who was beaming from ear to ear with a smile. At first, she was confused, then she wondered, given the swift, jargon-filled interaction, whether her client knew what had just happened.
“I turned to him and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but we lost that motion,’” she said. “He told me, ‘Miss Eve, I don’t care that we lost. You called out what those officers did and how they mistreated me. No one’s told my story like that before; no one’s stood up for me in that way.’”
She continued, “I will never forget it. You can’t undervalue how much standing beside someone means to them, regardless of the outcome.”
—————
Today’s losses are tomorrow’s wins
“Being a creative advocate who is part of a movement means you will need to make arguments others haven’t made before,” she said. “You will need to push jurisdictions to do things that make them uncomfortable, and you will need to push decision makers to change the way things have always been done.” Primus explained that it is hard to change unjust systems because they resist change. “But if you are creative, resilient, and patient in your fight to bend the arc of the law toward justice, you can transform today’s losses into tomorrow’s wins.”
Primus shared that for the last seven years, she has been working on systemic litigation about right-to-counsel violations in various states across the country. In some cases, public defenders are simply not being provided to people, causing them to sit in jails for weeks, months, even years without lawyers—despite being constitutionally entitled to representation. In other cases, jurisdictions provide lawyers at the eleventh hour, meaning they don’t have time to do any research or prepare, yet are expected to be effective.
When Primus began this work, it was a losing battle. Still, the litigation teams continued to fight, trying different approaches each time, based on the lessons they had learned from previous cases. In the last year, two states changed the way people receive counsel to fix some of these systemic problems. “These are real victories that would never have happened if there had not been serious losses,” she said.
—————
You cannot let imposter syndrome win
Primus urged the students not to cater to an unjust system, especially if doing something “the right way” within the system only advances that system’s goals.
“You are at Michigan Law because you’re overachievers,” she said. “You’re used to getting gold stars; that’s how you got to this point in your lives. When you fight against an unjust system, the people who are in charge of that system will not give you gold stars unless you do something that creates or enables the injustice.”
She advised them to avoid imposter syndrome at all costs, saying it is easy to discount the good yet beat yourself up when you make a mistake.
“Systems of injustice know this; they take advantage of self-doubt and feed on it,” she noted. “Don’t let it push you away from the fight.”
—————
Find ways to create balance in your life
“It’s important to be intentional about how you’re going to sustain yourself while fighting against a system that is stacked against you,” said Primus. “If you’re going to be exposed to the way the system chews up and spits people out, you have to find something in your life that’s going to show you joy and beauty. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going to happen to you if, day in and day out, all you see is human carnage and tragedy: you’re going to burn out. Create boundaries and find things outside of work to counteract the negativity that’s imposed by the systems of injustice you are fighting against.”
—————
Know your power
Primus closed by calling to the future judges, senators, leaders, and business executives in the room: “I hope you realize how much power you have. Even if you can’t stop people from doing things that perpetrate injustice, you can often stop them from going farther than they would have by watching and fighting.”
She continued, “I thank you in advance for all of the fights that you will be a part of, and I hope that you enjoy Michigan Law as students as much as I did. Thank you all for this award, and Go Blue.”
Primus shared that for the last seven years, she has been working on systemic litigation about right-to-counsel violations in various states across the country. In some cases, public defenders are simply not being provided to people, causing them to sit in jails for weeks, months, even years without lawyers—despite being constitutionally entitled to representation. In other cases, jurisdictions provide lawyers at the eleventh hour, meaning they don’t have time to do any research or prepare, yet are expected to be effective.
When Primus began this work, it was a losing battle. Still, the litigation teams continued to fight, trying different approaches each time, based on the lessons they had learned from previous cases. In the last year, two states changed the way people receive counsel to fix some of these systemic problems. “These are real victories that would never have happened if there had not been serious losses,” she said.
—————
You cannot let imposter syndrome win
Primus urged the students not to cater to an unjust system, especially if doing something “the right way” within the system only advances that system’s goals.
“You are at Michigan Law because you’re overachievers,” she said. “You’re used to getting gold stars; that’s how you got to this point in your lives. When you fight against an unjust system, the people who are in charge of that system will not give you gold stars unless you do something that creates or enables the injustice.”
She advised them to avoid imposter syndrome at all costs, saying it is easy to discount the good yet beat yourself up when you make a mistake.
“Systems of injustice know this; they take advantage of self-doubt and feed on it,” she noted. “Don’t let it push you away from the fight.”
—————
Find ways to create balance in your life
“It’s important to be intentional about how you’re going to sustain yourself while fighting against a system that is stacked against you,” said Primus. “If you’re going to be exposed to the way the system chews up and spits people out, you have to find something in your life that’s going to show you joy and beauty. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going to happen to you if, day in and day out, all you see is human carnage and tragedy: you’re going to burn out. Create boundaries and find things outside of work to counteract the negativity that’s imposed by the systems of injustice you are fighting against.”
—————
Know your power
Primus closed by calling to the future judges, senators, leaders, and business executives in the room: “I hope you realize how much power you have. Even if you can’t stop people from doing things that perpetrate injustice, you can often stop them from going farther than they would have by watching and fighting.”
She continued, “I thank you in advance for all of the fights that you will be a part of, and I hope that you enjoy Michigan Law as students as much as I did. Thank you all for this award, and Go Blue.”
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