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The Ultimate Example

11/01/2019

Prof. Brendan Roediger shares a reflection on the occasion of Prof. John Ammann’s retirement.
First given as a speech at a celebration honoring John Ammann (’84) and his Clinic students on March 28, 2019.

"Welcome, everyone. I’m representing the clinical faculty, and I was asked to say a few words about John. And I’m going to start by saying that this is probably the most nervous that I’ve been with the microphone. And this is a sad day for me. John has been a colleague but he’s also been a friend to me and a mentor to me for the past decade.

There are a lot of people in this room who know John as a teacher, a lot of folks who know John as a colleague, some folks who know John as opposing counsel, some folks who know John as a family member. I wanted to say a few words about the part of John that has impressed me the most, and it has guided me the most.

John’s job in addition to being a teacher is representing powerless people against incredibly powerful forces. And those powerful forces win a lot of the time. And John’s job involves witnessing — and when I say witnessing, I mean not just witnessing, but sitting next to, being with — individuals experiencing massive amounts of pain, and often that pain is unjust. Being exposed to that over an extended period of time erodes faith. That’s what it naturally does. And surviving that is not easy, and for anybody who’s done that sort of work, and there are a lot of you in this room who do that work, it can change you, it can make you hard, it can make you rough, it can make you mean, it can make you cruel.

So what’s been so incredible to me, and what I always think about when I think about John, is your ability to be in those spaces, to see that pain, to fight for people, and to come out the other end and still go to class and make students laugh, and to have the patience to have students come in to your office and talk about the silliest problems in the whole world. You just spent the whole day at a prison talking with somebody who’d faced the most terrible series of events and you now have a student talking about how they had the flu last week and couldn’t get their paper in. And then going home and being a decent, good family man. Those things are not easy to do.

And as somebody who thinks a lot about struggle, meaning, battling those forces we need to battle, but still being somebody who lives life and enjoys life, you are the ultimate example of that to me. And so I’m just so grateful, looking at how many people are in this room, I’m so grateful that all of us have gotten to witness that, and that that has rubbed off on so many of us."