Introducing Ralph Nader at Harvard Law

I introduced Ralph Nader at Harvard Law School this past September:

Hello everyone, For students like us, the pre-professional rat race has a certain gravitational pull: diverting our focus from the structural to the trivial, blurring our sense of right and wrong, caging our moral imagination, and diminishing our belief in our own civic power.

Fortunately, there’s hope: if we build up a sense of systemic justice – and knowledge of today’s injustices – then we can inoculate ourselves from this pull, liberating our civic powers to take an alternative path of serving the public interest.

We are blessed that certain law students in history have taken this alternative path. If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more visionary path, we would have never had Freedom of Information requests or the Clean Water Act; If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more transformative path, we would have smoking on airplanes and the word whistleblower would not be in popular use; If this Harvard Law student with us here today had not take this more just path, we wouldn’t have the Occupational Health and Safety Act nor the seatbelts and airbags that have saved millions of American lives.

In an effort to begin our own alternative path towards similar transformative legal vocations, we present the founder of the modern consumer movement, the original Nader Raider, the former host of Saturday Night Live, the only man to convince Sesame Street to have a song sung about consumer advocacy, America’s chief public citizen and a hero of mine… Mr. Ralph Nader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPC_lv9XEPo