Commencement 2025: Georgetown Law Graduates Celebrate, Embrace ‘Justice, Openness and Heart’

As graduates prepared to enter a world facing unprecedented challenges, speakers urged the Class of 2025 to lead in the fight for justice and the rule of law. “Law isn’t just a job. Law is a calling that, at its best, can help stitch a fractured world together. Beyond these walls, a nation cries out, torn by division, famished for fairness. The arguments you advance will echo from courtrooms, communities, history’s corridors, but it’s the example you set that will endure,” said Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., H’25, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree on Sunday. “Be the advocates who ask not just what the law is, but what it ought to be. Be the architects of a justice that heals, lifts, lasts because it’s in your hands to write the next chapter, not just of Georgetown Law, but of a world yearning for its better angels.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr., H’25, delivered the 2025 Commencement Address. “Law isn’t just a job,” he told the graduates. “Law is a calling that, at its best, can help stitch a fractured world together.” Photo credit: Sam Levitan Photography.

Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and the host of the PBS television series Finding Your Roots, emphasized the role of legal advocates in championing scholarly inquiry, freedom of expression and human dignity.

“Make your arguments bold, your reasoning sound and your impact lasting,” he advised. “Your verdicts will be written, not in casebooks, but in the lives you touch and the justice that you deliver.”

Gates also reflected fondly on his decades-long friendship with Dean William M. Treanor, which began when Treanor was an undergraduate student in a Black literature seminar that Gates taught at Yale University. Treanor will step down as dean next month after 15 years in the role, and Gates took the opportunity to praise his tenure at Georgetown Law.

Treanor’s investment in scholarship, his commitment to expanding access through financial aid and fellowships and his outspoken support for academic freedom and the importance of the rule of law, Gates said, provide a “playbook” for the Class of 2025 as they prepare to enter legal practice. “[Dean Treanor has] built a legacy not just about law, but justice, openness and heart,” he said. “Beyond these walls, some would wield power to silence voices of dissent … that tumult makes your work, the steady craft of law, all the more essential than ever.”

Dean William M. Treanor addresses the Class of 2025. Photo credit: Sam Levitan Photography.

Shaping a ‘vast and interconnected’ world

Gates’s remarks were preceded by an alumni address by fellow honorary degree recipient Daniel Tsai, L’79, H’25. Tsai is chairman of Fubon Group, a leading Taiwanese firm whose holdings include financial services and e-commerce companies, and a generous philanthropist whose historic gift will support the construction of a new flagship academic building, Tsai Hall, to be constructed on the Georgetown Law campus.

L-R: Henry Louis Gates Jr., H’25; Daniel Tsai, L’79, H’25; Dean William M. Treanor. Photo credit: Sam Levitan Photography.

In reflecting on his transformative experience at the Law Center, which marked the first time he traveled to a foreign country, Tsai underscored the merits of American academic institutions and of international education more broadly.

Daniel Tsai, L’79, H’25, delivered the 2025 Alumni Address. “Embrace the slow path,” he told the graduates. “It is often richer in wisdom and understanding.” Photo credit: Sam Levitan Photography.

“The diversity of the American society mirrored in their academic institutions are what draws people here,” he said. “To experience a unique education based not only on academic knowledge, but strengthened through our differences.” Tsai added that his own children have all followed his example and studied at universities in the United States.

Tsai also offered guidance to the graduates as they prepare to embark on the next chapter in their lives and legal practice. “I urge you to carry forward the torch of knowledge by navigating the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead with courage, compassion and integrity,” he said. “Remember that the world is vast and interconnected, and your actions have the power to shape it for the better.”

For Treanor, presiding over his final commencement ceremony as dean proved particularly poignant — and offered the chance to snap one final Dean selfie with the crowd.

“We cherish the rule of law, we cherish academic freedom, we cherish the principle that serious and sustained dialogue among the people of different faiths, cultures and beliefs promotes intellectual, spiritual and ethical understanding,” he said. “You are now Georgetown lawyers, and those values become the values you are prepared to fight for.”

In his closing remarks, Interim Georgetown University President Robert M. Groves echoed the day’s themes of dedication to the university’s long-standing principles, including its Jesuit heritage and tradition of preparing graduates for careers in public service. “Nothing will deter us from working toward the common good in everything we do,” said Groves.

Embracing the law in practice

Friends and classmates gathered during Celebration Days on the Law Center campus.

The call to use their legal training in service of others was a guiding principle for many graduates, who cited Georgetown Law’s emphasis on public interest law and hands-on legal training as the highlight of their law school experience.

For Megan Farr, L’25, the decision to attend Georgetown Law stemmed from the desire to practice real-life legal advocacy through the Juvenile Justice Clinic, through which she represents children in D.C. Superior Court.

“The resources here for public interest were incredible,” said Farr, who will join the Colorado Public Defender’s Office after graduation, of her clinic experience. “Getting to practice for a year under supervision before going into [that practice area] was the best opportunity ever.”

Friends and Section 2 graduates Leah Hebron (left), L’25, and Zach Rosenfeld (right), L’25, joined the Section 4 Celebration Day after rain moved their Friday ceremony indoors. Both will serve as law clerks after graduation. “My biggest lesson from being here is to be kind,” Hebron said.

For Siena Hohne, C’22, L’25, who will next serve as a Ruff Fellow in the Civil Rights and Elder Justice Section of the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, participating in the RISE program — which serves students who may have had less exposure to the legal profession before law school — was an invaluable experience.

“The RISE community was a great opportunity to connect with other people from underrepresented backgrounds,” she said. Hohne noted that the Georgetown Law motto — “‘Law is but the means; justice is the end” — has also served as a beacon throughout her time as a student. “That’s something I believe in deeply and something that I will carry forward through my legal career,” she added.

For Brady Marzen, F’22, L’25, the chance to learn from professors who are also legal practitioners — and the opportunity to partake in a Week One simulation course — were invaluable academic experiences. “The number of professors who were able to say, ‘I know this law because I wrote it,’ or, ‘I know this case because I argued it,’ has been just tremendous,” he said. “What is special about Georgetown is the people who teach here and the students don’t just want to study the theory of the law, but they want to go do it in the real world.”

Seeking justice for ‘today’s stranger’

Students gathered with their classmates during Celebration Days ceremonies.

Prior to Sunday’s ceremony, students convened on the Law Center campus for Celebration Days: ten program- and section-specific ceremonies held Friday and Saturday at which graduates hear their names called and walk across the stage to collect their diplomas.

The Celebration Days ceremonies also featured student speakers who reflected on their shared experiences inside the classroom and out, from triumphing over the challenges of cold-calling and bluebooking to the value of forging connections with faculty and classmates who hail from across the country and around the world.

Section 5 speaker Juli Pal Dajci, L’25.

Representing Section 5 was student speaker Juli Pal Dajci, L’25, an international J.D. student from Albania for whom graduation from an American law school represented the culmination of a lifelong dream — and a chance to reflect on the unconditional support that developed between his classmates over the past three years.

“You have all taught me that today’s stranger could very easily be tomorrow’s friend,” he said. “And because I know that tomorrow’s friend deserves justice, I know I must seek justice for today’s stranger. Only then can we honor the Georgetown precept of being people for and with others.”

Following the Celebration Days ceremonies, the Class of 2025 gathered for commencement on the Hilltop campus. Photo credit: Sam Levitan Photography.

LL.M. student speaker Bwalya Chisanga, L’25.

For Bwalya Chisanga, L’25, who represented a cohort of LL.M. students, many of whom are foreign-trained attorneys, studying at Georgetown Law provided lessons in leadership and perseverance. The first Zambian fellow to participate in Georgetown’s Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) program, which trains human rights lawyers committed to advocating on behalf of women and girls in their home countries, Chisanga invoked a phrase from her home country — Zambia Ku Chalo, or Zambia to the world — in her message to the crowd.

“We’ve seen what that leadership looks like in difficult circumstances. Right here at Georgetown Law, our own Dean Treanor has shown us what it means to be extraordinary by standing firm in Georgetown’s values,” she said. “We’ve seen what extraordinary looks like. And because we have seen, we too, get to be extraordinary, as we go out — Ku Chalo — to the world!”