WMU-Cooley Law School holds Commencement for Spring Term graduates

WMU-Cooley Law School held virtual commencement ceremonies on May 23, honoring 205 juris doctor and seven master of laws degree recipients from the Auburn Hills, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Tampa Bay campuses.

Melissa Heinz of the Grand Rapids campus and Kathryn Kucyk of the Auburn Hills campus were presented with the James E. Burns Memorial Award for graduating summa cum laude; and Comfort Aduwa, who attended the Lansing campus, was recipient of the President’s Achievement Award.

Buddy Faulkner and Roslyn Murrell were chosen by their classmates to present the valedictory remarks, and Judge Jessica Costello from the Hillsborough County, Florida, 13th Judicial Circuit, presented the keynote.

Judge Costello shared the importance of going through law school during the challenging times of the pandemic, the power of resilience.

She shared advice on being resilient, by first referencing the definition of resilient from Black’s Law Dictionary.
“The ability for something to return to its original form after being compressed or stretched, or the ability to recover from or adjust to adversity and change.’ You can definitely say the uncertainty of this past year compressed and stretched us. Importantly, over this past year, we’ve had to function without one of the most important aspects of the human experience, each other. Unfortunately, after the year we have experienced, and unlike the first definition, we will never return to our original form after what we have been through. For that reason I think the second definition of resilience is much more helpful to describe our current state in light of the difficulties we face. We will and we have and shall recover from and adjust to adversity and change.”

Talking about her experience as a lawyer and now a judge she explained how her own resiliency got her to where she is today. Costello shared a time when delivering the closing arguments for a defendant as the youngest lawyer in the courtroom that she had to “rise for the occasion and be resilient.” Costello said, today as a judge, “It does me great joy to see great lawyers do the same in a multitude of ways, because of the extraordinary impact you can have as an advocate for others.”