Justice & Law Quote by Constance Baker Motley

High school is framed here as an origin story, but not the sentimental kind. Motley’s “discovered myself” is less about identity-as-style and more about identity-as-mission: she locates her awakening in systems, not feelings. The pairing of “race relations” with “the legal profession” signals a precise diagnosis of where power lives. For a Black girl coming of age in the Jim Crow era, “race relations” isn’t a classroom topic; it’s the daily architecture of constraint. Law, then, isn’t just a career path. It’s the mechanism by which that architecture can be challenged, rewritten, enforced.

Her invocation of Lincoln does double work. It borrows national legitimacy from a canonical figure, but it also reframes him as a technocrat of justice rather than a saint of emancipation. Motley isn’t reaching for Lincoln’s halo; she’s reaching for his method. Quoting his belief that law is “the most difficult of professions” functions as a kind of preemptive rebuttal to anyone who might treat her ambition as naive. Difficulty becomes the point, even the proof of seriousness.

The subtext is grit with a strategic edge: if the law is the hardest, then mastering it is a form of authority that can’t be easily dismissed. In the broader context of Motley’s life - future NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigator, the only woman on the team behind key civil rights cases, later a federal judge - this reads like the moment she chooses the arena. Not because it’s fair, but because it’s where victories become binding.