Education Quote by Frank Shorter

There’s an athlete’s plainspoken amazement hiding in this lawyerly housekeeping: the system assumes you can drift out of practice and still be held to the profession’s standards. Frank Shorter isn’t delivering a punchline so much as pointing at a cultural tell. “Continuing Legal Education” sounds like bureaucratic oatmeal, but his emphasis makes it feel almost moral: the license isn’t a trophy you put on a shelf; it’s a contract that keeps asking something of you.

The details do the work. “Lectures” are the respectable version of self-improvement; “tapes on airplanes” is the more revealing image, suggesting compliance squeezed into travel time, knowledge treated like a maintenance task you can multitask. It’s education reduced to portability: not a renaissance of curiosity, but an institutional demand to stay “current” in a field where being out-of-date can hurt people. Shorter’s repetition of “stay current” echoes the legal world’s fear of stagnation and liability, and it lands differently coming from an athlete whose own career was defined by relentless training cycles and the brutal fact of aging out.

The subtext is about identity. “Even if you are not practicing” exposes the weird limbo of professional status: you can stop doing the job and still carry the credential, provided you keep feeding it hours. In a moment when careers are increasingly modular and people “pivot” as a lifestyle, the quote quietly argues that expertise is not a vibe. It’s upkeep, monitored by institutions, paid for in attention, and often done at 30,000 feet just to keep the stamp valid.