Thats great demand for you to be here. It is such an honor. Thank you so much for being here. We are thrilled that you are here for the steven fletcher. One of the special things about , as the deane mentioned, is i know that this this lecture is actually named after Justice John Paul stevens, who was your predecessor on the bench. In fact, he gave the first inaugural lecture in 2011, and ive heard you speak eloquently at his Funeral Service and elsewhere about how you filled his seat on the bench, but you cant fill his shoes. Too large. Can you tell us a little bit about his influence on you and what its like to Carry Forward his legacy . Yeah, i mean, it was it was so sad for me and for all my colleagues this summer when he passed away. He was a great, great man, and i never had the chance to serve with him, so unlike many of my colleagues, i cant tell stories about what it was like to be on the bench with him or in conference with him, but he is and long has been a hero of mine. He has a passage in one of his books about how he was honored to take the place of Louis Brandeis on the court. There are particular seats, and Everybody Knows which justices have filled those particular seats, and i sit in a seat which went Louis Brandeis, and bill douglas, and john stevens, and then me, which is quite extraordinary, but john stevens, i mean, if john stevens felt that way about Louis Brandeis, i feel that way about john stevens. He was a man of extraordinary brilliance, but even more of extraordinary wisdom, which is not the same thing. He was a man of great integrity. He was a man of great independence. I mean, he always did what he thought was right no matter what, and sometimes, that meant that he went his own way, and was, you know, and wrote an opinion that nobody else signed on to, or voted in a way that nobody else joined, but that was okay with him that he had his own view of the law, and he stuck with it and was extremely independentminded. He was a deeply kind person, which i think all his colleagues appreciated as well as his clerks, and everybody else in the court. I think, in terms of his judicial legacy, what hell go down in history for is a deep commitment to the rule of law, to the principle that no person, however high or mighty, is above the law, we are all subject to the same legal rules, and the accompanying principle that, you know, whether youre powerful, or whether youre powerless, the most humble person, the poorest person, the least educated person, is entitled to be treated by the legal system with the same dignity as the rich and the powerful. And for me, that is a great legacy of a magnificent 35year career on the court. We have lots of students in the audience. Can i get a show of hands from the students that are here . Great. Wow. Awesome. A lot of students. And you are all in the front which is fantastic. You got the good seeds. I dont know who they put up there. The students are vips. Thats what its all about. Exactly. This is forse the students. Why did you go to law school . What was it like for you to be a law student . If you could give some advice to our law students about approach to law school or entering their legal career, especially in this time. I went to law school for all the wrong reasons. [laughter] when i was a dean, i was talking to a bunch of College Students about whether they should go to law school. I was saying all these formulaic things about how you should think about this, whether this is what you want to do, and you shouldnt go to law school just because you cant think of anything else. And because you want to keep your options open. As the words were coming out of my mouth, i was thinking, i went to law school because i couldnt really think of anything else. [laughter] i wanted to keep my options open. [laughter] asont really describe this the way to approach this position. Im here to say that even if you went to law school for all the wrong reasons like that, when i started law school, i loved law school from the beginning. Wow. [laughter] does that make me weird . I dont know. Day, i lovedfirst law school because it combines two things. Thinkingat i loved the that law school demanded. I loved the kind of analytic rigor that law school demanded. Kinded the logical puzzle of enterprise that law is. Througho think complicated legal problems, sometimes arcane legal doctrines, figuring it all out in the way you might figure out a crossword puzzle. That this was not an abstract or sterile enterprise. That this was a way to make a difference in the world. That it was very obvious to me and my Law School Classes how it was that the law was about the betterment of our society, the advancement of human welfare. Oh. Can i help . I am the wrong person to help with technology, trust me. [laughter] to move my head too much from now on. It had this really practical aspect to it. Makeould see how it could a difference in the world and how the person using it could make a difference in the world. Thats what i loved about law school. Guess what i would say to with their years in law school, how to think about their legal careers, you have this great opportunity to find out in law school readily moves you, the kind of things you care about. It will be different from a few. For all of you. If you come out of law school with a sense of, this is the kind of thing that if i worked on, i would want to go to work every day. I would feel as though i was doing the job full of purpose and meaning. Thats a great thing to come out of law school with. Not everybody does. Some people find it later ron in their legal careers. To try to use law school as an opportunity to experiment in Different Things and an opportunity to try to find passion, this is what i care about, to not be so worried about planning. Im a big antiplanner. Most law students are planners. Most of you will plan enough. If you every once in a while thing to yourselves, no, Justice Kagan told us not to plan, it would be a good corrective. Most of the best things that happen in peoples s, when i think of people whose legal careers where i say wow, lead a life and a law like that, is mostly luck and serendipity. Of course, you make your luck and there are ways of putting yourself in the position to be offered an opportunity, for the most part, things come out of the blue. Thats the way life works. I think too many law students and Young Lawyers put themselves on this plan. First i have to do this and then that. That prepares me for the next thing. They will say no to opportunities that sound really fun and exciting and interesting because its not on the plan and because they worry about if they leave the plan, how do i get back on . The most fun and interesting and exciting parts of most legal careers are when people do leave the plan and noticed something. I never considered that for a minute. Gosh, that looks a lot more fun than what im doing now. I dont know. I really think that the best legal careers are the ones that are guided by a sense of, is this more fun than what im doing now . I think i will go do that. That makes sense. You have been looking around for a lot of fun. If i think about your career in the way it has gone, you start off at harvard law school. You are clerking on the d c circuit. You are clerking for Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. And then it is jumping to teach at the university of chicago. Dean andll become the then Supreme Court justice. You skipped a few. [laughter] i couldnt keep a job, really. [laughter] every four years, i was off doing something else. Im looking forward to keeping this for a while. [laughter] it looks like a dream life. In the times you failed. Can you tell us about those and how you deal with disappointment . You look at my resume and you see all the jobs i got. You dont see all the jobs i didnt get. For every job i got, there were two that i didnt get. Starting from law school. Loss goal, i did very badly my first semester. Law school has finally outed me for the fraud that ive always been. It wasnt true. I turned myself around and figured it out. Has, theresy who somebody ie have flitted around a lot. People, its more like im going to do one thing and get one job and try to be purchased perfect. I will do that for my whole life. If thats what makes you happy, thats fantastic. , thereare more like me are plenty of jobs i didnt get along the road. One job i didnt get was bill clinton nominated me to be a judge. The senate didnt give me a hearing and i never became a judge. There were other jobs in government that i didnt get. Harvard, idean at was considered to be president of the university and i didnt get that. All along the road. Some of these were highclass disappointments. I dont want to say anything. I dont know. In, you cantever let disappointments get you down too much. Its a little bit of magical thinking. Im a big believer that when a door opens when a door closes, a window opens. It may be the best thing that ever happened to you that you didnt get a job. That was true of when i was nominated to be a judge. I was quite young at the time. I was in my late 30s. I had worked for years in the Clinton White house. I thought i really wanted to be a judge. The senate thought otherwise. Being i didnt get it. I spent the next decade doing all kinds of things that i really enjoyed. I became a justice anyway. I want to turn our it i want to turn our attention to a lot of folks here in colorado. There are certainly go issues that are salient in a Square States like colorado. Indian law, about waterlogged, environmental protections. Wondering what your approach is. How do you go about educating yourself when it comes to those complex areas of law but other also cultures also other cultures. Have you educate yourself and your colleagues to address those matters . Are you are in the west. There are certain areas it was my fourth year on the court. I was assigned an opinion by the chief justice. Opinion terlogged watch her law opinion water law opinion. It was a dispute between kansas and nebraska. I remember thinking, i know nothing about this. These big Square States that have water problems. [laughter] i grew up in new york city. I went to school in massachusetts. Water law was not high on the curriculum. Learned there are so many things we dont know. Law might be one of them. Year, a super complicated thing about electricity regulation which i knew nothing about. There are those kinds of things. It happens all the time that there are things that you dont know. There are perspectives youve never encountered. Cultures youve never experienced. I think you are just under an obligation to keep learning. Just going back to your first stevens,about john when i got to the Supreme Court, i asked Justice Stevens for any advice you might offer me. He was a very humble man. I dont think he liked giving advice. I really tried to push him. He said, i think the best thing i ever did was that i tried to learn something new every single day i was on the court. You think about that. This is a man who served on the court for 35 years. Sayingld be forgiven for around your 34, i think ive learned it all. He never did. Thats the attitude that a justice has to take. There are all kinds of thing in things in this world and in the law that i dont know. , to figureopen mind out how to learn about them. To know what you dont know and to have strategies for learning about them. Contextht come in the of one particular case or it might come in a broader context. That is the john stevens advice, to think about all the things you have to learn and go out and learn them, thats the way to be a judge. I hear you. That that things brings up is an important issue of diversity on the court. As at is a whole whole does not reflect the demographics of american society. Many justices are appellate lawyers that come from a very small number of law schools. Only three women on the bench. Not a lot of diversity when we look at race and religion and geographic n geography. Im wondering, what role do you think, if any, peoples experiences and backgrounds shape how the court makes its decisions . Is there any good example where you think it really mattered . Yes. In general, im a big believer in diversity in the judiciary. But for a different reason than that which i will come back to. I dont think diversity necessarily means that you will get a different set of views on the court. There think about women, are lots of women in the world and i have all kinds of different views. My colleague Justice Ginsburg was asked, how many women should there be on the court . She said, nine, how about that . [laughter] [applause] nine,ther its five or you could have nine women who all had views like me or you could have nine women who all had none of whom have views like me. You could have some mixed. Women disagree on a lot of Different Things. All you have to look do was look around the u. S. Judiciary. You see women on every side of most legal questions. About in conference , ive been on the court now for 10 years. I cant think of all that many cases where i thought to myself, this would come out differently if only there were more women here. Time when i most thought thought, my gosh, there really is a different perspective here i have to go back 13 years ago. I was solicitor general at the time. The court had only one woman on it, the year before Justice Sotomayor arrived. It was only Justice Ginsburg. About as a case 13yearold girl in a Junior High School who was stripsearched because she was thought to have marijuana or some other kind of drug on her. She was stripsearched by these middle school administrators. I would say that it was not the greatest day on the bench for the Supreme Court. In can see Justice Ginsburg the questions that she asked, she could have a picture in her head of what this was like and what it would feel like if you were that 13yearold girl. But she was really the only one. Some of the men on the court were not having their finest hour. They were joking, not appreciating what this would have seemed like with 13yearold girl. There was a lot of commentary on it at the time, all deserved, i think. Then they went back into the Conference Room. I dont know what happened there. They came out and justice view, that it was an unconstitutional search, it prevailed by a lopsided vote. Was able toshe convince people that this was a serious matter even if they were kind of laughing on the bench. As i said before, you can find people of all kinds of different views. Some are women, some are africanamerican, some are hispanic. The more important reason to have diversity on the court is end,se the court, in the is supported by if the court doesnt have legitimacy with the american public, the court cant do that much. The court want to be taken seriously. To have legitimacy with the american public, one part of part, is the only all kinds of different people should be able to look at the court and say, i see somebody there who looks like me, who thinks the way i do, who has experience of the kind that i had. Thats the kind of thing that gives the court public legitimacy. I sit in the courtroom and think, all these cool groups who come into the courtroom, i think, it is so great. There are only three of us. Are pretty vocal on the bench. We dont by any means fade into the background. [laughter] on the left and Justice Sotomayor sits on the right. Justice ginsburg sits on the middle. There are womens voices coming from all over. This is fantastic, that all these girls are listening to this. All these boys are listening to this. It says something about how women can be in the Legal Profession and in society. That some of us serve as role models for people, for children and teenagers and even courtys who look at the and see somebody who they can relate to. [applause] i will turn to an issue that you have written about. The confirmation process. In the past, you have criticized the confirmation process as a vapid and hollow charade. [laughter] what do you think now about the process today . What are some of the most important attributes of a Supreme Court justice . I should give perspective about when i said those things. Before i went through the process, quite a bit before. Wrote an article on the confirmation process when i was a professor at the university of chicago. I was a young professor, in my early 30s. I had just come back from a summer that i spend working for joe biden who was then the chair of the judiciary committee. Done confirmation hearings for ruth bader ginsburg. Joe biden had a practice that he , every confirmation process that he was the chair for, he would invite in academic out and have the Academic Work with his team and think about what kind of questions to put to the nominee and so forth. I was the academic one summer for the confirmation of Justice Ginsburg. I found it a terribly frustrating affair. Justice ginsburg was remarkably good at never answering anything. [laughter] know, years and years later, i tried to emulate that. [laughter] time, it didnt seem like such a great idea to me. I wrote this piece. Thisi became a nominee, piece was very troublesome for me. [laughter] every time i said, i really cant answer that. They would say, you wrote this article. [laughter] the nomination process is a vapid and hollow charade. That was inconvenient. [laughter] you have to be careful what you write. Having gone through the process id can mount the other side, cant have too many criticisms of the process. It works. [laughter] its actually a pretty frustrating thing for everybody concerned. I dont quite know how to fix it. I have no Silver Bullet to tell you. The senators just want to know how people are going to vote on Different Things. I dont begrudge them that. We decide very important matters. , donty for a senator make me guess. It. Me what you think of for the nominee, its not a really good path to be confirmed. There are certain kinds of ethical rules that nominees have to follow. I found that when i was a nominee, i tried to be above the way iopen about , myght judges should act theory of constitutional interpretation, my theories of statutory interpretation. I really tried never to end the conversation. Much as a senator wanted to watch me about those things, i was open and forthcoming about them. Not all the senators are lawyers to the extent. They havent thought about some of those questions in a long time. They kind of want to know how you will vote. So it is ships passing in the night. Its hard to really have a process that works for everybody , that works for the nominees and for the senators. I dont really have a great solution to it. That should be i wouldnt say that senators should be uninterested in how people are going to vote. Its actually a pretty important part of who we justice is going to be. I wouldnt count that off the table. If you put that aside, the qualities are the kinds of qualities i talk about when i talked about Justice Stevens. Integrity, independence, wisdom. Openmindedness. About the knowledge law. Of come is this a person who is going to keep learning . Will this person keep an open mind . Is this a person whos not afraid to be independent and go out on a limb sometimes . Who will berson honest and you will have a lot of integrity in the way they approach decisionmaking . That is what you should look for. Absolutely. Lets lighten it up a bit. ,ne of the things ive learned the Washington Press has identified you as the hippest justice. It must be a low bar. [laughter] i wasnt going to say it, but you said it. Is it true . What qualifies me as hip . I dont think so. [laughter] im wondering what you think accounts for that. You have a reputation out there. Ive seen a couple things. Books, youveomic been called special k. [laughter] help us out here. I dont know where thats coming from. I threw out an opinion with a lot of comic book references in it. I didnt put them in gratuitously. It was an opinion about a patent case. The patent was on this glove that you put on and then you went like this and webs came out of the fingers. Spiderman, right. I once wrote an opinion for love spiderman references. Maybe thats where it comes from. Ive heard you quoted dr. Seuss. There you go. Ebody just sent me today has anybody read my opinion of v8 . The fish. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. It has now become associated at the end of and every year when clerks asked justices to sign their things, justices are asked to sign photographs of themselves mostly. Im asked to sign one fish, two fish. [laughter] maybe that accounts for it. Somebody just sent me any mail today imemail not going to say this. [laughter] she doesnt want to make news. [laughter] that there are strong friendships on the bench. You have taken really strong opposition in terms of your positions against her colleagues. How does that impact the way you interact with one another . What kind of institutional mechanisms are present that actually support and promote your ability to continue to have deep friendships with people that you vehemently disagree with . I like to think i like to read a strong defense. Im not the only one on the court who knows how to do that. We do write some strong words about each other. Right that we remain we have great relationships on the court. It is a collegial institution. There are really good french upon the court among people who disagree with each other about many things. So, why . Colleague, my old colleague who i miss a lot, Justice Scalia, he used to have a line where he said, if you take this personally, you are in the wrong business. I think that is basically true. We are dealing with important matters. Of course, we are going to criticize each other. Of course we are going to tell each other, you got the long really wrong today. That doesnt mean that we cant think that the other person is operating in good faith and is a good person. It seems to me that you can have very good friendships with people you disagree with. For that matter, not everybody would agree with you like, right . You dont like everybody would agree with. You should be able to like people you dont agree with. That. K we all get one of the things that binds us together, there are only eight other people in the world who really know what my job is like. Job where you cant talk to a lot of people about it. In that sense, its a pretty tight community. There we all are. Its just the nine of us doing this thing. We are the only people that can understand what the experience is like. You try to do other things. We have a lot of lunches together. Time that we hear an argument and every time we meet in conference, this is about four times a week for two weeks out of every month. Thats a lot. We go up to a dining room in the court. We have lunch together. There are rules about this lunch. Cant talkre, you about cases. More informal rule is that you cant talk about politics. The theory is, we have enough to fight about. Which shouldnt add anything to the list. So we talk about books and movies and theater and peoples families. All kinds of things. , Justice Ginsburg likes to get us to talk about opera. Nobody else really knows very much about it. [laughter] i think its a really good thing for the courts to do. It was a practice that Justice Oconnor really started and insisted on. I think she was a very wise person to do so. It just forges bonds of collegiality and makes people relate to each other as people. And not as that person who holds views that are so disagreeable to me. I want to go back to the idea of the role of dissent. , for yourself, how do you go about determining when it is more important to dissent that to build consensus among your colleagues. In particular about the common cause case. ,he recent case where the court 54 contentious decision in the court decided that it was not the courts job to intervene or try to resolve political gerrymandering issues. Dissent, you said, of all times to abandon the courts duty to declare the law, this was not the one. He went on to say, with respect and sadness, i dissent. Can you talk about what that was like for you . Yes. , the first point about, when do you dissent and when do you try to reach consensus, it is not always your choice to try to reach consensus. More than one person has to do it. Why is it that you arent having any trouble . [laughter] sometimes people want to go their own way. Times, everybody agrees. Maybe this was one of these cases. The court had tried to avoid the issue at times. Prior to last years decision. When we finally got around to deciding it, there were really two options. That wasnt a whole lot of room for compromise. Some issues i like that. Others are definitely not. I definitely dont think compromise is a dirty word. I think its really important in general to try to reach across perceived divisions and try to see if you can find any common ground. If you can find any room for compromise. I like to think it is something i do a lot. Sometimes, you cant. Either you have no takers or you cant because you cant. There a matter of fundamental principle at stake. Sometimes there isnt a third way or a compromise position. Was a decision i felt very strongly about. It was about whether the courts could get involved in partisan gerrymandering. It was not about the constitutionality of partisan janet to remembering. Everybody recognize that partisan gerrymandering of the extreme kind that we saw in two cases that came to the court, one was done by a republican legislature. One was done by a democratic legislature. It was a really extreme gerrymander. It deprived people in their respective states of the opportunity to have their votes mean anything. It was a kind of rigging elections. It was represented as picking their voters rather than voters picking the representatives. Nobody really argued that this was constitutional, done in this extreme way. The majority thought that the court just couldnt get involved in it. Manageablesented no standards for the court to decide when a gerrymander had gone too far. I thought that that was craig wong quite wrong. Courts around the country had actually worked pretty hard in developing exactly the kinds of manageable standards that the court, that the majority claimed to be demanding. It wasnt so hard to figure out exactly how these cases should be litigated. And when it was that some gerrymanders should be declared offlimits, like these ones. It was perfectly obvious that these two should have been invalidated. So, i did. I think i wrote a strong dissent. Hope, that was i not so much angry as deeply saddened. Court is note going to protect the basic structures of our democracy, then its hard to know what the courts role is. Court, the the majority failed to do that. I said so. [laughter] i agree. The court is tasked with interpreting and guarding the rule of law. Extreme partisan Political Climate that we are in , the highly contentious supreme , and confirmation process even the significant divisions among the justices themselves in cases that have political implications, im thinking about abortion, gun control, affirmative action, its hard for Many Americans not to see the court as political. What would you say to those who worry about the courts independence . Peoples the use and concerns about this can be exaggerated. That is not to say that theres not a kernel there. It out to be taken seriously. To put it in a broader someective, i think that people think this institutional always operates by these 54 54 votes and everything we do is like that. These part of the courts conservative and part is liberal. Thats all there is to say about the court. I dont think that thats right by a long stretch. About half the cases that we hear every year, these are only the most important cases, or the most difficult cases, they are almost all cases which have involved lower courts disagreeing with each other. That, half the cases we do each year are done unanimously. Another very substantial chunk of the cases we decide are not unanimous but they are pretty lopsided or even if they are closer, everybody is all scrambled. ,here is no way to read them as theres a conservative majority and a liberal minority, or anything like that. I think there are whole years that go by. Last year was a pretty good example. Take the 54ust cases, there were a lot of people doing what might be perceived as unusual things, making unusual alliances, finding unusual bedfellows. It would be very hard to look at justterm and say, thats the politicized court. I dont think you could do it. I dont want to dismiss the question at all. I do think that there are certain sorts of issues and they are hot button issues in society. Thatare often the issues get the frontpage treatment in the newspapers. Where there are really different ways of looking at those issues. I dont think that that is a matter of partisanship. Who is a democrat, who was a republican. Is a matter of different ways of looking at the constitution. Of understanding how to do constitutional interpretation. Different views of particular constitutional provisions. So for sure, there are real differences. Interpret some parts of the constitution which matter a lot to people . Say to what i would is, part of my message would be to the court and part of my message would be to the public. Think that everything i just said suggests the court should when it is doing this work. About trying as hard as it can not to look politicized and polarized and deeply divided. You are right. We live in a polarized time. The last thing the court should as polarized as every other institution in america. It would be great for the court to be seen as not that. The only way to be seen as not that is not to be that. So i think that theres a lesson for the court and how it operates. I would also say to the american public, they shouldnt jump to conclusions so fast on the basis of one decision or another, that we are decideour hardest to really difficult matters. We are all doing so in good faith. Sometimes, it will look like the world is falling in. Maybe it will look to other people liked the world is falling in because of another decision. Im not saying that people should give us always the benefit of the doubt if we dont deserve it. I think this issue that you raised is an issue for us. But i also think its important thathe public to recognize we actually are a different kind of institution. The onesution from from our buddies across the street. Thats important. In the in the interest of time, i will ask you one more question before we turn it to this is to the students. This goes back to your career and the idea come you have lots of starting lines. Weve all been at the starting line at one point. You have had many. I would love for you to tell me what that was like for one of them. I have three options. Pick whichever youd like to talk about. Youve been at the starting line is a junior justice, where you were for seven years before gorsuch joined the court. You were at the starting line is a solicitor general when you argued your very first appellate oral argument before the Supreme Court in citizens united. No pressure. Female dean first at harvard law school. Pick one of those were you can tell us. One of the first two. Which do you want to hear about . The junior justice one. All right. I was a junior justice for seven years. Its a pretty long stretch of time as these things go. The record is 11 years. Justice breyer just missed the record by about two weeks, i think. Justice breyer was the junior justice for 11 years. T is a junior Justice Justice . It is a hierarchical institution. In some ways, not in other ways. We all have the same vote. The chief justices vote doesnt count for any more than my vote. Ways, its a hierarchical institution. Particularjustice in i dont know how to say this. Gets hazed by everybody else. There are three things the junior justice does. One of them is semi serious. We gonior justice, when into the copper trim and discuss cases, it is just the nine of us. Somebody hasuss to take good notes. When we come out of the room, we will be able to tell everybody else what it is we have decided and they can issue the appropriate orders and things like that. Thats the junior justice job. That is sort of fun, actually. I do that in faculty meetings. Its a responsibility. When everybody else leaves the Conference Room and goes to eat lunch, the junior justice stays behind. All the ministry of staff of the court pours and and you deliver the news of what we have done. That is the serious role. The second role, because there are only the nine justices in it turnsrence room, out that sometimes people have to bring us stuff. , shall we say, forgetful. They forget their coffee, they havent taken the right file, they havent taken the right book. There a phone in the Conference Room. You can call back to your chambers and say, get my glasses or my coffee or my book. Somebody will come to the Conference Room and knock on the door. Not on the outer door, i should say. The Conference Room is this inner sanctum, holy of holy things. It has one door that you open from the inside. It faces another door. Somebody has to open that door from the outside. When somebody knocks on the door, you would think that the son who forgot the coffee [laughter] would go get the door, right . It turns out not. It turns out that the junior justice has to open the door. Really . Wow. Who is this for . They deliver it to the person who really needs that jolt of caffeine. Five years into my job, i injured my foot. I was Walking Around with one of those big boot contraptions. I dont know with any of you have ever worn them. The knock would come on the door. Still, everybody would sterritt me. [laughter] boy, she is really slow to the door these days. That is the second thing. The third thing is that they put you on the cafeteria committee. This is really their way of saying, you think you are hot stuff, you are a member of the Supreme Court. You just got confirmed. No, you will be on the cafeteria committee. You will meet once a month with a bunch of people to discuss what happened to the good stuff, which is cookies. [laughter] and then your colleagues do this stuff. We eat together a lot. Your colleagues do stuff like, there is too much salt in the soup. [laughter] somebody else would say, theres not enough salt in the soup. They do this obviously jokingly. In the end, they basically blame you for the cafeteria. [laughter] thats the job of a junior justice. I was delighted to pass it on to justice gorsuch. [laughter] i think its really unfair. He only had to be junior justice for a year. Thank you for sharing that. I could continue asking you so many more questions. [applause] because of my time, we will end this portion of the evening. We will turn our attention to the students. We have six students who have submitted questions that the justice is taking today. I will go ahead and bring those students into the conversation. We will hear from them in the interest of time, three minutes per question. [inaudible] pay no attention to the clock. We are good. We are going a little over. [laughter] we will go to dinner. We are in between dinner, oh boy. We have six students we are really excited about. I will ask leah fuji or to come up first, please. Student,thirdyear law editor in chief in chief of the law review. Please join us. Thank you so much for traveling to colorado law. Justice breyer admitted that the fact the controlling case conception was divided had no bearing on the undisputed allegations that it imposed as president. What effect if any does the courts unanimity or lack thereof have on the weight we afford president . I dont think it has much effect. We decide something is unanimous some things unanimously. End, the courts the court. The court reaches a judgment. That judgment needs to be respected except in the unusual people decidewhen that its appropriate to overrule precedent. 54, itits 90 or doesnt make much of a difference. The court speaks as the court regardless of the vote. Maybe theres a different fracturedor highly opinions of the court. If there really isnt a majority at all. In the justices have split every which way and one opinion ends up as controlling, maybe theres a difference analysis for that. Im not even quite sure of that. Operate in the same way. Thank you so much. I have jose . [applause] student. T year law good evening. There is some speculation that justices, particularly in their comments that oral arguments and in opinions, are talking more about just the case at hand, for example, the subtext in the competing analyses of due process between Justice Scalia and justice brennan. Extentstion is, to what should lawyers or the public read into this subtext . Istice kagan i cant say have thought about brennan since i was a civil procedure professor. Dont ask me to help either. [laughter] is, do we talk thet things other than issue at hand, i think in most cases, the issue at hand is quite enough. Im sure there are times when there is something offstage affecting what we do in arguments or in our opinions. But, i dont know, i think it is hard enough just deciding the cases. Sometimes a case is there is notpart some mystery decision driving the analysis. When you started off saying that are not what is at issue. I guess i thought you were going on a bit of a different direction. It made me think that the arguments are often when you watch a Supreme Court argument, we ask a lot of questions that are not really questions. Their statements with a question mark at the end. They are sort of speeches and then you raise your voice at the end. Think that is because the questions we ask really have an audience that is not just the lawyer at the podium, but we are talking to each other and telling each other how we are thinking about a particular case. Performs any important function on the court. Because we dont talk about cases before argument. It is only after argument that we talk about cases. Then we immediately start to go around the table and vote. If you are one of the people like me who votes last or near to last, it is pretty important to be able to have a forum where you can indicate how you feel about a subject before you get to the Conference Room. Usually, argument serves that purpose. Do it as a kind of somebody is standing at the podium and we are sort of directing our views to them. But the views are really directed to the other people on the bench and what might appear in a transcript like a bunch of questions being directed to lawyers are better understood as a conversation that the justices themselves are having prior to the first vote. Suzette thank you. May i have peter. A firstyear law student, just to fit in the environment the loss of environmental law society. Hello, Justice Kagan. You are so cool. [laughter] this is why it happens. [laughter] technology and social media have exploded over the past couple of years. What impact has this technological revolution had on the courts and how it operates . Justice kagan none. This is horrible. I will qualify that. Less than you might think. 1987rked for the court in and i came back in 2010. 23 years later. Hadhose 23 years, there been this technological revolution, communications revolution. I got to the court and i thought, it has just not touched the court at all. We dont use faxSecond Circuit is a machine. The Second Circuit literally communicate with each faxes. Hrough you may think that is really funny except the Supreme Court has not really gotten to faxes yet. The way we communicate with each other is we went out what we are writing and everyone is a person called chambers aid. The chambers aide walks around the building and just delivers it in copy on this kind of parchment like paper. Things about that we regret afterwards. [laughter] because whenever send emails at all. Never send emails at all. Some of us i think are perfectly proficient in use of technology within our chambers, but not across chambers. In the Conference Room, nobody brings laptops. Nobody brings any kind of modern device. Going to, and i am not name names, whose phone continually goes off. A pene most part, it is and paper type of thing. Is this terrible . The cord works remarkably well notwithstanding. This is true. Dont feel daytoday that our operations could be a lot better inwe start communicating modern ways. When i write an opinion, when my allks to stop for me, it is good. What strikes me about the technology question, it goes to this . I keep coming back to. If you wanted to put together a were of the people who most proficient in new Technology Development or new scientific developments, i doubt you would come up with the nine of us. For one thing, we are just too old. Extra burden on us, i think, to recognize that, to recognize there is lots of new stuff that we dont know, and figure out how to learn about it before we make mistakes. I think we all feel that responsibility. I think there are plenty of ways to use the stuff you take for granted as a little bit of a suzette we have to be more questions. Connor, from the silicon flatiron groups had you see the role and composition of the group. How do you see the role and composition of the branch, are you concerned about the legislature and executive . Justice kagan i dont know. We have had a contentious legislature and strong executive in this country for a while. Im not sure why the court, whether it is more or less contentious, more or less strong, i dont think the court. Hould define its own role based on what happens in the executive or legislature. Which is not to say that over long stretches of time, developments in the political process surrounding us do not affect what the court does. Of course, it does. That on a morenk shortterm basis that we should or curb ourselves either become less aggressive or more aggressive. Based on what happens to be happening at that moment in the political process. I think we should look after our own business. Suzette chelsea. Thirdyear law student pursuing a career in public defense. It is really wonderful to have you. I know we are all honored. You touched on this question already but it is the question i submitted so hopefully it allows you to assist allows you to expand. How do you think the court will change or be affected by the increasing use of Party Affiliation and nominations and appointments to the bench . If there are ways to maintain neutrality of the system with the increasing polarization of party ideals . Justice kagan i think we have talked about that. All of us wish that the confirmation process was less politicized. I think all of us have in our heads some golden age where Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg were confirmed to the court by 980 votes because everybody understood that, even though they had extremely different views, they were both peoplent and they both of great integrity. Independence and wisdom. Is that all of us sort of times where those how the process should work rather than these sort of pitched battles between parties where every nominee gets sent up fromraised for a few votes the party that is not the president who appointed. Think,our or five, i republican votes, not many. It has been like that for a considerable period of time. I would have to be a smarter person to know how to get back to those days. Of water has been under the bridge, if that is the expression. At the end, that is Something Congress to decide. Azette last but not least, second year law student, copresident of the black law student association. Thank you for being here. You had the wonderful fortune of clerking for justice Thurgood Marshall. You described him as the greatest lawyer of the 20th century. What was it like clerking for him and what was the most meaningful experience you had with him . Justice kagan i think for sure he was the greatest lawyer of the 20th century in a few respects. When you think about who did the ist justice in their life, dont know anyone who did the most justice as a lawyer than Thurgood Marshall did. [applause] a phenomenalust lawyer. He is a lawyer of the kind that you dont really see anymore. We have become a specialized fashion. People who do appellate work dont do trials and vice versa. People who do civil cases dont do criminal cases and vice versa. He did everything. 20 cases fromst the Supreme Court and won almost all of them. The jim crowscross south, stopping in these little courthouses, and represent people who were being charged with criminal offenses. Mostly africanamerican defendants being tried by white juries. He would be there trial lawyer and, the next day, he would go back up to the august halls of the Supreme Court, and the next day he would go back down to mississippi. On and on until he broke the back of the jim crow system. He you could see why he was so good at all of these different kinds of lawyering. He had an ability to get to the heart of a problem, to see straight through to what was most important in any legal issue. And he kept his eyes on the prize for his entire career, to use that expression. He did not let himself be distracted. He had a strategy for how he wanted to go about fighting the fight for racial equality. So, he was a strategic thinker. But he could also do all the little stuff. He was a forest and a trees person. He was really quite remarkable in that way. My most amazing part of clerking for him was, in addition to Everything Else he was, he was the worlds best storyteller. Anyone tell heard stories better. He had all of these voices that he did. He was like a mimic. Voices, faces. Do allnot embarrassed to of these crazy kind of expressions. Then he had the worlds best stories. The worlds most important stories. Was hiss whether it boyhood in segregated Baltimore Howard law school where he met Charles Hamilton houston where they started really developing the strategy that led to the eradication of jim crow, or all the stories time as aout of his Legal Defense fund. Stories about other civil rights leaders, stories about president s and senators whom he had met. Sometimes, they were really sad stories but he also had this really comic bent that would make you laugh, make you cry. You felt, when you were a click with him, that you were just getting something that you could not have gotten in however many books you read. Into as this window crucially important part of american history. I think he knew that was what he was given his clerks, among other things. An education in the law of the kind that all Supreme Court justices give their clerks, but he was also giving them an education in american history, justice. I hope i never forget those lessons. [applause] suzette we have to say goodbye. I do want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of everyone here for your wisdom, humor, and your time. It has been a true joy. I want to thank some other folks as well. As you know, it takes a village to pull off Something Like this. Let me just roll the credits real quick. I do want to think folks who have worked on this. Andrew sorensen, melissa nia delgado,use jennifer sullivan, laura dimart ino, shane thompson, nicole drane, of course the matthew team working hard. [applause] so, we do have a token of appreciation for you. This is a special gift. This ceramic vase is very special. It is made by an artist in boulder. Shout out to sally. In the vase, these are paper flowers. We could not help ourselves because you love comic strips. These are made of comic books trips. Spiderman and some of your other friends. Out toto give a shout the artist. We are hoping that you will have this in chambers or in your home and think fondly of the time you came here to colorado. Justice kagan thank you so much. [applause] suzette again, thank you so much. Come back again. We have a lot more questions for you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its here are some featured programs this weekend. Today spend a day in the life with three of the 2020 democratic hopefuls. Senator michael bennett. Mayor butejedge and senator booker. And well look at u. S. Relations with iron and security in the gulf region with a panel of former u. S. Ambassadors to persian gulf countries. From clinton, george bush, and the obama administration. Saturday a house ways and means hearing on the difficulties in caring for aging americans including the lack of reasonably priced longterm care for Senior Citizens and their care givers. Then at 8 00 eastern actor and environmental advocate ted dancen at a house Natural Resources ske hearing. Sunday at 9 00 p. M. Eastern campaign 2020 cspan speaks with president ial candidate patrick and bennett. Former governor talks about his background, his friendship with president obama. His aspiration fs elected president and his late entry into the crowded democratic field of candidates. Then at 9 30 senator bennett on why he decided to run for president , his leadership style nd stance. Coming up on