My name is matt and an associate professor of policy and government and director of undergraduate program in philosophy, politics and economics. Ppe here at george mason. The ppe program is honored to be the institutional sponsor and host of the Roger Wilkens lectures. We are grateful for the trust and support placed by the university. The attraction between the pgd ferdinand of these lectures im glad you asked. I spend a fair amount of time explaining what ppe is and what makes the program unique. I can go on. Really, i can go on but today im going to go straight to the bottom line. It explained that the scope helps students that create Better Solutions through the difficult and pressing problems that arise in the public life of a complex society. The problems that arise in the process in what Roger Wilkins in the first chapter of his autobiography had called with immense understatement complicated at times such as there are today. Ppe offers the foundation for students to build meaningful careers in civil service, journalism, business and the law and other socially engaged fields and endeavors. In this regard its my hope that the generations of students will set their sights on the example set by Roger Wilkins life and career. Again, we couldnt be prouder of our association in this legacy. I have three brief Program Notes to make before turning over the podium. The first is you are going to be able to find an archive of this event as well as past lectures and future lectures and more information about the program on the website which is ppe. Gmu. Edu. Dont take pictures pictures of consideration of those around you. At the conclusion of the event im going to ask you all to hold your seats, and we will allow Justice Kagan to leave first and then we can followup after her. Without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce the president of george mason university, president anne holton. [applause] anne thank you, professor, and thank you all. What a great crowd. Its a delight to see you all today, and i invite you to join me in extending a warm welcome to Justice Kagan. We are thrilled to have you here at this access to excellence. We are so proud of george mason and one of the things we are proud about here at george mason is we can offer our students opportunities like this, to hear from you today. We are here for the Second AnnualRoger Wilkins lecture. We like to think that, well, Roger Wilkins had a lot of Important Roles in his life, but we like to think that his most Important Role was his 19 years of service here at george mason university. Mentoring and fostering the growth of young minds and lives is a professor of history and culture, the program is one that honors our most distinguished professors and i believe we have a number of robinson professors in the room if you all could give us a wave. Thank you all for being here. He did a few other things in his life. He was the first africanamerican in a top leadership role at the department of justice in the 1960s where he helped president kennedy and then president johnson pass the amazing important Civil Rights Act of the era. He was at the Washington Post and New York Times editorial role and he was at the Washington Post during the watergate era and wrote some of the important editorials that shared in the Pulitzer Prize for the team won for that work. So, we are excited to honor him today through this continuing lecture series and we are so excited to have Justice Kagan here with us today. She and i have a number of things in common that you may not know. We share our undergraduate and graduate alma mater. We are both princeton undergrads. She wrote the daily princetonian, which i read at harvard she was on the wall review, which i didnt read. [laughter] and then we went on to have a significant overlap in our professional lives as well with a judge on the juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court for the city of richmond is literally the baby court in every way, and she as you know is a justice on the highest court in the land. Even though the courts are quite different, there are some significant overlaps and they are both all about the rule of law. The judges get all excited about the rule of law and not everybody quite understands that all the time, but the fundamental part of the fundamental essence of the rule of law is the principle that all rules apply equally to everybody. So, it is fundamentally about equality. When you travel in other countries. As i have the occasion to do in life where the rule of law doesnt apply, where courts will where there isnt an independent functioning judiciary, where people in certain parties or groups dont have to comply with the above rules others have to comply with, you remember the importance of this thing we take for granted in our system, the rule of law. One of the consequences of having an independent judiciary system as we do is the judges cant always speak freely to defend their positions and they sometimes have to take unpopular positions because of the rule of law so dictate. And yet they can only speak for their opinions. Therefore it makes it extra special to have an opportunity to hear from the justice here in an academic setting where we can hear more about how the whole system works so im very excited to hear her conversation today. Before i turn the microphone over, i want to acknowledge that we have professor wilkins wife, patricia, here with us who is a retired from her role as professor of Georgetown Law School and served in many other Important Roles as well. His daughter amy is with us, also a great advocate especially an advocate for children and families and all kinds of important opportunities, and most especially i am delighted that we are here with a chance to welcome his daughter elizabeth who will be following me on stage in just a minute. Elizabeth is the senior counsel to the dc attorney general. She is a yale undergrad, we will forgive her, and undergrad, but most importantly today she had an opportunity to clerk for Merrick Garland on the dc court of appeals and then for Justice Kagan at the court. For those of you that have any inkling of that, the law clerk to judge relationship is a very important one, partly because judges are so isolated. Your clerks are your family, they are your when i went to going to the world, and i know that elizabeth is thrilled to be here with us and Justice Kagen kagan and vice versa. I will hand over to elizabeth wilkins. [applause] elizabeth good afternoon and thank you for that introduction. It is a pleasure to be here today speaking at the lecture that honors our dad and also introducing my former boss and mentor. It feels fitting to me that we are in a sense bringing together these two intellectual giants and who have dedicated their career to public service. Above all else, our dad taught to us, his students coming in freely to anyone who would listen or read that we each have a fundamental civic duty to make our country better. He brought all of his considerable talents and intellectual firepower to bear on major questions of justice in his lifetime using whatever position or power he had in the service of those that have less. He did that most elegantly have with his pen writing time and time again the calls to evil what he saw around him. Justice kagan in her term spent a career putting her talent to work in service of the public good and expects the same of others. I can tell you i remember when i was interviewing to clerk with her, she noticed i worked for the Obama Administration at the time and i wasnt much older than many of the people in this room and she asked me one pointed question about the experience, what was the most important thing that you did for your country . To be clear, i was like 24 at the time i was working the Obama Administration so i felt a little overwhelmed trying to answer this question, but that is Justice Kagan. She has high expectations. There are no wallflowers, no waiting around. You better show up and get things done no matter what your position is. That certainly has been Justice Kagan throughout her career. A born and raised new yorker, she attended princeton, oxford and harvard law before starting her career as a law clerk first on the dc circuit and then to Justice Thurgood marshall. She stopped briefly before moving to academia as a professor at the University Law school. She then was asked to come into the Clinton Administration for the associate white House Counsel and been domestic policy adviser. She went back to harvard law as a professor and became the dean where shes widely credited for institutional reform. President obama then appointed her to be the first female solicitor general of the United States and then quickly followed up by appointing her to the Supreme Court. Two less well known but nevertheless very important achievements, Justice Kagan was the dean who brought free coffee to harvard law and frozen yogurt to the Supreme Court which i appreciate very much. In all seriousness, i was extremely fortunate to have clerked for a person like Justice Kagan. If our father taught me how to be passionate, dedicated to service, Justice Kagans chambers taught me diligence, tenacity and commitment to excellence necessary to give her absolute all. I will not soon forget going to work before 5 a. M. When the moon was still high when working on an opinion, but i also will never forget what it seems to take your responsibilities responsibilities seriously, to turn over every stone and to pursue every line until you are sure youve gotten things right. Like our god give you could good dad, shes known for the power of her pain and every sentence is in place to construct the most sustained argument and possible. Her commitment to writing accessible, forceful and exceedingly well reasoned opinions for parties in the case, for the court, and for the development of our law is unparalleled and we are all lucky to have her. This afternoon, Justice Kagan will be in conversation with Steve Pearlstein to whom our family is extremely grateful, and he has been the driving force behind these lectures honoring our dad and like my dad, he was is a professor here at george mason and like our dad, he is a semireformed journalist originally from massachusetts he started out as a tv reporter and even started his own political magazine before coming down here to work at the Washington Post. He won a pulitzer for his reporting on the coming financial crisis before starting here in 2011 where his dedication to his students, to the institution and to learning is ever evident. I look forward to a great conversation. Thank you. [applause] steve good afternoon. I dont know whether any of you saw this, elizabeth has great red shoes. Next year im going to wear my red shoes. [laughter] thank you all for being here and thanks to you, Justice Kagan. Justice kagan it is an honor. It really is an honor. First off, i do everything he elizabeth asks me to do or tells me to do, but this one was a really special privilege and treat because you know, i never had the opportunity to meet Roger Wilkins. I feel as though i know him through his daughter and his wife. He was such a superb educator and journalist and lawyer and most of all, public servant. Its great to see you carrying on his legacy, elizabeth, and its great to be here for this event. Steve so, there were a lot of undergraduates and some law students here. This is a very diverse campus. People from all sorts of countries and all sorts of walks of life and classes but they all have one thing in common. They are all in massive anxiety about their careers. [laughter] Justice Kagan chill out. [laughter] steve so, lets talk about careers, particularly yours. Harvard law school, law school, white house, dean, solicitor general. Was there a grand plan . Did you plan that whole thing out . Justice kagan yeah, it was all written down. Thats a joke. Come on. [laughter] steve in high school though you appeared in your yearbook wearing a gown and holding a gavel. Was that just coincidence . Justice kagan a bunch of us raided the costume closet in the Drama Department and that is how i ended up, but i had no idea i was even going to go to law school before basically the year i went to law school. I guess my view of the way things have turned out is that most of it was serendipity and unplanned. College students, law students, they tend to plan too much and the best advice you can give people is planning some is good and important, but its really just keep your eyes open to opportunities that might just pop up, because i think most of life happens that way. Things come about that you never would have expected and the only thing you have to know how to do is how to grab those opportunities when they do arrive. Steve and figure out the good ones from the not so good ones. Youve had some setbacks. At one point, you were nominated to the dc circuit by president clinton and as it sometimes happens, you didnt get a hearing or vote. At one point you were a candidate for the president of harvard. Tell us about those disappointments. If you had gotten those jobs you might not be sitting here today. So how should we think about this kind of disappointments . Justice kagan those are high cost of disappointments. [laughter] you know, i also had some. The funny thing about if somebody looks at a resume that has all these great jobs on it and it doesnt have all the jobs you didnt get. There are plenty of jobs i didnt get along the way that i thought i wanted, but i dont know. I think what i tended to discover and you know, the example that you gave about the dc circuit judge schiff is a good example of that. When a door closes someplace, a window opens. That might be magical thinking that it happened often enough but i believe it. Sometimes the disappointments are the best things that ever happened or could ever happen to you and that was true for examples of the judgeship. I was nominated to be a judge minus 39. So i would have been very young and i would have spent my entire life on the court. I love the work i do, that when i look back on it, i think you know, instead i had a decade where i did many other things and i developed lots of different sorts of skills. Now i am a judge, so i get to that, too. It was a good thing i think that happened that i had an opportunity to explore some things i never would have had a chance to add that come about in the way i thought i wanted. Steve can you convince yourself of that at the time or is it hard to . Justice kagan its hard to convince yourself at the time. I went back to teach, and i love teaching. Ive always loved that. And then just a few years after that, i had the opportunity to become the dean of harvard, and i learned so much in that role. I learned how to do so many things that i never would have you know, do required you to be a person i didnt really expect myself to be and to develop all different kind of skills. It was a very steep learning curve, which the jobs i like are those that require you to learn all kinds of new things. It was a great decade before i got to where i am now. Steve so lets talk about the law. What did you learn about the law and about judging from Justice Marshall . And i should say that you were one of Justice Marshalls last clerks. Roger wilkins was one of his first out of law School Working for Thurgood Marshall before he was the justice when he was a legal defense. The line goes from marshall to roger to you to elizabeth, and i hope beyond. So, what did you learn from Justice Marshall about the wall judging . W and Justice Kagan mostly what you learn from Justice Marshall is how people can advance justice. I dont think anybody has ever done so much of it as he has. I mean, i view him as the greatest lawyer of the 20th century, in part because he did the most justice in his time, and in part because he was just a great lawyer. He was miraculously skilled at all kinds of different things. You know, you dont see lawyers like this anymore, people who were great trial lawyers, people who were great appellate lawyers. He did criminal cases, civil cases, he did you know, one day he was arguing before the Supreme Court, and the next day he was on a train down to some small segregated town in the deep south where, you know, he was fighting to defend somebody. A lot of the cases he did with Death Penalty cases in front of all white juries and it was hard to win cases. Everything he did, whether it was the big cases, the kind of brown v. Board and developing the entire strategy, and whether it was the small cases, which was just making sure that individual defendants, not so small individual defendants got the justice they deserve. Everything he did was all about bringing justice to this country, and in particular to th