Of the american prudence. The stevens lecture brings the distinguished jurors to the life of our community. We are fortunate to have welcomed in previous years several outstanding judges including a number of Supreme Court justices who have enriched our thoughtprovoking insight on the role of our judiciary and its highest court and the nations legal and related political borders. The u. S. Supreme court has a monumental role and endeavors to guard the values and of liberty and a poverty and in solidarity of the constitution. It does so against the excesses of majority will partisanship or a president ial and the Supreme Court is made of nine individual human beings with her or his individual perspective and on the precise guideposts in decisionmaking the most proud to have one of those with us this evening. This years stephens lecture is the honorable illinois kagan and the Supreme Court. applause notably, Justice Kagan replaced just a stevens on the Supreme Court after delay justice announced his retirement and president barack obama appointed her and prior to joining the Supreme Court kagan served as the first female solicitor general and in that position she made a number of important cases in the Supreme Court. Shes had a storied legal career since graduated from Harvard Law School. Not only in Public Service but in the private sector and the academy. She was a law clerk and served president bill clinton and president obama and practice law under washington d. C. And a professor at Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School and has been at the harvard law for five years planted comments that kagan brings a fresh perspective to the Supreme Court. Based on her prowess, technology and pop culture. laughs i would add, that she also brings to the court a wisdom and i love for the law and the justice it could yield. An awareness of the people and the world that it touches. Joining Justice Kagan onstage is the director of modern white center, Provost Center subset malveaux. applause . Professor is a nationally recognized expert and commentator an silver class action litigation. She joined the university of colorado just over a year ago from the university and since then, her commitment to cutting edge scholarships, innovating teaching Public Service contributed to the life of law school. After a discussion with Justice Kagan, malveaux will take a few questions for the justice that have been submitted by the law students in advance. Ive been asked to addressed a view household members before i welcome Justice Kagan and professor malveaux to the stage. First, lets make sure that your cellphones are turned off or on silent. I feel like ive turned into a dean but also, photography is not allowed by the members of the credit press who are taking pictures and finally, please remain seated as Justice Kagan and professor malveaux exit the stage with my pleasure and honor to ask all to join me in welcoming to the stage, United States a prime court elena kagan and professor suzette malveaux. applause thank you. I cant see anything. It looks like there are a lot of you here. Im very honored. Its great to be here. Over 2000, i think. 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 stevens lecture. One of the special things about you being here, as the dean 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. laughs 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. applause and you are all in the front which is fantastic. You got the good seeds. I dont know who they put up there. laughs the students are vips. Thats what its all about. Exactly. Everybody else this is for 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. 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. I wanted to keep my options open. I dont really describe this as 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. Does that make me weird . I dont know. From my very first day, i loved law school because it combines two things. One is that i loved the thinking that law school demanded. I loved the kind of analytic rigor that law school demanded. I loved the logical puzzle kind of enterprise that law is. Trying to think through complicated legal problems, sometimes arcane legal doctrines, figuring it all out in the way you might figure out a crossword puzzle. I also loved 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 . laughs i am the wrong person to help with technology, trust me. laughs applause ill try not to move my head too much from now on. It had this really practical aspect to it. You could see how it could make 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 students 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. I think that most of the best things that happen in peoples legal careers, 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. I think ill become the dean and then Supreme Court justice. You skipped a few too. laughs i couldnt keep a job, really. Every four years, i was off doing something else. Im looking forward to keeping this for a while. laughs applause it looks like a dream life. Im interested 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. I thought, law school has finally outed me for the fraud that ive always been. It wasnt true. I turned myself around and figured it out. Theres nobody who has, theres nobody maybe somebody i have flitted around a lot. Some 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. If you are more like me, there 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. When i was dean at harvard, i 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. Im a big believer in, you cant 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. It ended up being i didnt get it. I spent the next decade doing all kinds of things that i really enjoyed. I became a justice anyway. Want to turn our it i want to turn our attention to a lot of folks here in colorado. There are certainly legal issues that are salient in a Square States like colorado. Im thinking about indian law, waterlaw, 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. It was a waterlogged opinion 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. I grew up in new york city. I went to school in massachusetts. Water law was not high on the curriculum. I think you learned there are so many things we dont know. Water law might be one of them. The next 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 question about john stevens, 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. You could be forgiven for saying 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 keep an open mind, to figure out how to learn about them. To know what you dont know and to have strategies for learning about them. That might come in the context of one particular case or it might come in a broader context. I think that 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. One of the things that that brings up is an important issue of diversity on the court. The court is a whole as a 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 ethnicity, even geographic 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. In general, i dont think diversity necessarily means that you will get a different set of views on the court. If you think about women, there 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 . Whether its five or nine, 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. What i think 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. The time when i most thought that, when i 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. There was a case about a 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 Supr