Including a number of u. S. Prima Court Justices who have enriched our community with. Provoking we are fortunate to have welcomed several outstanding judges including a number of u. S. Approval for justice who have enriched our community with thoughtprovoking speeches. Valueeavors to guard the and architecture of liberty, equality, and solidarity found in the constitution. It is done so against the excesses of majority rule, partisanship, or president ial overreach. The Supreme Court, however, is of nine individual human beings. Each with her or his individual perspective on the balances struck in the constitution, guidepostsprecise on decision making. This year is stephen lecturer is the honorable elana kagan, associate justice of the United States of court. [applause] notably, Justice Kagan replaced Justice Stevens on the Supreme Court after the late justice announced his president barack obama appointed her to the court. Justice kagan served as the first female solicitor general of the United States and in that position, she argued a number of important cases to the Supreme Court. A storied legal career since graduating from harvard law school, not only in Public Service, but also in the private sector and the academy. Clerk for Justice Thurgood marshall, sir president bill clinton and president obama, practiced law at the powerhouse firm of williams and connelly in washington dc, and was a professor at Chicago Law School and harvard law school, eventually serving as dean of harvard law for five years. Kagan brings a fresh perspective to the Supreme Court based on her prowess with technology and pop culture. [laughter] that she i would add also brings to the court grounded in a love for the law and a justice that can heal and an awareness of the people and the world that it touches. Joining Justice Kagan on the stage this evening as the director of the byron white center, provost professor of civil rights law, suzette malveaux. [applause] the professor is a nationally recognized expert and frequent commentator on civil rights in class action litigation. She joined the university of Colorado Law School just over a year ago and since then, her commitment to cutting edge integrative teaching, and Public Service has contributed to the life of the law school. After a discussion with Justice Kagan, professor malveaux will take a few questions for the justice that have been submitted in advance. We address that some household matters before i welcome them to the stage. First, please make sure your cell phones are turned off or on silent. Now i feel like i have turned into someone who is a dean trying to keep everyone in order. Also, photography is not allowed except by accredited members of the press who have received permission. At the end of the event, please remain seated until Justice Kagan and professor malveaux have left the stage. It is my pleasure and honor to ask you all to join me and welcoming to the stage United States Supreme Court Justice Elena kagan and professor suzette malveaux. [applause] thank you. I cannot see anything, but it looks like there is a lot of you here. [laughter] Justice Kagan i am very honored. Prof. Malveaux there are, great demand for you to be here and it is such an honor. Thank you for being here. We are absolutely thrilled that you are here for the stevens lecture. One of the special things about you being here for the stevens lecture as the dean mentioned is , i know that this lecture is actually named after Justice John Paul stevens who was your predecessor on the bench. In fact, he gave his first inaugural lecture in 2011. I have heard you speak eloquently at his funeral howice and elsewhere about his seat on the bench but you cannot fill his shoes. Justice kagan too large. [laughter] prof. Malveaux can you tell us a little bit about his influence on you and what it is like to Carry Forward his legacy . So sad foran it was me and for all of my colleagues this summer when he passed away. He was a great, great demand. I never had the chance to serve with him, so unlike many of my colleagues, i cannot tell stories about what it was like to be on the bench with him or in conference with them, but he is and long has been a hero of mine. Has a passage in one of his books about how he was honored to take the place of Louis Brandeis on the court. Particularthere are seats and Everybody Knows which justices have filled those particular seats. And i sit in a seat which when Louis Brandeis, phil douglas, and john stevens, and then me, which is quite extraordinary. Stevensvens, if john felt that way about Louis Brandeis, i feel that way about john stevens. He was a man of extraordinary oflliance, but even more extraordinary wisdom which is not the same thing. He was a man of great integrity. He was a man of great independence. He always did what he thought was right for you no matter what , and sometimes that meant that he went his own way, and was writing an opinion that no one else signed on or voted in a way that nobody else joined, but that was ok with him. He had his own view of the law, and he stuck with it, and was extremely independentminded. He was a deeply kind person. Of his colleagues appreciated as well as his clerks and everybody else in the court. Judicialn terms of his legacy, what he will go down in history for is the deep commitment to the rule of law, to the principal that no person, high or mighty, is above the law. Subject to the same legal rules, and company and principle that whether you are powerful or whether you are 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. For me, that is a great legacy. Of the magnificent 35 year career on the court. Prof. Malveaux that is really, really important for yo absolutely. Really, really important. Absolutely. Can i get a show of hands for the students that are here . Great, wow. Awesome. [applause] Justice Kagan and you are all in the front, too, which is fantastic. I dont know who they put up there. Prof. Malveaux the students are vips. Justice kagan what is this all about except for the students. Prof. Malveaux exactly. What else is everybody else therefore. Prof. Malveaux this is for the students. Why did you go to law school, will what it was like for you to be a law student, and if you could give some advice to our law students about the approach of i went to law school for all the wrong reasons. [laughter] i was ace in when dean i was talking to a bunch of College Students on whether they should go to law school. I was saying these formulaic things about how you should think about whether this is what you want to do. You should not go to law school just because you cant think of anything else. [laughter] 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 could not think of anything else. [laughter] i wanted to keep my options open. This asreally prescribe the way to approach. Say even if you went to law school for the wrong reasons, when i started law school i loved it from the beginning. [laughter] does that make me weird . I dont know. Day. My very first i love to law school because it combined two things. Loved the thinking that law school demanded. I left the analytic rigor it demanded. Puzzle kindogical of enterprise that law is. Trying to think through complicated legal problems. Doctrinesarcane legal and figuring it out. In a way you may figure out a crossword puzzle. I also loved this was not an abstract or sterile enterprise. This was a way to make a difference in the world. That it was very obvious to me in my Law School Classes how it was that law was about the betterment of our society. The advancement of human welfare. O. H. We will just [laughter] i am the wrong person to help. [laughter] are we doing all right . [applause] im trying not to move my head too much. It had this really practical aspect to it. Could makeee how it a difference in the world. How a person using it could make a difference in the world. That is what i loved about law school. Studentsuld say to about what to do with early years in law school and legal careers. You have this great opportunity to find out in laws quote what really moves you. Things youe kinds of really care about. They will be different 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 i would want to go to work every day. I would feel as though i was doing a job full of purpose and meaning. That is a great thing. Not everybody does. Some people find it later on in their legal career. To try and use laws will as an opportunity to experiment and Different Things and an opportunity to find that passion, that sense of this is what i care about. To not be so worried about planning. I am a big antiplanner. [laughter] i think most law students are planters. Nners. Yourself, Justice Kagan told us not to plan, it will be a good corrective. [laughter] the best most things that happened in peoples legal careers when i think of people whose careers i look at it and say, to leave a life of law like that. It is luck and serendipity. You make your luck and there are ways of putting yourself in a position to be offered certain opportunities. For the most part, things come out of the blue i think. That is the way life works. Student andmany law Young Lawyers put themselves on this plan. I have to do this and then i have to do that and that prepares me for the next thing. They will say no to opportunities that sound fun and exciting and interesting because it is not on the plan. Because they worry about if leaving the plan, how do i get back on the plan . Most fun and interesting and exciting parts of most legal careers are when people leave the plan and they look around. They notice something. They say i never considered that for a minute. Fun, that is a lot more than what im doing now. I dont know. I really think the best legal careers are the ones that are guided by a sense of, is this more fun than i am doing now . [laughter] i think i will go do that. That makes sense. You have them looking around for fun. Think about your career and the way it has gone. You start off at harvard law. The dean did a good recap here. Then you are clerking on the d. C. Circuit judge and then for Justice Thurgood marshall. Then jumping to teach at the university of saqqara chicago. General andor Supreme Court justice. Use get the fear. [laughter] you skipped a few. [laughter] i couldnt keep a job. [laughter] for years i was off doing something else. I am looking forward to keeping this for a while. [applause] from an outsiders point of view, it looks like a dream life. In the times you failed. Andyou tell us about those how you deal with disappointment . You look at my resume and to see the jobs i got but you do not see the ones i didnt get. Truly. For every job i got there were two that i did not get. Law school i did very badly my first semester. I thought law school has finally outed me for the fraud i have always been. [laughter] it wasnt true. I turned myself around and figured it out. Nobodys maybe somebody you know. I have flitted around a lot. People are going to do one thing and get one job and it will be perfect. I will do that for my whole life. If that is what makes you happy, that is fantastic. , thereare more like me were plenty of jobs i did not get. Was bill did not get clinton nominated me to be a judge. The senate did not give me a hearing and i never became a judge. There were other jobs in government that i did not get. Harvard i wasn at considered to be president of the university. I didnt get that. Sometimes they were highclass disappointments. [laughter] i dont know. In you justeliever cant let disappointments get you down too much. Little bit of magical thinking but i am a big believer in the idea that when a door opens, when a war closes a window opens. It may be the best thing you ever happen to. When irue of my was nominated to be a judge. I was in my late 30s. I had just worked for years and the Clinton White house. Thought i wanted to be a judge. The senate thought otherwise. [laughter] up being i did not get it. I spent the next decade doing all kinds of things i really enjoyed. I became a justice anyway. It worked out fine. [laughter] attentionto turn our we have a lot of folks here in colorado. There are certain legal issues that are salient in a square state like colorado. What i am thinking about is indian law, water law, Environmental Protection those sorts of things. Wondering what your approach is . How do you go about educating yourself when it comes to those sorts of complex area of law . But also other cultures you may not be intimate with. How do you educate yourself and your colleagues to address those matters . It is interesting you said here you are in the west. I remember my fourth year on the court. I was assigned an opinion by the chief justice. Involvingaterlogged kansas, nebraska, and colorado. Colorado was a more big player. It was a big 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. Not high on the curriculum. [laughter] i think you learn it the same way there are so many things we dont know. Border law may be one. I once wrote an opinion that was complicated about electricity regulation. I knew nothing about. There are those kinds of things. It happens all the time that there are things you do not know. Perspectives you never encountered. You said cultures you never experienced. I think you are just under obligation to keep learning. And justice or a judge going back to your first question about john stevens. Court,got to the supreme i asked Justice Stevens for any advice he may offer. He was a humble man. I dont think he much like giving advice. I really tried to push him. He said, i think the best thing i ever did was that i try to learn something new every single day i was on the court. You think about that. This is a man who served for 35 years. You could be forgiven for saying around your 34 [laughter] i think i learned it all. But he never did. I think that is the attitude a justice has to take. There are all kinds of things in this world and a lot that i do not know. Mind and figure out how to learn about them. To know what you dont know and have a strategy for learning about them. In the context of one particular case. Or it may come in a broader context. Advice the john stevens think about the things you have to learn and go out and learn them is the way to be a judge. I hear you. I think one of the things that brings up is an issue of diversity on the court. The court as a whole does not reflect the demographic of american society. If we look at the justices themselves, many are lawyers and come from a small number of law schools. Only three women on the bench. I do say only. Not a lot of diversity when we look at race, religion, ethnicity, and even geographic. What role do you think if any peoples experiences and backgrounds shape how the court makes his decisions . Is there any good example where you think it matter . I am a bigal believer in diversity in the judiciary. For a different reason than that which i will come back to. In general, i do not think diversity necessarily means you will get a different set of views on the court. If you think about women. Women there are lots of women in the world and they have different views. My colleague, Justice Ginsburg, once was asked how many women there should be . She said nine, how about that . [laughter] [applause] whether it is 549, you could have nine women whether it is five or nine you could have women that were all like me. You could have that are none like me or a mix. Women disagree on a lot of things. All you have to do is look around the judiciary and you will find women on every side of most legal questions. I dont really think and when i think about, and conference, this is my 10th year. Casest think of that many where i thought to myself, this would come out differently if only there were more women. The time when i most thought gosh,ere most thought, my there really is a different perspective here. I have to go back 10 years ago. I was solicitor general at the time. At that time the court had only one woman. It was the year before Justice Sotomayor arrived. It was only Justice Ginsburg. It 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. She was stripsearched by these male school administrators. Theuld say it was not greatest day on the bench. Ginsburg see justice in the questions, she was she had a picture in her head of what this was like. What it would feel like if you were that 13yearold girl. Only one. S really the some of the men on the court were not having their finest hour. They were joking and not appreciating what this would have seemed like too a 13yearold girl. There was a lot of commentary on at the time. All deserved i think. Went back into the Conference Room and i dont know what happened. They came out in justice which that itw was unconstitutional prevailed by an extremely lopsided vote. In the end, she was able to convince people this was a serious matter even if they were laughing on the bench. That as i said before, you can find people of all kinds of different views. Women, africanamerican, hispanic. I think the most important reason to have diversity on the because the court in the end is if they do not have legitimacy with the american public, the court cant do that much. The court will be taken seriously. Will not be taken seriously. It is not the only part. One part of that is that the all kinds of different people should be able to look at the court and say, i see somebody there who looks like me, thinks the way i do, who has experience of the kind i had. Thing that kind of gives the court public legitimacy. I sometimes sit in the courtroom and see all these School Groups that come into the court realm. I think, it is so great. There are only three of us. Vocalree of us are pretty on the bench. We dont by any means fade into the background. [laughter] set sit on the left and Justice Sotomayor sits on the right. Justice ginsburg sits on the middle. There are voices coming from all over. I think, this is fantastic. These girls are listening to this. And all these boys are listening to this. It says something how women can be in the Legal Profession and society. Us serve assome of role models for people who have children. Teenagers and even you guys. Court and seee somebody who they can relate to. [applause] i want to turn to an issue which you have written about. The confirmation process. In the past you have criticized ae confirmation process as vapid and hollow charade. [laughter] those are your words. What are your thoughts now . What do you think are some of the most important attributes of a Supreme Court justice . Perspectivegive you about when i said those words. [laughter] before i went through the process [laughter] quite a bit before. I wrote the article 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 spent working for joe biden who was the chair of the judiciary committee. Done confirmation hearings for ruth bader ginsburg. Jill biden had a practice that he would invite for every confirmation process he was the chair of he would invite an academic out and have the Academic Work with his team. Think about what kind of questions to put to the nominee and so forth. I was the academic one summer. I found it a terribly frustrating affair. Justice ginsburg was remarkably good at never answering anything. [laughter] later i tried to emulate that. [laughter] at the time it did not seem like a great idea to me. Piece and when i became a nominee, this piece was very troublesome for me. [laughter] every time i said, you know, senator, i cant answer that. They would say, he wrote this article. [laughter] calling the nomination process a vapid and hollow charade. That was inconvenient. [laughter] you have to be careful what you write. , having been through the process and coming out the i cant have too many criticisms for the process. It works. [laughter] i think it is a pretty frustrating thing for everything concerned. I dont quite know how to fix it. I have no Silver Bullet to tell you how to fix it. The most partor just want to know how people are going to vote on Different Things. I dont begrudge them that. We decided very important matters. Senator,robably for a dont make me guess. Of x, y,hat you think and z. There were certain kinds of ethical rules nominees have to follow. I found that when i was a nominee what i really tried to wasboveboard and open about the way i thought judges should act. My theory of constitutional interpretation or my theories of statutory interpretation. I really tried never to end the conversation. I tried is much as a senator wanted to ask me about those things to be open and forthcoming. The senators, not all of them are lawyers to the extent they are lawyers. They have not really thought about some of those questions in a long time. They want to know how you are going to vote. It is ships passing in the night. It is hard to have a process that works for everybody. That works for the nomination and senators. I dont have a great solution to it. Qualities that should be i wouldnt say senators should be uninterested in how people are going to vote. Important on who a justice is going to be. I would not count that off the table. But if you put that aside, i think the qualities are the kinds of qualities i talked about when i talked about Justice Stevens. Wisdom,y, independence, and obviously knowledge about the law. Of isre of those kinds this a person who is going to keep learning . Is this the person who will keep an open mind . Is this a person who is not afraid to be independent and go out on a limb sometimes . Is this a person most important who will be honest and have a lot of integrity in the way they approach decisionmaking . I think that is what you should look for. Absolutely. Just a sort of lighten up, i think one of the things the Washington Press has identified you as the hippest justice. It might be a low bar. [laughter] i wasnt going to say it. Is it true . What qualifies me is hit . Hip . I dont think so. I am wondering what you think counts for that. You have a reputation. It may be your love of youogames, comic books, have been called special k. [laughter] help us out. Ive got nothing for you. [laughter] we are going to let the notorious rbg she can say something. Opinion thatthis had a lot of comic book references. Not just because i put them in gratuitously. It was an opinion a patent case the patent was on the glove he put on and you went like this. Webbs came out of the fingers. Like spiderman. [laughter] opinion full of spiderman references. Maybe that is where it comes from. I hear you quoted dr. Seuss. There you go. Ebody just sent me today has anybody read my opinion in gaetz . Yates . Yeah. One fish, two fish, redfish, bluefish. Whene end of every year clerks ask justices to sign various things mostly justices are asked to sign photographs of themselves. I am asked to sign one fish, two fish. [laughter] maybe that accounts for it. Somebody just sent me by email i am not going to say this. [laughter] she doesnt want to make news. People know there are strong friendships on the bench. You have taken strong opposition in terms of your positions against your colleagues and point of view. How does that impact the way you interact with one another . What kind of institutional thatnisms are present support and promote your ability to continue to have deep friendships with people you disagree with . I like to think i can write a strong defense. I am not the only one on the court that knows how to do that. We do right strong words about each other. Right that we remain we have good relationships on the court. It is a collegiate institution. There are good friendships on the court. Among people who disagree with each other about many things. Why . Colleagueue my old who i miss quite a lot, Justice Scalia used to have a line is that 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 law really wrong today. That does not mean we cant think the other person is operating in good faith and a good person. It seems to me you can have good friendships with people you disagree with. For that matter, not everybody you agree with you like. [laughter] if you dont like everybody you agree with, you should like some you dont agree with. I think we all get that. One of the things that binds us together if there are only eight other people in the world who know what my job is like. Where you cannot talk to a lot of people about it. In that sense, it is a tight community. It is just the nine of us doing this. 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. Arguments andhear every time we meet in conference , this is about four times a week for two weeks out of every month. That is a lot. In thep to a Dining Room Court and we have lunch together. There are rules about this lunch. Cannot talke you about cases. Is thatre informal rule you cannot talk about politics. I think the theory is that we have enough to fight about. We should not add anything to the list. So we talk about books, movies, theater, peoples families. All kinds of things. Justice ginsburg always likes to talk about opera but nobody knows much about it. [laughter] i think it is a good thing for the court to do. It was a practice Justice Oconnor really started and insisted on. I think she was a very wise person to do so. Collegialityds of and makes people relate to each other as people and not as that person who holds views that are so disagreeable to me. I do want to go back to the idea of the role of dissent. Yourself,ring, for how you go about determining when it is more important to dissent then build consensus among your colleagues. I am thinking in particular about the common cause case. Courtcent case where the decided it the court was not their job to intervene or try to resolve political gerrymandering issues. And your dissent if i can quote you sent, of all times to abandon the court duty to declare law, this was not one. U. N. On to say you went on to say that you dissent. Can you talk about what that was like . The first point about when you dissent and try and reach consensus is not always your choice. To try and reach consensus more than one person has to do it. Why is it that you are not having trouble [laughter] sometimes it is not your choice. People want to go their own way. Times i think everybody agrees that it may be one of these cases. The court had tried to avoid the issue at the time. To last years decision. When we finally got around to really justere were two options. That was not a whole lot of room for compromise. Some issues are like that. Others are definitely not. I definitely dont think compromise is a dirty word. In the court or anyplace else. In fact, i think it is important in general to try and reach across, perceived division, and see if you cant find any common ground. If you cannot find room for compromise, i like to think it is something i do quite a lot. Sometimes you cant. You cant because you have no takers on the other side or you cant because you cant. There is a matter of fundamental principle at stake. There really is not a third way. Or a compromise position. Decision was a decision i felt strongly about. I think it was about whether the court could get involved in partisan gerrymandering. It was not about the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering. I think everybody recognized partisan gerrymandering of the extreme kind that we saw into cases that came to the court, one done by a republican and one by a democratic legislature. It was a really extreme gerrymandering that deprived people in their respective states of the opportunity to have their vote mean anything. It was a kind of raking of the election. Of the election. Speakingpresentatives themselves picking rather than the people. Nobody argued this was constitutional. The majority thought the court could not get involved. Manageablesented no standards for the court to decide when a gerrymander had gone too far. And i thought that was wrong. Around the country had worked pretty hard in developing exactly the kind of manageable standard that the majority claimed to be demanding. It wasnt so hard to figure out exactly how these cases should be litigated. Gerrymander that should be declared offlimits. Like with these two. It was clear they should not be validated. So i did. I wrote a strong dissent. Was a dissent i hope that was not so much angry as deeply saddened. Court is not going to protect the basic structure of democracy, then it is hard to know what the courts role is. I think the court the majority failed to do that. [applause] i agree. Court is tasked with interpreting and guarding the rule of law. Extreme partisan Political Climate we are in, the highly contentious Supreme Court confirmation process, and even the significant division among the justices themselves in cases that have political and locations. Implications. Im speaking of abortion, uncontrolled, affirmative action. It is hard for americans not to see the court is political. What would you say to those who worry about the courts independence . Peoples views and concerns about this can be exaggerated. Which is not to say there is not l there that ought to be taken seriously. But to put it in a broaders peopletive, i think some thek the court institution always operates by the 54 votes. Everything we do is like that. Part of the court is conservative and part of it is liberal. That is all there is to say. I dont think that is right. About half of the cases we hear every year and these are the most important cases or the most difficult. They are almost all cases that have involved lower courts disagreeing with each other. Notwithstanding that, about half the cases we do each year are done unanimously. Chunkr very substantial of the cases we decide are not unanimous but pretty lopsided. Or even if they are closer, everybody is scrambled. Them is no way to breed as, there is a conservative majority and a liberal minority or anything like that. I think there are whole years that go by last year was a 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 hard to look at last justand say, that is politicized court. I dont think you could do it. I dont want to dismiss the question at all because i think there are certain issues and they are hot button issues in society. They are often the issues that get the front page treatment. Ways ofe different looking at those issues. Think that is a matter of partisanship. A democrat and who is a republican. I do think it is a matter of different ways of looking at the constitution. Of understanding how to do it constitutional interpretation. For sure there are real on how do we interpret some parts of the constitution . Which matter a lot to people. Say to what i would is just part of the message would be to the court in part to the public. Everything i said suggest the court should think hard when it is doing its work. About trying as hard as it cannot to look politicized and polarized. I think you are right. We live in is polarized time in the last thing the court should do is look as polarized as every other institution. Courtsd be great for the to be seen as not that. The only way to be seen as not that is not to be that. Is a lesson for the court and how it operates. I wouldthere is also also say to the american publi , that they should not jump to conclusions so fast on the basis of one decision or another. We are trying our hardest. Decide really difficult matters and we are doing so in good faith. Sometimes it will look like the world is falling in. But it of one decision will look to other people like the world is falling in. I am not saying people should give us the benefit of the doubt always. I think this issue you raise is an issue for us. Think it is important for the public to recognize that we actually are a different kind of institution. From ours buddies across the street. [laughter] it is important. Thank you. In the interest of time i am going to ask you one more question before returning to a student. This kind of goes back to your career. The idea you have had lots of starting lines. We have all been at the starting line at some point and you have had many. I would love for you to basically tell me what that was like for one of them . I have three options pick which one you like. You have been at the starting line is a junior justice where you work for seven years before gorsuch. You are at the starting line as the solicitor general you argued your very first appellate oral argument between the Supreme Court. No pressure. [laughter] you are the first female dean at harvard loss code. Pick one of those harvard law school. I pick one of the first two and tell me which one. Junior justice. [laughter] i was a junior justice for seven years. It is a long stretch of time as these things go. The record is 11 years. Justice breyer just missed her the record by two weeks i think. Justice breyer was a junior justice for 11 years. What is a junior justice . A hierarchy kind of and some was. [laughter] not in other ways. We have the same boat. The chief justices vote does not count for more than mine. Hierarchal institution. Particularjustice in i dont know how to say this but gets hazed by everyone else. [laughter] there are three things they do. One is semi serious. When we go into the Conference Room and discuss cases, it is just the nine of us. We do not take clerks, no members of administration. Somebody has to take notes so when we come out of the room we will be able to tell everybody what it is we have decided. They can issue the appropriate orders and things like that. That is the junior justices job. That is sort of fun. You said that in faculty meetings. You have responsibility and it gives you when everybody else leaves the Conference Room and go steal lunch, the junior justice stays behind in the administrative staff pour in and you deliver the news. That is the serious role. Role is because there are only nine justices in the Conference Room, it turns out that sometimes people have to bring us stuff. Some of us our are forgetful. Haveforget coffee, they not taken the right file, they have not taken the right book. There is a phone in the Conference Room. You can call back to your chambers and say, get my glasses, get my coffee, get my book. Somebody will come to the Conference Room and knock on the door. Knock on the outer door i should say. The Conference Room is the kind of inner sanctum. [laughter] it has one door that you open from the inside and then faces another door. About two feet away. Then somebody has to open that door from the outside. So in summary knocks on the door you would think the person who forgot her coffee [laughter] would go get the door. And get her coffee. It turns out not. [laughter] justice out the junior has to open the door. Get the coffee and say who is this for . And deliver it to the person who really needs that jolt of caffeine. Job,out five years into my i injured my foot. I was Walking Around with one of those big boot contraptions. I dont know if you have ever worn them. Door and wood, the everybody would steer on it would come on the door and everybody would stare. [laughter] the other thing is they put you on Cafeteria Committee. This is their way of saying, you think youre hot stuff . You just got conference. No. You are going to be on the Cafeteria Committee where you are going to meet once a month with a bunch of people to discuss what happened to the good chocolate chip cookies . [laughter] then your colleagues do this stuff. We eat together a lot. Your colleagues would do stuff like, there is too much salt in the soup, elaina. [laughter] ien some went out with say, think there isnt enough. But iny this jokingly the end they basically blame you for the cafeteria. [laughter] that is the job of a junior justice. I was delighted to pass it on to justice gorsuch. [laughter] i think it is unfair that you only had to that he only had to be jut junior justice for a year. Thank you for sharing that. [applause] i could continue to ask you so many more questions. Because of my time, we are going to end the fireside chat portion and turn our attention to the students. We have six students who have submitted questions that the justice is taking today. Im going to bring the students into the conversation. We will hear from them in the interest of time about three minutes. We have six students and three minutes on the clock. [laughter] pay no attention. We are good. We are going a little over. [laughter] then we will go to dinner. Students who are excited. I will ask leah to come up first. [applause] she is a thirdyear law student, editorinchief of the law review, please join us. Justice kagan, thank you so much to travel to colorado law. Factce breyer noted the that the controlling case was that it imposed as president. Courts unanimity have when we afford president . I dont think it has much effect. We decide some things unanimously. In the end, the court is the court. They reach a judgment and that judgment needs to be respected except in the unusual circumstances. When people decide it is appropriate to overrule precedent. A 50 45four, this because the court regardless of vote. Maybe there is a difference of analysis and highly fractured opinions. If there is not a majority at all. Split every are which way and one opinion ends up controlling. Maybe there is a different analysis for that. I am not quite sure of that. 54, 90, they operate the same way. Thank you so much. Madrid . Hose in jose madrid . [applause] good evening, Justice Kagan. There is speculation that commentsespecially in and opinions are talking about more than just the case at hand. For example, the understood subtext in the competing analysis of due process between Justice Scalia and justice brennan. To what extent should lawyers and the public read into the subtext . I cannot say i have thought about burnham since i was a civil procedure professor. I am going to ignore that. [laughter] me to help either. [laughter] is do we talkn about things other than the issue at hand . Issuek for most cases the at hand is enough. [laughter] i am sure there are times when there are there is something that is affecting what we do. In argument or our opinions. But i dont know. It is hard enough deciding the cases. Sometimes the cases i guess it sometimes. For the most part if we are deciding a case, we are deciding a case. There is not some mystery decision that is driving the analysis. Think when you started off the arguments i think you said were not necessarily about the case at issue. , i thought we were going in a different direction. Often whenare you watch a Supreme Court argument, we ask a lot of questions that are not really questions. They are statements with a . Question mark at the end. You raise your voice at the end. [laughter] theink that is because questions we ask really have an audience. It is not just the lawyer. Youre talking to each other and we are telling each other how we are thinking about a particular case. Performs any important function on the court. We dont talk about cases before argument. Argument we get together and talk about cases. We immediately start to go around the table. If you are one of the people who vote last or near to last, it is actually important to be able to forum where you can indicate how you feel about a subject before you get to the Conference Room. Argument serves that purpose. Do it as a kind of somebody is standing at the ourum and we are directing views to them. The views are really directed to the other people on the bench. Appear in a transcript like a bunch of questions being directed to asyers are better understood a conversation that the justices themselves are having prior to the first voting. Thank you. Please . Ve peter firstyear law student participating in the environment to law society and the silicon flat iron student group. Hello, Justice Kagan. You are so cool. [laughter] this is why it happened. Social ogy and social media have exploded over the last few years. What impact has the technological revelation had on the court and how it operates . None. [laughter] its horrible. I will qualify that. Less than you may think. When i talked to the when i clerked for the court in 1987 and came back in 2010. 23 years later. Years, there had been this technological revolution. Communication revolution. And saw ite court had not touch the court at all. [laughter] this is the way we communicate. The Second Circuit was in love with faxed machines. The judges on the Second Circuit communique with each other through facts. Fax. The Supreme Court has not gotten there yet. [laughter] the way we communicate with each other as we print out what it is we were writing. Each of us has a person called a chamber eight. They walk around the building and delivers it. [laughter] in hard copy. This parchment like feature. For the most part, it is a pen and paper type of thing. Is this terrible . The cord works remarkably well notwithstanding. This is true. I dont feel daytoday that our operations could be a lot better if we start communicating in modern ways. When i write an opinion, when my clerks to stop for me, it is all good. I guess what strikes me about the technology question, it goes to this . I keep coming back to. If you wanted to put together a court of the people who were 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. So, it puts an 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 three more questions. Connor, from the silicon flatiron 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 should 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. I would not think that on a more shortterm basis that we should either curb ourselves or 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 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 . Is 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. I guess 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 brilliant and they both people of great integrity. Independence and wisdom. Is that all of us sort of look back at those times where how the process should work rather than these sort of pitched battles between parties where every nominee gets sent up and praised for a few votes from the party that is not the president who appointed. I got four or five, i think, 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. A lot of water has been under the bridge, if that is the expression. At the end, that is something for congress to decide. Suzette last but not least, a 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 most justice in their life, i dont know anyone who did the most justice as a lawyer than Thurgood Marshall did. [applause] then he was just a phenomenal lawyer. He is a lawyer of the kind that you dont really see anymore. We have become a specialized profession. 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. He argued almost 20 cases from the Supreme Court and won almost all of them. He would crisscross the jim crow south, stopping in these little towns, small 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. And 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. I have never heard anyone tell stories better. He had all of these voices that he did. He was like a mimic. He did accents, voices, faces. He was not embarrassed to do all of these crazy kind of expressions. Then he had the worlds best stories. The worlds most important stories. Sometimes whether it was his boyhood in segregated baltimore or his time at 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 that came out of his time as a 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. Which is this window into a 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 schechter, yusenia delgado, jennifer sullivan, laura dimartino, 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. First of all, 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. I want to give a shout out to 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 caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] campaign 2020 coverage continues saturday 4 0n gabbard and former vice mondaynt joe biden 2 00 p. M. Eastern Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and tuesday at 11 0r Elizabeth Warren in boston, watch the president ial onlinetes live on cspan at cspan. Org. Or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Campaign 2020 bus team is traveling across the country asking voters what should president ial candidates address . Any environmental issues. Like to see everglades keys. E it. Nt to see action on i help to come up in the election. A issue i would like to see the upcoming president ial address is the current injustices that are in our country. Whether its videos placed on instagram or the white house or office. E in the current i feel like those issues need to be addressed. Forhe issue important to me 2020 is climate change. Coral to be able to visit reefs in my lifetime and not e them something to think about is hbcus and lackful funding. Actual issue in our government. We are just as important as universities. Most important issue now are healthcare and Campaign Finance and ethics in government. Healthcare i do think we should improving it. Were not fully seeing the healthcareersal making it simpler and affordable. To see it expanded. Theaign finance system, inues is too much money now politics. This is from the road on cspan. Next Senate Energy hearing on impact of wildfires on the electric grid. Lawmakers are looking at wildfire mitigation technology. Power management and system reliability
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