Supreme Court Justice said she believed the high court should adapt to the code of conduct used by lower courts. Remarks followed a published news reports on the travels of Justice Clarence thomas and samuel alito at the book sales of justice. The university of Notre Dame Law School hosted with this one hour and ten minute event. [applause] you have a lot of fans here. Thank you for the introduction and the great warm welcome that ive received already from your law school. I have enjoyed the day so far and im sure i will enjoy this conversation. Im so grateful that you are here. I first want to start by asking your path to the Supreme Court ran through academia, you were an academic first in fact the first nominee to the Court Without prior judicialic experience since Justice Rehnquist was nominated 50 years earlier. How does your academic background shape your perspective and do you think it gives you a different perspective than your colleagues . The court has had many people who served a great deal of their career in academia. So they weret, all judges and i wasnt but of course Justice Amy Coney barrett is an academic and we are the only two on the court now i think, but i hope im not forgetting anybody. [laughter] Justice Ginsburg in her formative years were spent in academia at columbus law school, Justice Scalia and the university of virginia law school. F so the court has had plenty of academic sentence time and im not sure in terms of you can tell from those people they are very different kinds of judges and different in the decisions they make and of the academic background leads to a particular kind ofca judge. Its not the scholarship idea or the environment generally. Its the experience and the way that has affected me is when i write my opinions, i try hard to figure out how it is that im going to explain things to people because the law is complicated and often especially when i started the court and i was a junior justice i got all these technical opinions to write. Thats the thing they tend to do and tend to get but i wanted ordinary people to understand them and not just legal specialists to understand them. I wanted nonlawyers to understand them and you dont want to dumb them down so that absolutely everybody can understand them at the expense of the legal precision and sophistication but i wanted to figure out a way to present ideas in a way that they were comprehensible to people because in the end this is a democracy and people should be able to understand how the issues of government work including the courts. The best way i knew to do that is when i sat down to write an opinion, i would think about sitting down to repair a class because when you are preparing a class, you are imagining going into a room of smart people engaged people who at that moment before the class they dont know all that much about what you are going to teach them. Maybe a little bit, but its important to figure out how to present in a way that they will understand at the time and in a way that will also stick so that when they look back later, whether it is studying for the example or if it is years later they will remember something of what you told them. I think that you develop certain habits, good teachers do, and i like to think i was a good teacher of how to do that, how to explain things to people in a way that will be understandable. I tried to think about that when i write opinions and so i am very much sort of approaching my opinion writing task as a teacher that is of course what i did in to law schools. Whether i learned anything w about judging you think about the y institution and if i wasnt already it made me into an institutionalist. I care about the institution that i am in and i try hard to do what i can to make the institution works better and i try to Pay Attention to relationship in the way deans demonshave to Pay Attention to relationships. Maybe the politics of institutions, which i i think al institutions have and i hope im attentive to. That only takes you so far, but i like to think of myself as an institutionalist that wants to make the court as a multimember body and wants to make it work as a multimember body where we can reach good decisions, where we can achieve consensus, where we can make principled compromises consistent with our obligation to interpret and expand on the law as we see it and i think those instincts which i hope i have are maybe ones that are more important. Does that make sense . [laughter] a in addition to being an academic you are also the solicitor general of the United States sometimes we refer to as the tenth justice. Can you say a little bit about what that taught you and how it might guide you on the court . Its the coolest job in the world and honestly if you can really plan out your career i would have loved to have spent a few moreou years there but when the president calls and says hes ready to appoint you to the Supreme Court i think it is the wrong answer to say i would really like to be solicitor general. [laughter] its why when you said youre the only one who wasnt a judge, which is true, if used to be the case by the way that the court was full of people, lawyers who hadntpe been judges so for example if you look back to the brown v board court, it didnt have a single justice on it who had a been a judge previously. Chief Justice Rehnquist had never been a judge previously. Wevee gotten away from that. I think weve gotten away from it mostly because the nomination and the confirmation process that people and president s very much want to know what their nominees are going to do and the court has become a little bit more or a lot more something that president s want to make their nominees are not going to surprise them so the president can look at that and say thats what they are going to be like as, a judge. From the standpoint of the court im not sure the court did very well without everybody. Its not Rocket Science if you are a good lawyer and youre engaged in the law and you have judicial temperament and a proper understanding of what the judicial role is, then i think youre going to be a good judge. But to the extent that there were experiences about serving on the court that i didnt have, which there were. The learning curve was high was superb preparation for being on the court itself because what the solicitor general does its the person in the Justice Department who basically has responsibility for all the appellate work of the United States. So the solicitor general decides what to appeal, what trial judgments to appeal on behalf of the United States and then the solicitor general also decides which cases to take to the Supreme Court. Some of the cases the solicitor general in her office and engages in are cases where the United States is a party, but in addition in the Supreme Court and to some extent in the Appellate Court the United States functions as an amicus that means a friend of the court. And essentially is there to represent the u. S. Governments interest even in cases where they are not directly participating. So if you assume the Supreme Court for example has 60 cases a year,me probably the solicitor general in one capacity or another either as a party or as an amicus will take part in 45 of them, 50 of them, the great majority. So what the solicitor general does is make all these appellate decisions and thats the fun part of the job, deciding which cases to appeal and which arguments youre going to bring forward and in particular in the Supreme Court, your offices are giving a substantial majority of the cases, and youre arguing some of those so every month the solicitor general goes up to the Supreme Court andto gets to the podium and argues whatever the most important case of the month is and also all the briefs flow through the solicitor general so shes responsible for thinking about how to argue all these cases before the court, what arguments are going to be presented. So all my job basically was trying to figure out howob to convince these nine people of the United States decision on various matters so the first was to decide often with the u. S. Position was and then to think how you were going to persuade the court to adopted so when i got to the court i used to think the job really hasnt changed because before i was trying to persuade nine peopleg and now im trying to persuade eight people but it was the same basic job and it was by the time i finished my tenure as solicitor general, i knew all about the courts procedures and i knew a lot about thes courts personalities and i had seen the court in action and had been focused in my thinking on the court and what made it take and what was likely to persuaded and likely not to so when i got to the court, again there were a lot of things i had to learn but it felt like a very good preparation. You mentioned the confirmation process. In your confirmation hearings in 2010, you famously said we are all originalists. Can you explain what you meant by that and is it still true . Thats only part of the sentence. [laughter]r] since Everybody Knows that part its nice that you gave me the opportunity to tell you the other part and what it meant. The sentence goes so in that sense we are all originalists now. You canis tell from it was a moe complicated statement. It came after a longlo discussin about why i was not and originalists in the conventional understanding of the term but instead why i thought constitutional meaning evolved, developed over time and why that was consistent with what the framers wanted and consistent with the document they gave us so it was like no im not and originalist as some people would define it about my view that the constitutional meaning is involved is consistent with the actual original understanding of what the document was meant to do and how it was meant to work so with that off the table that stupid soundbite that has been hanging over my head for a while. [laughter] i tell you why i think it evolved and how and why that is with what they thought would happen. Take a document and theres some parts of the constitution that are very specific so it says nobody under 35 can be president. Everybody agrees on Something Like that. If youre 35 you cant be president , nobody goes further than that and everybodys willing to accept that. Nobody says Something Different then than it is now. Maybe it should be 50 but a lot of the constitution is nothing like that. A lot of the constitution is broad and generalhe phrases, so for example if you look at the amendment aware of a lot of the constitutional laws that people care about comes from, the constitution, the amendment says people should be granted due process of law and equal protection of the role so the question becomes how do we interpret those phrases and decide what those mean. I dont want to simplify too much but in essence the originalist position is we look at what thosese phrases meant. The set of applications if you will are the applications that we should continue and nothing else. But the first thing about that isis its hard to figure it out. Lawyers, judges are not historians. History is hard and that kind of constitutional history. That kind of intellectual history is a pretty Impossible Task and you see this honestly in the courts opinion in the originalist because ones history as a historical argument saying a and another has the historical argument saying not and both are choosing to pick and choose from the historical record. Picking out your friends in a crowd when they talk about legislative history. So the history is hard. Its rare in these cases that we can know with any certainty what these words were, what they required and what they did not require added to the exact time in question. But the thing i was trying to say in the nomination hearingiss that i dont think the framers thought and i dont think that we should think thats the question. Nobody would havees used phrases like that if they meant to codify a particular set of practices. They would have codified a particular set of practices. These people were speaking for the ages and they knew it and they were speaking to all of thesefo people, people in the original founding period and then after the civil war. It was anybody that understood how the world changes. It was those people how societies change, how governments change, how people change. They brought on a revolution and lived the civil war. They had know doubt that societies changed and understandings changed. They spoke in those phrases because they wanted the constitution to be fit to govern a people as the people lived over time. That doesnt mean that there are know warnings or bearings. Quite the opposite. The original understanding is important, so too is the broader structure of our history, so too is the particular precedents that the court has used. So, you always have to think about anchoring and not going off. We can just make it up. We cant just make it up. Judges have to be disciplined. Judges have to be constrained, butip the project is not to fige out what they thought and this again is an example but an important one. Equal protection of the walls meant in 1868. That wasnt the founders own project. And they were right about that. I mean, think about the kind of rules that we would have to live under if that were the project. Ive got to tell you the two of us would not be setting up here having this conversation in 1868. So, you know, just to take a couple of concrete examples, there was nobody t that thought that in 1868 equal protection under the law prohibited segregated schools. Thereve beenoo some arguments that are not convincing as brown is self made very clear. There is not an originalist argument for the prohibition of segregation and education, or not a good one at least. And similarly, that equal protection clause, that is women wanted themselves to be protected in the equal protection clause and there was a specific decision made not to have anything about women and indeed a sort of to suggest that the student didnt have anything because people did want to be entirely race focused so if you just look to 1868, women have know legal rights emerging from the equal protection clause. So, i dont think i could go on and on about Different Things that are accepted by pretty much everybody now that we would have to ditch if we really were true to this, like no, we just do it to the way they did it in the founding period. I dont think that we could live with that. I dont think the framers wanted us to live with that. Again that doesnt mean that you can do anything you want. Constraint and discipline and incrementalism what we might call minimalism are important values and the reason original the sum caught on was because of that because people thought the judges were kind of making it up, imposing their own personal preferences and that is a totally legitimate concern and you have to figure out ways to prevent that from happening. I think as i say on a more multi various approach, which thinks about the law as it develops over time, thinks about a certain kind of incrementalism in the decisionmaking, thats the way to be truly constrained. You mentioned as a way to discipline theat courts and you have been a steadfast defender most notably in your majority opinion in campbell versus marlborough and in the case versus dogs and students for fair admissions, the majority of the court voted to overrule a precedent. Is it becoming an ideological dividing lien in the court . I surely hope not. And you are right there have been times recently where there have been ideological divides overturninge precedent. I dont think i am hopeful it wont have that year after year, case after case, at least it shouldnt, because the idea of precedent is of incredible importance to the development of law, and maybe i will say a few words about why thats so. So, the idea of precedents is kind of a counterintuitive idea. It says that because the court did something in the past, it should continue to do the p same thing even if that thing was wrong in its original formulation. It wasbeca right in its original formulation of course you dont need precedent where the idea comes in is saying even if you think it may have been wronged or even if you think it was wrong, theres still value in sticking to the course that was laid out. So people say why would you do that if you think it may have been wrong or if it was wrong why not just to change it and there are a fewt reasons for that. One is just humility. This is a doctrine of humility. It basically says i am one judge at one time and if thereve been many other judges over the course of many years, then i o those people some deference, some respect because i might be wrong. So it is a good value and the law. The judges dont think that they know everything and can do everything. Its basically a doctrine of humility and also of stability and overreliance. So it keeps the law stable and means the people that rely on a particular legal rule or principle dont have the rug pulled out from under them so its not like you have it right one day and dont have it to the next day. Its not like you own a piece of property one day and then you dont own a piece of property the next day. So, stability and attention to reliance interests are of crucial importance in the law and then finally i would say precedent is important, adherence is important because it prevents the court from looking like a political actor, like an ideological driven actor and the reason is because, you know, i think what happens when courts just overrule things willynilly, its usually because, or sometimes its because new judges have come on the scene and they say we never liked this rule. We were not part of creating it and we never liked it, so we are going to overturn it. But when that happens, the court looks with a matter of whos on the court, what judges happen to be there on any given day and that doesnt look very long like two s people. Its ale crucial thing about the legal institutions that the public have confidence in them and that confidence is of a particular kind. People have no right to expect that they are going to agree with all the decisions courts make. Quite the contrary very often courts have to do things which amajority of the public doesnt like. Ic but people do want to the courts and have the right to expect the courts act like courts and they dont look like other political actors. They dont look like the other parts of the government that are made up of political actors but they look as though they are doing Something Different. When the court goes kind of back and forth and the bound to the president talks about this quite a lot, it makes people think courts are just making it up on the fly and that is an extremely damaging thing for the judicial system, and i think for our country. Id like to ask about the courts role with regards to the political and democratic processes. In the Democratic National committee, your dissent defended the Voting Rights act against arizonas out of precinct law where you argued the minority voters were disproportionately likely to have their votes thrown out by that law. Do you think the Voting Rights act ought to be read more liberally to afford special protections to minority voters . I dont think that it ought to be made more liberal than what it was actually written as. In other words, some people sometimes say while, you should give someme kind of statutes a little reading. I dont think that thats the case generally, and i dont think it is the case with the Voting Rights act. What you should do is read the statutes fairly. Thats the reason the court got it wrong isnt because they didnt put the thumb on the scale, not because it didnt read the voting act liberally. Its because it didnt read the Voting Rights act fairly. Understand the Voting Rights act was one of the most expensive, broad, farreaching pieces of legislation that congress has ever passed in this country. What it did is give a kind of reading to the Voting Rights act. It unnaturally restricted, construct that it. If the Voting Rights act was read fairly, that decision i said in my dissent would have come out the other way. That decision if the Voting Rights act was prettyng clear tt what it was doing was ensuring thatng everybody had an equivalt right to vote and everybodys vote counted in the same way so that impediments to voting, obstaclest to voting, schemes that diluted some peoples votes as compared to other peoples votes on the basis of race were forbidden and that responded to a very dire horrible history in this country of preventing black americans especially from accessing the polls and from having their vote count in the same way as white americans vote and the act was passed by congress as a powerful indictment of that practice and in my view, read in the way it was written which was to say that it was read fairly and as they wrote it. Lets talk about another practice that is gerrymandering. In the case russo versus common cause, your dissent lamented the refusal to remedy the constitutional violation of the partisan gerrymandering that in your words deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights, the right to participate equally in a political process and gerrymandering in that case debased and dishonored our democracy. The majority in that case held that the gerrymandering and the political questions beyond the reach of federal court. If thats true, then whats the role of the courts and policing the democraticg process . The point of the dissent is that the courts indeed can play a role and have a role in this process so let me tell you a little bit about why and then its like what else can we do. Its still the case the state courts using state constitutions can try to prevent partisan gerrymandering and many of them have and do. But with respect to that opinion, which was about courts under the federal constitution, what was striking about that case is that its a case in which everybody agreed that the gerrymandering involved did not. There was know argument that it didnt violate the constitution so these were cases in which it could be you imagine different gerrymandering andce where say people are roughly divided. Some half like republicans and catholic democrats. Then the District Lines are drawn so that its wildly out of proportion and 13 seats ten go to one party and three go to the other. Thats one of the gerrymander is involved in the case. Another was basically an estate where there were many more democrats and republicans but it deprived the republicans of any ability to elect even one representative in the entire state so they can work in different ways butdi essentially what they do, and we have before us one republican gerrymandering and one democratic gerrymander so she was on both seats and what the legislatures had tried to do is just to prevent people who supported the opposite party from merely having any fair shot to get representatives of their choice selected in the appropriate number of districts. What is theth appropriate number is a hard call and at the chief justice that wrote the majority opinion madeni a persuasive cas. Iat agree with it that you cant have courts looking at every single District Line and figuring o out should this be a six, seven gerrymander, six, seven split or should it be 85 split. But there was know need to do that in this case because what the courts below had done is basically create a series of remechanisms to prevent extreme gerrymander girders so there was a lot of room around the edges for the political process to work and there was a lot of room for politicians to engage in the kind of ageold practice of drawing lines and making political judgments about how the districting should operate about there were these mechanisms to prevent completely extreme gerrymandering and the majority opinion said even that is too much for courts. The courts just shouldnt be involved in it and i thought that that was a wrong decision, that many of the lower courts had shown that it was really possible to separate out the really bad from others. Whats striking about the opinionng is that it allows what everybody understands as a constitutional violation to go forward because of a judgment that courts cant do anything about it. I think that thats wrong and i willan just say, you know, youe asking me these questions i guess because its about the futurens of democracy. I think theres one things the courts appropriatelye do. Theres so many things courts should stay their hand or be restrained and courts should say we want to let the political process work. We want to leave this to actors that are elected by the american people, but the one place where the court has most responsibility is to actually protect the mechanisms of democracy itself so that if the democratic system is structured incs a fairway end of the rules are fair and primarily that means if everybody is counted and is relatively equal to every other persons vote, then you let the democratic process works and whatever outcomes it produces, it produces. But the necessary thing is to make sure that the rules of the democratic process arent completely skewed from the outset because if the rules are beskewed from the outset, then e results are going to be skewed, and in deemed illegitimate. If theres one place the court has a rule but shouldnt be embarrassed about the taking, it is to protect the institutions of representative government. Thats why i honestly thought thathohy this dissent was the mt important one ive ever written. The decision made me very sad. I want to ask about another case, and thats the recent student loan forgiveness case, biden versus nebraska. In that case, chief Justice Roberts andt the majority opinn striking down the biden administrations Loan Forgiveness Program by referring to your dissent as follows. Its become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with whichh they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. Weve employed at the traditional tools with of the decisionmaking in doing so, reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis and in fact at least three do. We do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any misperception would be harmful to the institution, then you respond to the chief justice by writing from the first page to the last, todays opinion departs from the demands of the restraint at the behest of a party that hasnt suffered injury, the majority to side ofe contested Public Policy issue properly belonging to the political branches and the people they represent. In a saying so and saying so i do not at all disparage of those who disagree. The majoritys right to make that point as well as to say reasonable minds are found on both sides ofre the case and thereis surely nothing personaln the dispute here, but the justices throughout history have raised the alarm when the court has overreached and exceeded its proper limited role in the nations governance. It wouldntou have been disturbg and indeed damaging if they hada not. It would have been disturbing and damaging if they had not. The same is true in our own day. I dont think that ive ever read such an exchange between the majority opinion and the dissent before the majority criticizing the modeit of criticism of the dissent. Is there some unspoken concern here that prompted this exchange . Was either of you worried that the public might misunderstand the disagreement or the tone of either opinion . I feel like to provide a full answer to that question we should have the chief justice here. We could both give our respective answers for the respective parts of the exchange. Heres what i want to say. I would say i agree with what one of the things the chief justice said, and i disagree with the other. I will start with the disagreement. Read me the first sentence of f the chief justices opinion. He says its become a disturbing feature of recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree. Go ahead. As going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. To criticize decisions going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. I dont think that is disturbing at all. It would be disturbing of the dissent if they thought that the court hadd gone beyond the rule oft the judiciary. It would be disturbing if you didnt say that. If you pulled your punches. If you said we are going to look the other way and he said i d believe that the court has goe beyond the proper role of the judiciary, has trespassed on other institutions prerogatives, has been a court that has not acted like a court and yet i am not going to say anything. I think thats what would be disturbing is pulling your punches in that way. I do think i mean, come on the other hand heres where i do agree with of the chief justice. I do think, yes, to the extent that he was concerned look, i wrote a strong dissent. You know, it was a strongly worded dissent. This is whatug i saw about the case. Its a little bit summarized in the passage that you read. I thought the case should never have been before the court. We have rules called standing rules which require that people who come to the court with constitutional complaints have themselves suffered injury of some kind. The plaintiffs before us i thoughha not suffered a constitutional injury. They were states that were complaining about the biden administrations Loan Forgiveness Program and the fact that a lot of students or former students had gotten more money it might be a bad policy, it might be good policy. But its really hard to see how the states were injured like that. These were policy preferences by the state. They thought it was bad policy, so they came in and they brought a suit but we are not supposed to allow that to happen. To allow policy w disagreementso become legal cases. And i also thought, putting that aside, the decision was wrong substantively that if you looked at the statute, the statute gave the department of education the ability to make these kind of calls when emergencies occurred the department of education had used that Authority Just as congress had expected it might be used so we were wrong on in the substantive matter as well. I thought the court was wrong to allow the case in the first placeon t and then that the cout had basically trespassed on the prerogatives of the politically accountable branches to make policy. And again, the policy may have been a stupid policy, but it wasnt our role to say that. If that is what the politically accountable branches had done by way of a statute and then in an administrative role. So i said the court had not acted like a court. To bet a pleasant thing told that. When im told that by other justices, i dont likeli it either. So, you know, but thats sort of the nature of the business is that in our judicial system, there are judicial systems where there are know dissent is that when somebody loses they just pack up and go home. Our judicial system has followed a different course and i think rightly so. Our judicial system says we want to hold the majority is to account. O we want to allow people to express their disagreement so that may be when the next case comes along the same mistakes are not made so maybe when in many years to come the law can go in the different direction and thats why the dissent is important and so again, i just disagree that its not in the nature of i the dissent. Some of the most important dissent of the countrys history have been about why the court has oversteppedn its role. Nobody should take that as personal in any way. I admire the chief justice enormously, as a person, as a judge, i admire him as the institutional leader of the court. So there was nothing personal about this. There was know i think his word was disparagement. And to the extent he thought people dont understand when they read the point and counterpoint like this that you can say both of those things, that i vigorously disagree with of the decision that you reached, but i admire him as a judge. People dont understand that im trying to suggest both of those things can be true. I agree. Both of those things can be true and people should understand that as well. Im going to talk about that a little bit more. Theres a lot of focus on disagreements like that in the court and in the press in particular theres this pitcher of an ideologically or politically divided court, but theres a lot of opinions where there are 90 opinions where there is agreement and a lot of other opinions where it isnt clear you could see any particularu ideological divide between the justices. Can you give an example of cases where you cant really predict how the justices would come out on the basis of who appointed them and why dont those cases get more attention . For sure there are cases like that. First, we probably do 30, 40 . It varies by the year but 30 to 40 of the opinions unanimously across every divide that you can come up with. Then there are cases where we are sort of scrambled up in unpredictable and hard to explain ways. I was preparing for the first conference of the year the other day and i noticed there were some petitions that had to deal with how to understand the confrontation clause that allows a criminal defendant to confront the witnesses against him. It turns out that justices on the court have been all over the map on that and not in any kind of way that would strike a person as like of course its 63 or Something Like that, just like everything is scrambled up, usual allies arent allies, usual people across are on the same side. So definitely things like that and perhaps people dont notice them quite as much as the more easy to explain. Used to be 540 and now 63 opinion. Occasionally people notice them. I just say justice and i got into a case about an antiwar silkscreen and whether it was constituted fair use or whether the foundation had to pay the photographer whose photograph he had used. It got an enormous amount of press. And partly because it was kind of a fun case but partly it was because here are these two women who often agree with each other. So sometimes that and we fought very vigorously. So sometimes that exact like the usual allies arent doing there are plenty of cases with justice and i disagreeing but its like lets watch them cap fightig or Something Like that. [laughter] but as to why those cases usually get less attention, i think to be completely honest, it has to be said some of the more important cases do fall along pretty predictable lines, and not all of them, but when in the course of a couplen of yeas you have a case like last year and a case prohibiting the use of affirmative action and an important case involving lgbtq rights, the student loan case, the prior year you had the right to abortion overturned. You had a very important case of Climate Change and the ability of the o government to come back to Climate Change. When all of these are falling 63, it doesnt strike me as surprising that people would talk about that. We are here at notre dame, the faithbased institution and i want to ask about the role of faith in your life and your professional career. Its really important in my life. Im jewish. Its important to me religiously and culturally. I am steeped in from an early age, steeped in the history of the jewish people and i went to Hebrew School for a lot of years and continued to go to synagogue on many occasions. You are catching me now in, last weekend i spent all weekend in the synagogue and after im here and i go to a Football Game [laughter] this coming week, sunday and monday, i will spend those days. This is the most holy day of the jewish year, it is the opportunity for jews to reflect and repent and get square with get your relationship right with god and other human beings and its a time when i reflect a lot about my religious life and religious practice and how it can help me to be a better person. So, you know, my judaism is important to me as a human being. I try not to make it important to me as a judge. I try to keep the one thing separate from the other. When you think about what religions are and what they do, there is a system of morality certainly the jewish religion is full of moral and ethical precepts and those precepts of morality just like any others, thats personal morality and it would be improper for me to substitute my personal morality for the legal rules that im supposed to enforce for the provisions of law that im supposed to interpret. If so, being jewish is super important to my life, but i hope being jewish is of know importance to my judging. So, you mentioned codes of morality and ethics and right now we see in the press certainly theres a lot of talk and conversation about a code of ethics for the court and the justices. Theres scrutiny over the justices relationships with particular parties or even law schools and law school teaching. Do we need a code of ethics . This is as a number of people have discussed recently been a subject of conversation in the court. The chief justice recently gavei a speechus in which he says that the Supreme Court had to be held and he was committed to making sure it was to the highest standards of conduct. Right now wewe are in a situatin where weve committed to following certain kinds of ethical rules respecting judges, but have said we will only be guided b by others. So, you know, weve committed to following the rules that other judgeshe follow and outside ince rules other judges follow. But other judges have a very extensive code of ethics that governs everything that they do and theres been some concern and i think its a legitimate concern that not, that the Supreme Court is in unusual kind of court in certain respects and that some of the rules do not fit quite as well at the Supreme Court level that they do with the level of lower courts. K,but of course, what we could o isld just adapt the code of conduct that the other Court Systems have in order to reflect those come of that certain differences and i think it would be a good thing for the court to do that. It would help in our own compliance with of the rules and it would i think go far in persuading other people that we were adhering to the highest standards of conduct. So, you kne progress. I know Justice Kavanaugh was recently at an event where he said he thought we would and you know soon and im not sure how he phrased it, but i hope that that is true. Host and you tell us who the holdup is . [laughter] guest no. Know what goes on in the Conference Room goes on in the Conference Room area you know and i did not want to suggest that there is one holdout. This is for various reasons having to do with certain differences between the supreme and other courts. There are complicated issues here. There are totally goodfaith disagreements or concerns if you will. There are things to be worked out. I hope we can get them worked out. Host i withdraw the question. [laughter] host so you are arguably one of the best writers on the court. A lot of were orders agree that that is the case. Do you have any tips for Young Lawyers, law students and Young Lawyers as to how they can write better. Guest first of all, thank you. Thank you very much for that complement. I dont know whether or not it is true. The first role is edit, edit, edit. There are really very few people, i am certainly not one of them, whose first draft is a gift you know. First drafts for me to see mean to be six edit by second drafts and succeeded by third drafts and things finally come into shape. Then you find good people to edit you. My clerk formed an important part of my writing process by editing draft. And i know that they get better because they are outside readers going this does not work, this does not work structurally or substantively. And that kind of thing. And it makes my draft better over time. That is my first piece of advice, the second piece of advice is read well. Im a big believer in the fact that people who read good writing are more likely to absorb what that sounds like, what it feels like to write for themselves. And it also works conversely. Sometimes i pick up a brief and i think every minute i speak spend with this brief i become a worse writer. Host [laughter] guest but sometimes i think of a brief and it is the opposite. So, read well. And i think those are but two big ones. Host i know you are an avid reader and youre a fan of jane austen novels, can you tell us what you might be reading now and can you tell us anything about guest yeah. Oddly enough i have to admit that that i told but i told the dean that may this that make have led to this question. Im on the plane and i am reading this Popular History book called fever in the heartland which is about a book about the ku klux klan in indiana in the 1920s where the clan is very powerful in the 1920s and in fact they all used almost capture the state house. Im on page 140 and there we are in south bend. And you probably know this story, but i will tell it to whichever ones of you do not know this. You have great moments in the universitys history where the kkk, they come to south bend to put notre dame in its place. And make it clear to this Catholic Institution it should be wiped off the face of the earth. And the students kind of organized against it. There is like, what we think of now as a demonstration and the counter demonstration and the students basically route the kkk and send them out of the south. This is the days of the four hearse men four horsemen and they say the quarterback of notre dame, instead of burning the cross, they had put up across with red electric bowlb ulbs bulbs and the quarterback of notre dame started throwing stones and knocking out the bulbs one by one. The students in them packing. Host certainly a history we are proud of. [applause] host that is a great story. You spent a lot of years as a dean at harvard. One of the things we have seen happen around College Campuses in america is the rise of cancel culture. And with cancel culture weve got a rise in selfcensorship. What do you see as ways that we can, as law schools or even undergraduate in touche and combat cancel culture and create an environment where people feel free to speak their minds. I often get asked by students out of a take a Free Exchange culture out to the workplace with them. Guest i know with the goal is the goal is what you suggested. There is too much disrupting beakers too much added books, theres too much trying to insulate yourself from ideas with which you disagree. All around us. And it is on both sides of the political spectrum. It is wrong and counterproductive for our democracy and society. For our democracy, this nation cannot work and cannot do the things that it needs to do unless people get along with it talk with each other and can really try to understand each other and learn from each other. And try to put their Heads Together and work for a common good with which presumably we all want this nation to prosper. It is not going to happen unless people Work Together across various disagreements, profound as they might be. I think it is especially important in educational institutions, as to educational institutions are supposed to be about learning, exchange, and engagement with ideas, including ideas that you do not like. If nothing else, nobody has ever managed to persuade a person who they do not understand. So, put yourself in another persons shoes and try to figure out where that other person is coming from and why she thinks what she thinks. If nothing else, in order to persuade that person. You may also learn from that person and he may share something that you did not realize you shared. And that sort of exchange is what universities and other educational institutions are all about. And i should say it may be especially in law schools. Stanford law school recently had a very bad episode with respect to one of these things. A lot of good things came out of that bad episode where a judge was disrupting and preventing being a conservative judge. But one good thing that came out of the episode is a former colleague of yours wrote this letter to her student body. The letter is really quite eloquent about how the law especially as an institution, it is all about hunting different wines of you and how you were going to do your job as a lawyer. If you close your mind and close your ears to different ideas and ideas that you might find in are mostly objections. You cannot operate well as a lawyer unless you can engage those ideas and understand them and try to figure out what, why they are held by people. Then you can go about trying to counter them. But so education law and democracy in general so much depend on this process of neutral mutual engagement of learning from each other, listening to each other, of, kind of an active engagement and persuasion that really does depend on thinking that other people are operating in good faith. And that you know, that there is something to be learned from engaging with them. Host i am wondering if you could either confirm or know. Dashboard deny a rumor that has been running rampant on this campus this week. As you may know, the espn called game day here tomorrow. Some people think you might be the guest celebrity kicker . [laughter] guest i think i will deny. Im also aware by the way that i might have worn the wrong color. Host [laughter] guest i realize that. You know you come with what you come with and i came with a red jacket and somebody pointed this out to me i felt very bad about it. [laughter] guest then the person said just tell them your heart is green. So, ok, my heart is green. Host [laughter] well, if it is not, we have supplied you with plenty of green clothing for tomorrow. [laughter] guest but not over the gift limit. Host [laughter] yes. So i have one last question for you, ohio state or notre dame . Guest well i think i have already said notre dame. [applause] [applause] just for that i have a special gift for you. Also not over the gift limit. [laughter] thank you so much. I have to move this out of the way. [applause] thank you so much. That is so great. I love this. Thank you for joining us. It is going in my office. I hope so. Thank you very much