President trump waited for the senate to confirm attorney general Jeff Sessions. That is not the way it turned out. Here is a look at her speech. [applause] sally yates camile, thank you for a beautiful and generous introduction. Dean minow, distinguished faculty, family, friends, and most of all to the graduates of the Harvard Law School class of 2017, thank you for inviting me to share in this special day with you. It is such a privilege for me to be here. And to the graduates of the class of 2017, i want to say congratulations. You have worked incredibly hard to get here today, and i hope that you will take a moment to really let the full weight of your accomplishment sink in, and that you will revel in this a little bit, and to the parents of the graduates that are here today, you have to feel a tremendous sense of pride and sheer joy in what your children have accomplished. Congratulations to the moms and dads here as well. [applause] mrs. Yates dean minow, i cannot let this moment pass, this moment of your last commencement here as dean. Without also recognizing the inspirational leadership and vision that has marked your tenure. And to the student award recipients today that we all just heard about, and to all of the students here today that were recognized for their pro bono service, i have to tell you, im humbled by your unselfish dedication to justice, a dedication you make simplified even before you have graduated from law school. I have really been excited about the opportunity to be able to talk with you all today but as the day grew closer, i admit, i started to get a little anxious. This is a big moment for you, and i wanted any words i had here today to be commensurate with that occasion. And the anxiety got a little worse a few weeks ago when i was at breakfast with my family, my husband and my daughter kelly, who is here with me, and my soninlaw zach. They knew i was going to beginning the speech, so the topic of commencement themes quickly surfaced. They started going around the table naming what they considered to be overused, trite commencement themes. [laughter] follow your dreams, dont give up, find your inner passion. I am playing along with this, but as they keep going, im starting to feel a little sweaty, because, one by one, with every derisive chuckle, they are eliminating every possible theme that i could have here for today, and i knew i would be busted because i knew my daughter and soninlaw would be here. So i went back to the letter i received from your class marshall. I have to tell you, they write a heck of a letter. They told me that this was the bicentennial of the schools founding. That for over 200 years, graduates of this school had been changing the trajectory of both our country and the world. If you think about it from both ends of the political spectrum, and every point in between, president s, Supreme Court justices, foreign leaders, activists, ceos, journalists, and 11 attorneys general have graduated from Harvard Law School, including my former boss and a woman i was proud to work under, loretta lynch. [applause] mrs. Yates now, some of the harvard law graduates are obviously a household name. But others are known only to the people whose lives they have changed forever. And now, all of you are following in their footsteps. And as if the bicentennial were not enough, they also told me that this year was the first time there really any equal number of men and women graduating from the law school. That is a long way from when my grandmother was admitted to the georgia bar. She did not even go to law school. She did what was called reading law then, which was essentially studying under the tutelage of another lawyer. Then she took and passed the bar exam. But back then, passing the bar exam and being able to practice law as a woman, especially in the south, those were two very different things. So she became a legal secretary to my grandfather and then later my father and uncle. Truth be told, she was smarter than all of them. [laughter] and i can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for her to have spent her career typing someone elses thoughts. She would be thrilled that for the 380 women graduating today, they have another destiny. The letter of invitation from your class marshall said this is the last opportunity for you to receive the wisdom and advice from someone outside the law school before you embark on your careers as lawyers and advocates around the world. So i thought back to my 31 years of being a lawyer, the vast majority of which i spent with the department of justice. For me, being a career prosecutor was not just my job, it was a really important part of who i was and who i still am. That is because i believe so strongly in the mission of the justice department, in the privilege of Public Service. And both the opportunity and the responsibility that lawyers have to use that special gift that we have to bring this world a little closer toward justice. As i thought back over those years, i came to realize that i envy all of you today. I envy that you were on the front end of this wonderful, challenging, rewarding, sometimes gut wrenching, but also sometimes uplifting adventure of being a lawyer. So i thought i would share with you today four observations or lessons that i have learned over this time about what it means to be a lawyer and what being a lawyer has taught me about life in our country. So observation number one. We are all better than our worst moment. But sometimes we are not quite as good as we think we are either. Now, as bright, talented, and driven as all of you are right now, you need to give yourself this face to develop into great lawyers. You are not born one. As rigorous as your education was here, there is still for you to learn, more dimensions of your lawyerly to be developed. I learned this the hard way not long after i graduated from law school. I was working at a big firm in atlanta. And we were working on a case involving the failure of one of those giant cranes they have in ports, the failure of a giant crane in the savanna port. A spine tingling topic which may give you an indication of water of why i left private practice. I was a new associate in the firm. We have traveled to savanna to depose the other sides expert. Looking back on this, i realize that that expert must not have been too important to the case if they were letting me do the deposition, but none the less, that is what we were doing. We get there in the expert is a with a veryneer heavy accent who chain smokes with one of those long cigarette holders, holding it like this for the entire deposition. This is back when folks could smoke in depositions. Now, i was incredibly nervous, and i have to tell you, throughout the whole thing, he is literally, not just figuratively, not literally blowing smoke in my face. I also have to admit to you, i did a miserable job. He owned me during that deposition. I dont think i made a single point. Well, on the flight back the partner that i was with thought that this might be a good time to critique my performance in the deposition. And we are sitting on the aisle seats, he is one row ahead of me, so he has to turn around to talk to me. For the entire flight back to atlanta, in excruciating detail, in what felt like a booming voice, told me and the entire flight just how much i had totally screwed up that deposition. Well, i got home and recounted the events to my then boyfriend, now husband. I told him how i had completely blown this thing. And he reminds me that at the end of this description i exclaimed to him, but i thought i would be so good at this. I got better at it. Thankfully, that miserable deposition did not define my career. I was better than that bad moment, though not as good as i thought i would be. That is going to happen to you, too. You will make mistakes. You are going to have mediocre moments and sometimes some outright blunders. You will be disappointed in your performance, and while im not suggesting to you that any of this is something to aspire to, you need to give yourself the space to learn from that, do not be defined by it. Lawyers are not the only ones who are better than their worst moment as well. I have come to appreciate that over time about the individuals who i have prosecuted over the years. Social justice and criminal justice do not exist on nonintersecting planes. Rather, every single day as a prosecutor i saw how a generational lack of access to education and Economic Opportunity converged or more accurately collided with our criminal Justice System every day. And as a society we compound that when we fail to ensure that the thousands of individuals who are being released from prisons every single year across our country we compound that when we fail to ensure that they have the basic tools they need to be successful when they are released. Everyone should have the opportunity to rise above his or her worst moment. [applause] mrs. Yates second observation. You never know when a situation will present itself when you will have to decide who you are and what you stand for. The defining moments in our lives often do not come with advanced warning. They can arise in scenarios we would have never expected, and they do not come sometimes with the luxury of a whole lot of time to go inside yourself for some serious introspection. So how do you prepare for all of that . You are type a people, i know that. You want to be prepared. I had such an experience recently with the travel ban. As you heard, its a tradition at the department for the Deputy Attorney generals to stay on during the transition between administrations. That is for good reason, its important to have continuity. Id agree to stay on as acting attorney general until president trumps attorney general Jeff Sessions could be confirmed. It was supposed to be an uneventful time. We had agreed with the incoming team that while i was the acting attorney general, things would stay just as they were. No positions at the department of justice would change, everything would stay status quo. I was in the car on the way to the airport late in the afternoon of friday, january 27, when i learned from media reports that the president had signed an executive order restricting travel from seven muslim majority countries. Even though this was the very first we had heard of this, we were going to have to have doj lawyers in courts all over the country defending it within a matter of hours. On monday, i learned that we had to take a position at the department on the constitutionality of the order. This is not what i was expecting. My former chief of staff had jokingly told me that during the short time i was acting ag, i would have time these are her words a lot of long, boozy lunches. We expected everything would be quiet during this time, but i can tell you, there was not time for lunches at all, boozy or otherwise. [laughter] mrs. Yates now, dont worry, im not about to launch into an exhausting discussion of constitutional law or immigration law. And i appreciate that people of goodwill can have very different views both on the legality of the order and what i should have done in this scenario. But i do think it is illustritive of an unexpected moment, when the law and conscience intersected, and the decision had to be made in a very short period of time. After reviewing the legal challenges and reading cases and conferring with the doj lawyers, i came to the conclusion that defending the constitutionality of the travel ban would require the department of justice to argue that the executive order had nothing to do with religion, that it was not intended to this favor muslims. Muslims. Or this was despite the numerous are statements made by the president and his surrogates regarding his intent to effectuate a muslim ban. I believed this would require us to advance a pretext, a defense not grounded in truth. So i directed the department of justice not to defend the ban. [applause] mrs. Yates i appreciate that some believe that i should have just resigned instead of ordering the department not to defend the travel ban. And that is a fair question. I grappled with that all over the weekend and during the day on monday, but i believed then and i believe now that resigning would have protected my personal integrity, but it would not have protected the integrity of the department of justice. The department of justice is not [applause] doj is not just another law firm. And this was not just any legal issue. It was about the core founding principle of religious freedom, and i could not in good conscience send doj lawyers in court to advance an argument that the travel ban was unrelated to religion when the evidence of intent reflected that that was not the case. There was not much time to examine the weighty constitutional law concepts that were implicated here, nor was there a lot of time to craft the directive that we ultimately issued to the department. But i did not make this Decision Just within the 72 hours from the time i learned of the ban until i issued a decision. That decision was the result of what others had taught me over my entire 27 years with the department of justice. I drew on the lessons of mentors who, while i was with ausa had instilled in me a reverence for the privilege of representing the people of the United States and upholding the law and the constitution. From the judges who rightly expected doj lawyers to be held to a higher standard than lawyers representing private litigants because, after all, we were the department of justice. And also from my interactions with people whom i served, the people who had made clear time and time again that they were looking for the department of justice to stay true to our founding principles and to protect peoples rights. That compass that is inside all of us, that guides us in times of challenge is being built every single day with every experience that we have. I was fortunate to have learned from some inspiring people in my life who not only served as role models for me but challenged my assumptions and my way of thinking and helped to build my core. Over the course of your life and your career, you too will face weighty decisions were the law and conscience are intertwined. And while it may not play out in such a public way, the conflict that you will feel will be no less real. And the consequences of your decision also significant. The time for introspection is all along the way, to develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for, because you never know when you will be called to answer that question. The third observation. The safest course is not always the best course. Be bold. You over the course of my legal career, i have encountered people who seem to always take the safest route, and this can manifest itself in a variety of ways. It is prosecutors who dont want to lose, so they wont bring the difficult, hard to prove case, even though the individual is guilty and should not get away with it. Private practice lawyers whose advice is generally that which is least likely to come back and blow up on them, rather than what is necessarily best for the client. They put every possible argument and a brief. They put every piece of evidence in a trial, because they dont want to take the risk that they have left out something important, even though their briefs and trial presentations are less effective because of that. This is the person who reads which way the room is going before he or she speaks up, who never tells people in authority something they dont want to hear, whose in authority and surrounds him or herself with people who will simply affirm their own judgment. This person can rock along pretty well, probably make partner in their firm, climb up the corporate or institutional ladder. But do you want to be that person . Would you find that a very satisfying way to live, much less to practice law . From my perspective, you may be advancing your career by practicing law like this, but you are not doing your job. Doing your job means you are not simply a reflection of someone elses values or opinions. You are the person to whom the leader turns when he or she needs to hear the truth. I can tell you from my experience both as Deputy Attorney general and as u. S. Attorney, i could only trust the advice of the people around me if i knew that they were willing to tell me when they thought i was wrong. Im not advocating being reckless or irresponsible, but from my perspective, to fully embrace both life and practicing law you got to be willing to take a risk, to be uncomfortable, to be bold. But taking a risk also means that you have to be willing to be wrong. And that can sometimes be a lonely place to be. But i hope that the fear of being wrong will not keep you from acting. Because inaction, doing nothing, or simply going along, that is a decision, too. It seems it is the time in my life when i have not acted that that is when i have regretted it the most. Being willing to be wrong also requires that you are willing to own it. We are all wrong at times. It is going to happen to all of you as well. There is nothing worse than the person who never was to have his or her fingerprints on anything controversial and who will try to slip out of responsibility when things hit the fan. Not only does this generally not work very well, but if your colleagues sense that you are going to cut and run when things start going south, they will not trust you. If they dont trust you, they are not going to include you in the big moments, in the moment you went to law school for. Being bold, taking a risk, and owning it is not easy to do. The instinct for selfpreservation may continually draw you to the safe, riskfree course. But i urge you to resist that instinct. Not only is a life of hedging your bets unsatisfying, but it means you are unlikely to make much of a difference. You can either glide across the world or impact it. It is your choice. Which brings me to my last point, which is actually a question. And that is, what are you going to do with that diploma that you receive tomorrow . When i ask you that question, im not asking you so much what your job is going to be. Im asking you who you are going to be. Regardless of whether you go into private practice or Public Interest work, whether you are in the corporate world, or academia, you are now a lawyer. That means that you not only have the unique opportunity and ability, but also the attendant responsibility to Foster Justice in this world, to reveal truth, to stand up for the voiceless, to hold our country to its promise of equal justice for all. I believe the people of this country care deeply about those values. They care about the rule of law. They care about our constitution and the principles and freedoms on which our country was founded. And they are counting on you, the lawyers, to do what Bobby Kennedy said, and that is to breathe life and force into the concepts and liberty of justice. If you have ever doubted whether that was true, if you ever doubted whether the American People really care about all of that or not, just think back to that first weekend after the ban when protests erupted all over the country, and thousands of people streamed to airports, east coast, west coast, big cities, small towns, all demonstrating about what they believed was an attack on our constitution and core values. But lawyers streamed to the airports, too. Lawyers streamed there to represent people who were being turned away. Of course, they were not getting paid anything for it. The most remarkable thing about that whole experience to me was that all of these people who were flooding the airport to protest or the lawyers showing up to represent individuals, for the most part, they were not personally impacted by the traveled ban. Not them, not their family members, not their friends. It did not impact them, yet they still felt compelled to act and to speak out. An example of this was illustrated in a letter i received after i left doj. I got a letter from a couple in oregon who had gone to the airport there with their young son to protest the travel ban. They sent me a photograph of him, this little bitty boy holding up a sign that said immigrants and refugees welcome. And they said they did that because they wanted both their son to know that as a country that is who we are. That is what we stand for. [applause] mrs. Yates a friend of mine shared with me and old irish story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in. St. Peter says, of course, just show me your scars. The man says, scars . I have no scars. St. Peter responds, pity. Was there nothing worth fighting for . There is plenty worth fighting for. For me, it is criminal Justice Reform so we can have a fair and proportional criminal Justice System that applies equally to all, regardless of race or wealth or status. [applause] mrs. Yates it is also respect for the brave men and women and Law Enforcement who risk their lives every day to protect us. [applause] mrs. Yates it is Holding AccountableCorporate Executives who lie and cheat and steal so that we can ensure that just does not become the way of doing business. It is the right of all americans to marry the person whom they love, regardless of whether that person is the same or an opposite sex. [applause] mrs. Yates and it is the rule of law and the principal that our Law Enforcement and intelligence agencies must be free to do their work, free of political interference or intimidation. [applause] those are the things on my list. That is what i think is worth fighting for, but you have to come up with your own list. You have to decide what you believe is worth fighting for. Now, im not suggesting by this that all of you have to devote your entire career to Public Service or Public Interest work. Indeed, the students who are being recognized today, the students who did 1000 or 2000 hours of pro bono work, they did that on top of their job of going to law school. The lawyers who showed up at the airport to represent individuals after the travel ban, they were not Public Servants in the typical sense of the word, in terms of being government employees. Instead, all of these lawyers and lawyerstobe recognized that they were people who were in, the words of your law school, moved to question, prepared to reason, and called to act. The arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, but it does not bend there on its own. So i would urge you to grab hold of that arc and not let go, because the people of our country, and indeed the entire world are counting on you. Thank you again for the privilege of being able to join you today. Congratulations to the class of 2017. [applause] regardless of your background, a member where you came from. Hold on to the way so many of you reached out to mentor young three hold on to the way you engaged in this community. And make sure to bring that commitment to whatever walk of life you choose. Bravery, not perfection, was the key that unlocks every door i have walked through sense. It took me 33 years to figure out that brown girls can do white guy things too. Understand you are here because of a lot of help. You also understand that now is time to help others. That is what this is all about. Saturday night at 8 00 eastern, 2017 commencement speeches. Speakers included former california governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at university of houston, former Vice President joe biden at Colby College in atne, girls who cofounder Scripps College in california, Arizona Governor doug ducey at Aeronautical University at joint base andrews, santa fe mayor hobby or gonzales at new mexico highlands university, and michigan Governor Rick Snyder at Adrian Community college in michigan. Saturday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan and can