[ applause ] a few years ago we began inviting a giant of the bench or bar to offer reflections to our entering class and its been an extraordinary opportunity for our students as you embark on your Legal Education to listen to and to learn from someone whose career has shaped the law. And by attending georgetown law youve chosen to learn the law in the place where laws are made and this is evident in the speakers who have welcomed our first year students. So in the past few years people have heard from justices stevens and the late justice scalia. And we have been so fortunate the last two years this is the second year in a row to be joined by the legendary Justice Ruth Bader ginsburg. [ applause ] so i know that a long introduction of Justice Ginsburg is not necessary for georgetown students. As you progresses in your studies at the law center youll read and discuss from many powerful and Supreme Court decisions as well as her pointd and influential descents. And youll also learn that she occupies a rare place in history. Like thorough good marshal, she would be a historical figure even if shed never been a judge or justice and as im sure you all know the judge, the justice is also a cultural icon. How many of us can say that we have inspired a one act opera, two coloring books, and the phenomenon known as the notorious rbg. Justice ginsburg is also a special member of the law center community. For those of you who came down on this side, you might have noticed that we recently received a portrait of Justice Ginsburg, which we now proudly display as you come into the auditorium. Her late husband had was a belvled professor at georgetown law for many years and we have a professorship named in his honor. And Justice Ginsburgs authorized biaugrfers and co biraphers are members of our faculty. Every year invites the fellows to the court for tea for conversation. Im deeply thankful for your commitment to our students and alum alumni. Thank you, Justice Ginsburg. A couple of logistical announcements before we begin. After the justices remarks, we will go to the reception. So thats one. Thats where you go next. Two, silence your cell phones. I did mine on the way in. And then in terms of the format, the justice will talk for a little bit about the past term. Then after that ill ask some questions and we received a lot of questions from the audience. So i will time allowed, ask as many of them as i can. When i ask your question, i ask tat you stand up so that we can recognize you. So now members of our 2017 entering class, please join me in welcoming Justice Ruth Bader ginsburg. I feel so welcome and you feel mostly first year students. Is that right . A very exciting time. I remember how i felt my first year of law school. It was a new kind of learning. In college i was mostly passively taking notes but your Law School Classes i hope are engaging you so you are thinking all the time. Well, i thought we could begin by my giving you a resume of what last term was like at the Supreme Court and say a few things about the term that was thought on the first monday in october. The largest Headline News last term was the appointment of a new justice. Justice gorsuch to replace justice scalia. For 14 months we were only eight on the bench. Neal gorsuch became the 113th justice in time to join us for our last sitting in april. He had only one week between his conformation and the start of the sitting but he managed to prepare well for 13 cases. He also cast himself as a potential rival to justice citau mior, as the justice who asks the most questions at argument. The principal inhouse ben fishiary of Justice Gorsuchs appointment is justice who is no longer our junior justice. Meaning she escapes opening a conference door when a meschger knocks, answering the rare ring of the telephone and most daunting, conveying to the entourage from the Clerks Office, the legal office and the reporters office the disposition the justices made at the conference. Justice kagan also released to Justice Gorsuch, the Cafeteria Committee and that assignment, Justice Kagan suffered brumbling with good humor. Her signal achievement, the installation of a frozen yogurt machine. A new statistic was reported last term, adding to the laugh meter and the count of questions asked by each justice. It was the average number of words from the bench per argument. Justice brieer won hands down with 814 words. Justice kagan took second place with 646. Justice meyer third with 515 and i trailed with only 284. But running neck in neck as fastest justice and getting out opinions, according to a june 1 reckoning, rapid ruth and swift sonia. Twice during the term justice fryers cell phone rang in the midst of argument. Like spectators, the justices are expected to leave their phones and other Electronic Devices behind. After the second occasion, the chief justice had a replica of a metal detecter frame placed in the corridor for justice brieer to pass through before ascending to the bench. For me the most unforgettable argument of the term is a case you probably never heard of. This was a question presented. Could a naturalized citizen be stripped of her citizenship if she committed an offense and failed to report it on her citizenship application . The chief justice was visibly shaken. Some time ago, he confessed, of course outside the statute of limitations, he drove skilkt miles an hour in the 55. Per hour zone. With such a confession prompt cancellation of naturalization he asked . Justice kagan used cant recall how many times ive lied about my weight. Responded, unless you did so under oath. The court released 62 decisions and argued cases last term, dividing 53 or 54 in only 9 of the 62 decisions. In comparison to that sharp agreement rate, we disagreed in only 15 of the cases. We were unanimous in the bottom line judgment in at least 31 cases fully half the decisions rendered and argued cases. And in 21 of the 31 unanimous judgments, we were unanimous in the opinion as well. So agreement you can see is substantially higher than sharp disagreement on the court. We decided several high profile cases and i will describe some of them. Two cases came to us from the Second Circuit. Sessions, moraly, santana against habasi. Both were among the most closely watched. Morali, santana concerned a birth right citizenship statute that treated unwed u. S. Citizens mothers more favorably than unwed u. S. Citizen fathers. A child born abroad to a u. S. Citizen mother would acquire citizenship at birth if her mother had had previously resided in the United States for a continuous period of one year. Unwed u. S. Citizen fathers were subjelkt subjel subjected to a more demanding residency requirement. Because his fatherant lived in the United States more than five years after turning 14, moraly santana did not meet the statutory qualifications for u. S. Citizenship at birth. Congresss spesification of different physical presence for unwed mothers and fathers, the Second Circuit held. It was incompatible with the equal protection principal. Six of the eight participating justices addressing the toughest question in the case the court ultimately concluded that striking down rather than extending the favorable treatment for unwed mothers was the remedy congress would have preferred it known of the constitutional infirmity of the genderbased differential it enacted. That was so, we explained because the longer residency pare period applied to parns as well as unwed fathers. Congress, we thought would not have wanted the exception for unwed mothers to swallow the main room. The mitigation stem from the governments Immediate Response in new york city to the september 11th tragedy. Plaintiffs sued Prominent Department of justice officials and wardens of the metropolitan Detention Center in brooklyn, new york. Where plaintiffs were confined for periods running from three to eight months. Those arrested had over stayed their visa s but were not accusd of any criminal law infraction. They alleged discrimination based on the perception that they were muslim and they alleged gross mistreatment. Many of their allegations were confirmed in an Inspector General report which corroborated that the plaintiffs were held in cramped cells for over 23 hours a day, kept awake day and night by bright lights and loud sounds, denied access to basic hygiene items, toilet paper, soap, towels, tooth paste and eating utensils. Denied for extended periods telephone calls to family and lawyers. Allowed no mail or visitors, frequently strip searched and subjected to physical and verbal abuse. The the District Court dismissed most of their claims, reversing in part the Second Circuit held that many of the claims could pass the courts threshhold. The court took up that case with only six sitting justices. Soto miorbecause she had had been in the Second Circuit during earlier stages in the case and Justice Kagan because she was our solicitor general while the case was pending. And Justice Gorsuch had not yet joined the court when we heard argument. Four justices voted to reverse in principal part pivotal to the courts decision was a 1971 precedent the case was bivens gensz six unnamed agents of the federal bureau of narcotics. Directly under the constitution. In bivens and self it was the fourth amendments ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Even kwhen there was no statute granting a right to sue. Restrictively reading the precedent the court held that bivens did not reach claims like those asserted in abossi, given the apeling interest in national security. Justice brieer descented in an opinion i joined. He took the unusual step of sumerizing his descent from the bench. That meant he thought the court s opinion was not just wrong but egregiously so. Without a right to sue, he urged the constitutional safeguards against arbitrary detention would be toothless. He guided the court in a case decided soon after hernandez against mesa. The episode there ensued. A Border Patrol age nlt on the texas side of the border. The agent spied while the the boy was playing in a cover separating the two countries. The boys parents sued the offices seeking monetary compensation. With all of the courts judges sitting, the fifth circuit held that because the boy was shot while he was on the mexican side of the border, the ninetyfoufo amendment did not apply to the offices use of deadly force. In an unsigned opinion, the court instructed the fifth circuit to consider as an initial matter and in light of the abossi decision whether a claim could be mounted under bivens. Again justice brieer descended and again i joined him. The coalvert was a jointly controlled and maintained area. Justice brier emphasized it was policed by both mexico and the United States. It should not have been material in our view. Where in the coalvert the bullet fire and struck the boy. A case coming to us from the federal circuit, mattel against tam. Targeted a provision of the l m lanm, a trademark act. A law that prohibited the patent and Trademark Office from registering a despairaging trademark. Rock front man, simon tan sought to trademark the name he chose for his band, the slants. His aim was to reappropriate a term long used to despairage members of a Minority Group and to render the term instead of a racial slur, a badge of pride. The patent and Trademark Office refused to register the mark on the sole ground that it despa despairaged people of asian descent. Sitting with all of its judges, a fractured federal circuit held that the provision that banned disparaging marks a viewpoint discriminatory measure incompatible with the First Amendment. We afirmed that judgment. There were two opinions, each for four justices but all of us agreed that a trademark is the trademark holders speech and not the governments speech. The underlying issue had received considerably more attention in the dispute over the nfl s Washington Redskins trademark. The patent and trademark aufls canceled protection for redskin trademarks in 2014 at the request of a group of native americans. A federal District Court ruling that redskins was disparaging to a substantial compositive native americans. The appeal to the Fourth Circuit was placed on hold pending our decision in the slants case. One of the problems these cases present is what exactly does disparaging mean . Beauty is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. To the Trademark Office examiner, slants was a racial insult. To the slants themselves, it was an expression of pride in their heritage. I check before coming here to find out what had had happened to the redskin case. In june the Fourth Circuit had had asked the parties to inform the Court Whether in light of the decision in the slants case oral argument was necessary. All of the lawyers, the ones for the plaintiffs, the native urmarecons that complained and the lawyer for the redskins and the government agreed that the slants case was controlling and that there would be no need for oral argument. In another First Amendment case, packing hm against North Carolina, the issue was access to the internet by former sex offenders. A state law made it a felony for a registered sex offender to access a broad array of commercial social networking websites that the offender knew did not restrict membership to adults. Packingham had served a sentence for taking indecent liberties with a 13yearold. He had served his time and several years later, he posted a note on his Facebook Page celebrating his success in getting a traffic ticket dismissed. For that posting, he was charged with violating North Carolinas law, banning him from using facebook, also amazon. Com, web md, the New York Times, the Washington Post and scores more. In defense of the statute, North Carolina stressed its vital interest in protecting children from sexual predators. But the law was stunningly over broad, the Supreme Court held because it barred him from all of the Online Platforms individuals use to gain information and engage in ordinary and protected speech. For example, interacting with their elective representatives, obtaining Online Education and finding gainful employment. Applying the First Amendment to the internet, the court recognized will be a trying task and no doubt the future will bring more opportunities to address the matter. The religion clause of the First Amendment in Trinity Lutheran church. The case involved an application by the church to participate in missouris scrap Tire Grant Program to resurface a playground at its preschool and day care facility. The state department of Natural Resources denied funding on the ground that Trinity Lutheran was a church. And the department did so relying on an article of the Missouri State constitution that read no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly nor directly in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion. Trinity lutheran challenged the departments ruling, urging that its exclusion from the Grant Program violated the free exercise and equal protection clauses by discriminating on the basis of religious status. Disagreeing with the lower courts, the Supreme Court held that excludeing the church from the Grant Program violated the federal constitution. A generally available benefit the court reasoned could not be with held on account of the beneficiaries religious identity. In a case i joined, justice mior said the clauses need more of a separation of church and state. More concern questions stemming from the courts 2016 decision against hodges. Ob obergafelled held that we sum airline reversed a decision of the Supreme Court of arkansas concerning birth certificates. We held that a state may not deny to marry samesex couples the right afforded by state law to married opposite sex couples to have the name of the birth mothers spouse entered as the second parent on the childs birth certificate. On the same day that we saw, we granted review in a case under the colorado antidiscrimination act. A case that has gotten more attention, i think than any other on our current docket. Al against colorado silver Righ