My name is matt schera, director of under graduate ppe program. Its honored to be the host of Roger Wilkins lectures. So whats the connection between our pbe program and these lectures . Im glad you asked. As director, i spend a fair amount of time explaining what it is and what makes Masons Program unique i can go on. Really, i can go on. But today im going to go straight to the bottom line. It exists to serve highly motivated students who want to help create Better Solutions for the difficult and pressing problems that arise in the public life of a complex society. The problems that arise and persist in what Roger Wilkins, in the first chapter of his autobiography, had called with immense understatement, complicated times, such as our own today. Approximate. Pe offers an opportunity for students to build meaningful careers in civil service, journalism, business and the law and other socially engaged fields and endeavor. In this regard its my hope that generations of students will set their sights on the examples set by Roger Wilkins life and career. Again, we couldnt be prouder of our association with this legacy. I have three brief Program Notes to make before turning over the podium. The first is youre going to be able to find an archive of this event as well as past wilkins lectures and future lectures and more information at our website ppe. Gmu. Edu. The second is please, during the event, dont take pictures or videos out of consideration for those around you and up on the stage. Third and final note is at the conclusion of this event im going to ask you all to hold your seats and were going to allow Justice Kagan to leave first and we can all follow out after her. Without further ado, its my pleasure to introduce the president of george mason university, president ann ho holten. [ applause ] thank you, professor scherer. Thank you all. What a great crowd. Its a delight to see you all here today. I invite you to join me by extending a warm welcome to Justice Kagan. Were thrilled to have you here, action toes excellence. Were so proud of george mason. One of the things were proud about here at george mason is that we can offer our students opportunities like this, to hear from you today. We are here for the Second AnnualRoger Wilkins lecture. We like to think Roger Wilkins had a lot of roles in his life. His most Important Role was his 19 years of service here at george mason university, mentoring and fostering the growth of young minds and young lives as robinson professor of American History and culture, robinson Professor Program honors our most distinguished professors and we have a number of robinson professors in the room if you all could give us a wave. Thank you all for being here. He did do a few other things in his life. Top leadership role at the department of justice in the 1960s where he helped president kennedy and then president johnson pass the amazing important civil rights acts of that era. He was at the Washington Post and then New York Times in editorial roles, at Washington Post during the watergate era and wrote some of the important editorials and shared in the Pulitzer Prize that the post team won for that work. Were excited to honor him today through this continuing lecture series. Were so excited to have Justice Kagan here with us today. She and i have a number of things in common that you may not know. We shared our undergraduate and graduate alma maters. Princeton grads. She wrote the princetonnian which i read. She was on the law review, which i didnt read at harvard. But then we went on to have a significant overlap in our professional lives as well. I was a judge on the juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court for the city of richmond, literally the baby court in every way, and she, as you know, is a justice on the highest court in the land. Even though those courts are quite different, there are some significant overlaps, and they are both all about the rule of law. You know, judges get all excited about the rule of law. And not everybody quite understands that all the time. But the fundamental part, the fundamental essence of the rule of law is the principle that all rule that the rules apply equally to everybody. So it is fundamentally about equality. And when you travel in other countries, as ive had occasion to do in life, where the rule of law doesnt apply, where courts, where there isnt an independent functioning judiciary, where people in certain parties or groups dont have to comply with the rules that others have to comply with, you remember what this the importance of this thing that we take for granted here in our system, the rule of law. One of the consequences of having an independent judiciary system, as we do, is that judges cant always well, they cant speak freely to defend their positions. And they sometimes have to take unpopular positions because the rule of law so dictates. And yet they can only speak through their opinions. Therefore, it makes it extra special to have an opportunity to hear from Justice Kagan here in an academic setting where we can hear more about how the whole system works. Im very, very excited to hear her conversation today. Before i turn the mic over, i want to acknowledge we have professor wilkins wife, patricia, here with us, who is retired from her role as professor at Georgetown Law School and served in many, many other Important Roles as well. His daughter, amy, is with us. Also a great advocate, especially an advocate for children and families in all kinds of important opportunities and most especially im delighted that we are here, we have a chance to welcome his daughter, elizabeth, who will be following me on stage in a minute. Elizabeth is the senior counsel to carl racine, a yale well, well forgive her undergrad and law grad. Most importantly here today, she had an opportunity to clerk for Merrick Garland and then Justice Kagan at the court. The law clerk judge relationship is a very, very important one, partly because judges are so isolated. Your clerks are your family. They are your window into the world. And i know that elizabeth is thrilled to be here with Justice Kagan and vice versa. With that, ill hand off to elizabeth wilkins. [ applause ] good afternoon. And thank you, president holton, for that introduction. It is a real pleasure to be here today, speaking at the lecture that honors our dad and also introducing my former boss and mentor. It feels fitting to me that we are, in a sense, bringing together the two intellectual giants who dedicated their careers to public service. Above all else, our dad taught to us, our students and anyone who would listen or read that we each have a fundamental civic duty to make our country better. He brought all of his considerable talents and intellectual fire to bear on major justice of his lifetime using whatever position or power he had in service of those who had less. He did that most elegantly with his pen, writing time and again calls to arms against the evils he saw around him. Justice kagan, in her term, has spent her career putting her enormous talents to work for the good. I remember when i was interviewing to clerk for her she noted that i had worked for the obama administration. Mind you at a time when i was not much older than many of the people in this room, and she asked me one pointed question about that experience. What was the most important thing that you did for your country . To be clear, i was like 24 at the time that i was working in the obama administration, so i felt a little overwhelmed by trying to answer this question, but thats Justice Kagan. She has high expectations. There are, in her court, no wallflowers, no waiting around. You better be showing up and getting things done, no matter what your position is. That certainly has been Justice Kagans m. O. Throughout her career, born and raised new yorker, Justice Kagan attended princeton, harvard, serving as a law clerk and then to Justice Thurgood marshall. University of chicago law school, she was then asked to come into the Clinton Administration first as associate white house counsel, then domestic policy adviser. She went back to harvard law as a professor but quickly became dean where she is widely accredited for institutional reforms. President obama then appointed Justice Kagan to be the first female solicitor general of the United States and quickly followed up by appointing her to the Supreme Court. Two less wellknown but nevertheless very important achievements, she was the dean who brought free coffee to harvard law and she was also the justice who brought frozen yogurt to the Supreme Court, which i appreciated very much. In all seriousness, i was extremely fortunate to have clerked for a person like Justice Kagan. If my father taught me to you to become passionately to service, her chambers taught me diligence to Service Necessary to give it your all. I will never forget biking to work before 4 00 a. M. While the moon was still high but i will never forget to make your responsibilities so seriously to turn over every stone and pursue every line until you are sure you have gotten things right. Like our dad, justice k a. Gan is known for the power of her pen and watching her wrestle every sentence, every word into place to construct the most succinct argument possible was astounding to see. Her commitment to writing accessible, forceful and exceeding exceedingly we are all lucky to have her. This afternoon, Justice Kagan will be in conversation with steve pearlstein, professor perfectlystei pearlstein. He has been the driving force behind these lectures honor mieg dad. Like our dad, he is a professor here at george mason and like our dad, he is a semi reformed journalist. He started out as a tv reporter and even started his own political magazine before coming down here to work at the Washington Post. Won a pulitzer for coming on crisis before starting here at gmu in 2011 where his dedication to his students, the institution and to learning is ever evident. I look forward to a great conversation. Thank you. [ applause ] good afternoon. I dont know whether any of you saw that elizabeth has great red shoes. So next year im going to wear my red shoes. Thank you all for being here and thanks to you, Justice Kagan. Its an honor. It really is an honor. I mean, first off, i do everything that elizabeth asks me to do or tells me to do. But this one was a really special privilege and treat, just because, you know, i never had the opportunity to meet Roger Wilkins, but i feel as though i know him some through his daughter, and through his wife, and he was just such a superb educator and journalist and lawyer. And most of all a public servant. And its great to see you carrying on his legacy, elizabeth, and its great to be here for this event. So there are a lot of undergraduates here and some law students here. This is a very diverse campus. People from all sorts of countries, all walks of life, all classes. But they all have one thing in common. They are all a mass of anxiety about their careers. Chill out. So chill out. [ laughter ] so lets talk about careers, particularly yours. Harvard law school, two clerkships, law professor, white house dean, solicitor general. Was there a grand plan . Did you plan that whole thing out . Yeah, it was all written down when i was about 20 or something. No, thats a joke. Come on. When you were in high school, you actually appeared in your High School Yearbook wearing a gown and holding a gavel. Was that just coincidence . It was just coincidence. A bunch of us had raided the costume closet of the drama department. But i really had no idea i was going even to go to law school before basically the year before i went to law school. And i guess my view of the way things have turned out is that most of it was serendipity and unplanned. And these days college students, law students, they tend to plan too much. And the best advice you can give people the planning some is good and important, but is really just to keep your eyes open to opportunities that just might pop up. Because i think most of life happens that way. Its just things come about that you never would have expected, and the only thing that you have to know how to do is how to grab those opportunities when they do arise. And figure out the good ones from the not so good ones. You had some setbacks. At one point you were nominated to the dc circuit by president clinton and, as sometimes happens, you didnt really get a hearing or a vote. At one point you were a candidate to be president of harvard. Tell us about how those disappointments if you had got those jobs, you might not be sitting here today. So how should we think about those kinds of disappointments . Well, those are highclass disappointments, i have to say. [ laughter ] i also had some less highclass disappointments. The funny thing about these somebody looks at a resume and it has all these great jobs and it doesnt have all the jobs you didnt get. So there were plenty of jobs i didnt get along the way that i thought i wanted. But i dont know, i think what i tended to discover and the example that you gave about my dc circuit judgeship is actually a good example of that. Is that when a door closes some place, a window opens. And that might be magical thinking, but its happened to me often enough that i really believe it. And sometimes the biggest disappointments are the best things thats ever happened or could happen to you. And that was true, for example, of the judgeship. I was nominated to be a judge when i was 39. So i would have been very young and i would have spent really my entire life on the court. And i love the work i do, but when i look back on it, i think, you know, instead, i had a decade where i did many other things, where i developed lots of different sorts of skills. Now i am a judge. So i get that, too. So it was really a good thing, i think, that happened that i had an opportunity to explore some things i never would have had a chance to, had that come about in the way i thought i wanted. Can you convince yourself of that at the time, or is that hard to convince yourself. Its probably hard to convince yourself of it at the time and then something happens and you think that worked out all right. I went back to teach and i love teaching. Ive always loved it. And then just a few years after that, i had the opportunity to become dn of harvard and i learned so much in that role. I learned how to do so many things that i never would have you know, it requires you to be a person that i had didnt really expect myself to be and to develop all kinds of different skills. And it was a really very steep learning curve, which are the jobs that i like, are the jobs that require you to learn all kinds of new things. And it was a great decade before i got to where i am now. So lets talk about the law. What did you learn about the law and about judging from Justice Marshall, and i should say you were one of the last clerks. Roger wilkins, i think his first job out of law school was working for Thurgood Marshall for the Legal Defense fund. So the line goes from roger from marshall to roger to you to elizabeth. And i hope beyond. So what did you learn from Justice Marshall about the law and about judging . You know, mostly what you learn from Justice Marshall was how people can advance justice. And i dont think anybody has ever done so much of it as he has. I mean, i view him as the greatest lawyer of the 20th century, in part because he did the most justice in his time. And in part because he was just a great lawyer. He was miraculously skilled at all kinds of different things. You know, you dont see lawyers like this anymore, people who were great trial lawyers, people who were great appellate lawyers. He did criminal cases, he did civil cases. One day he was arguing before the Supreme Court and the next day he was on a train down to some small segregated down in the deep south where, you know, he was fighting to defend somebody for a lot of the cases he did were Death Penalty cases in front of allwhite juries, where it was hard to win cases. And everything he did, whether it was the big cases, the kind of brown v. Board, developing that entire strategy, and whether it was the small cases making sure that individual defendants, not so small individual defendants, got the justice they deserved. Everything he did was all about bringing justice to this country, and in particular to the africanamerican community, but to the whole country. And he was a great story teller and he told stories about his life. I clerked for him in one of his last years and i think by that point he was not in the best of health. I think he knew that he didnt have all that much time left, and he would look back sometimes on his life. So we would go into his chambers and do all the usual things that clerk and judges do and we would talk about the cases, and then at some point he would segue into storytelling mode and we would hear about his chil