[applause] thank you. Its really an honor and a privilege to be here. I was asked to say a few words to introduce the next panel. I would start by saying something that we probably know. The court is a fairly powerful institution. It was not always so, one of the signs of how powerful it is, is that you do see, in any president ial election, people say it matters who you vote for because they will pick the next Supreme Court justices. If you think about why that really is so, the Court Decides about 80 cases a year. About 75 of them need to be decided but thats not the reason the court is powerful and not the reason people say that about who you should vote for for the president ial election. There typically five or six cases in any term which is why we care about the court. Those are the cases that have truly Significant Impact on our politics, society, and government. Part of the reason that makes them so important is that the law runs out before you get to the decision. So how do we justify giving so much power to what amounts to a Monarchical Institution in cases like that . And its not actually so easy to do. One of the ways we do it is by who we appoint. Who we give that kind of power to. We look ideally for people who have experience in politics, who have been in a position where they have had to make these hard decisions with responsibility for the consequences of those decision. In the ideal world we remove them from politics and the way we structure the court and they have a wisdom to bring on those cases when the law runs out. So that last bit when the legal justifications might take you one way or another, they can bring that to bear into the decision and exercise judgment, which is why we call them judges. In those five or six cases, its that kind of experience that matters. If you look across American History we used to routinely appoint justices with that kind of experience. We had justices who had been governors, senators, cabinet officials, people who had been in the heat of politics and important political decisions, sometimes at the state or federal level with real responsibilities and the consequences of what they did. Justice oconnor was the last justice of that ilk. You see it reflected in her decisionmaking. Part of the reason is because the court has become so powerful. It becomes difficult to get anyone through the appointments process. When she was appointed, and for all sorts of reasons, we heard on the first panel they went to someone who was quite unconventional but whose important experience for the court was not her experience as a judge but as a state a state legislature and the leader of her party in her state and somebody with that experience in politics. So what happened when the law runs out . You can see that reflected in Justice Oconnors opinions. You could see it not just in what she decided but how she decided. But nobody gets to see how a justice decides their case better than her law clerks. Not even her fellow justices got to see as close or as much as the clerks. Clerking is closer to discipleship than a regular job. You work long hours. Oconnor worked longer hours and most of us. You have incredible close contact with this person. You spend your time thinking not about how you can influence them, because very few of us have the arrogance at the age of 26 to want to push the justice in a different direction than they wanted to go, but trying to understand what it is that the justice needs, wants, or is trying to do. To provide the research, thinking, and argumentation that helps the justice shaper views. So who better to give us a sense of what it was that made Justice Oconnor the justice that she was. Who better than those in those key cases who did the work with her. So let me bring on the next panel. I think you will be interested to see the firsthand experiences of the people who had the opportunity to work as closely with Justice Oconnor as only her clerks ever did. [applause] please welcome to the stage our moderator, mr. Jeffrey rosen, and our first panel of distinguished speakers, chancellor kent severewd, miss marci hamilton, and miss julie osullivan. [applause] ladies and welcome to our panel about the firsthand experience of clerking with Justice Oconnor. We are honored to have three extraordinarily distinguished scholars who also clerked with Justice Oconnor during her early years on the court. During the 1984, 1985, and 1989 terms. We should begin by asking what was it like to clerk with her as she was still adjusting to the extraordinary role of being the first woman on the Supreme Court. Chancellor, we will begin with you. [indiscernible] she was incredibly demanding, and incredibly supportive. And what a blessing that was to have early in your life. She expected the best of you but also knew you had a family. It was exhausting but exhilarating. Professor hamilton, you talked about how she taught you to be a professional. Tell us about that. The thing about clerking for Justice Oconnor is that you learn how to be incredibly honest while you are smiling. You learn not to put in writing things that you do not want to read again. I will never forget in the abortion cases, i was very unhappy with Justice Scalias treatment of the justice and i really wrote it up and i wrote a response. We nailed him. That was my plan. And i hear marci so i went to the secretarys desk and i go to the office and she goes we dont talk like that. And i said i think we should. And she said no, take it out. So i took out all the strong wordage and left the facts. And i learned a good lesson. You can really disagree with someone, but you dont have to be disagreeable. Thats an amazing skill that somebody gets early in their career. I have to ask, after Justice Scalia said that one of her opinions cannot be taken seriously, she famously said sticks and stones may break my bones, thats probably not true. Did she find his barbs to be a little sharp . She found them annoying and really capable of being ignored. She is one of the people who understood that you do not get back to the person whos trying to taunt to you, you could really drive them crazy. She was gifted at it. She told me that she figured out that dealing with Difficult People she had four levels of dealing with them. You do this, you try humor at this level, try something at this level. And i started taking notes because i would never remember it. She was so good with people. Professor sullivan, she famously made chili and had the saturday sessions. Give us a sense of what it was like to have her chili and discuss cases. To give you a sense of how things worked, i was the fifth year in, these guys were little earlier. She came from the state court of appeals and she did not have a lot of experience in federal or constitutional law. In the court was hearing 150 cases a year, now they hear about 75. We were doing the third pool memos, she wanted every case to have a bench brief and we were doing the opinions. It was a punishing schedule, maybe you remember, the computer was only up until midnight and 10 00 to 10 00 on weekends. We were there every second the computer was up. So we would write our bench memos and we were expected to read each others bench memos for maybe 10 cases on friday night, we would get together on saturday morning and the justice would make herr three alarm tacos or chili. Im a girl from new jersey, i did not know i was like what is this. Was it really spicy . It was good, once you got past the foreigness for some people. It was not the tacos that were hot. I was usually in the hot seat. The justice, in my experience, tended to hire someone who was a liberal, a real conservative, and i think it was somewhat intentional, and two people in between. I was the liberal and i shared my office with a conservative, who was the real conservative. We had a wonderful time because we both smoked and drank too much diet coke. We got along famously, but i did get beaten up pretty thoroughly almost every saturday. I was only 27, i look back and i think what were you thinking. You had some nerve. But those sessions, she let us spar, and did not enter into until the end, when she gave you a sense of what she wanted. She was really sincere about listening to a 27yearold tell her about the cases. We viewed our roles as not as telling her how to decide it but to make sure she can make the best decision possible. We were honest about what the cases said, what the briefs said, we might present our point of view, but our job was to protect her and to make sure that she made the best decision, which included telling her how she had decided previous cases. Thats fascinating, that vision of her listening to the best argument on both sides and deliberating is very powerful. Chancellor, can you take a particular case and give us an example of how that played out and take us into her decisionmaking process . I would take a case from long after i clerks, planned parenthood the caseyv. Casey. She genuinely listened to everyone and read everything. You had to give her everything you cited, and everything you read that you chose not to cite, marked with the pages with these huge book carts that she would roll in when you were preparing an argument and later with an opinion. Planned parenthood v. Kci spoke with her a lot about. That was 1992. The clerks were very sharply divided, as may be you will hear later. I guess i would say she was able to, when she had to struggle between her belief in the rule of law, and her intuition from her own background and experience were the hardest cases for her, and i would say that was about the hardest. Professor hamilton, we all want to hear about casey, that was a defining case for her, could you shed any insights on that. I would compare to kc the hodson case, thats from our term, where Justice Oconnor voted to invalidate an abortion regulation. The year i was clerking was one of those years where there was a strong conservative cabal of law clerks that snuck around and thought they were deciding all of the cases for the justices. There was a lot of fighting over this case and a lot of unhappiness that Justice Oconnor was going to go the way of saying you cannot say two parents have to both give to sense two cents for a teenager to get an abortion. But she was a stall wart. She did not care what was going on in the halls. She did call me and one time and asked me about it. And i said im going to be honest, im not invited to the meetings. There are not any women at these meetings. She did not like that. In the end, she did what she wanted to do, we agreed that by far was the best oral argument of the term. An absolutely fabulous oral argument, her kind, where the litigator for the reproductive rights project was saying things like the answer to that question is on page 152 and the second paragraph, the answer to that is on 845. You could see her going check, check, you are right. It was an amazing year, but it was the only year she voted that way. Professor sullivan there were two aspects of kc that were so distinctive to Justice Oconnor, her concern about spousal notification, which she felt was a paternalistic violation of gender equality, and the undue burden test, which was so central to her jurisprudence. Could you discuss those or reproductive rights cases you had during your term. We did not have reproductive rights cases my term, and we did not have the unpleasantness because all of our desk cases were held. Those tend to bring out the visceral feelings of the clerks and can get really ugly. Our year was pretty benign. We had some reasonably important cases, we had an affirmative action case where she weighed in on whether affirmative action should have scrutiny apply when you are advancing africanamericans. That was very difficult. She really struggled. But one thing about the justice, people talk about her discipline and her work ethic, but people dont realize was how incredibly bright she was. It always amazes me, and i think its because her character was such that she made it look easy. But here she is, brandnew, deciding these abortion cases a couple of years in, we are wheeling in 10foot tall stacks of books, and shes doing that between exercise class at 8 00, and dancing with john at 7 00. I dont know how she did it. In part its because shes a quick study and a hard worker and she was decisive. She gave it her best shot and did not look in the rearview mirror. That decisiveness is so striking. She had a pillow at one point in her chamber that said may be in error, but never in doubt. She heard the best arguments on both sides, made up her mind and did not look back. At the same time she was such a model of thoughtful moderation, of balancing competing interests in a way that seems so rare and precious today. How can you reconcile those two features, the balancing moderation and the decisiveness. If you could give a specific examples that would be great. She was the common law judge, and thats hard for people to understand in a polarized era where people are trying to get their cases in their textbooks. She wanted to decide things on the facts, the messy facts that she had seen as a politician and a trial judge. She had seen how messy the facts are. In the second thing to say is that she was often in doubt. She knew they were hard cases. So she wrestled really hard with them. But when she decided, she did not look back, because she had another case to deal with, and she pushed me hard to say, the time to have doubts is before you make a decision but not until afterwards, if you wait until afterwards you are doing a disservice to people. She was capable of doing really hard things and moving on cheerfully and positively, which was not by nature but by upbringing. A common law judge, what does it mean for Justice Oconnor to be a common law judge . What consideration moved her as she balanced competing features and again, examples, please. She was really an incrementalist in a lot of ways. She was too humble to think that she could decide and issue for all time with one case. She was very respectful of the case and controversy requirement. I really didnt come to truly appreciate that until i started comparing her approach with her dear friend, Justice Scalia. For Justice Scalia, it was zeus handing the truth down from high and it was supposed to be the truth for the next 20 to 30 years, which turned into the way of operating. If they decided a case they will not take it for a long time. She was much more willing to say this is the four corners of this case. Here is how i would decide this case. And im not going to pretend i know what is the next case. In that way i found her to be deeply fair and concerned about the case in front of her. Not the horizon, not how she would go down in history. I think it has been unfair that she has sometimes been characterized as being the swing vote. I have heard some characterize her as looking both ways to see where the power was. That could not be farther from the truth. She had a sense like a beacon. She knew where she was going to land and if nobody else agreed with her on the court, ok. But the way she operated, she often got agreement. Thats a fascinating observation, that she was a swing vote by virtue that she had to be in the center, but she would have had the same approach with a she would say over the years that she had never changed, including when she went to the court of appeals, that the court itself had shifted right and became increasingly hard to remember what it was really like to be a republican, or the right wing. She no longer identified with that end of the political spectrum. Many justices have said that, stephen said he had never changed but the court shifted right and Justice Ginsburg said that she did not change and she felt the court shifted. And yet oconnors unique commonlaw constitutionalism was distinctively consistent. She was approaching cases in the same way at the beginning and the end and it seemed so striking and its a its a distinctiveness. Give us a sense of where that approach came from and her background and how it played out. Her incrementalism and her distaste of footnotes. Dont even think about putting a footnote in. Why not . I think she thought people were hiding stuff in there. She specifically thought that someone would put footnotes in three cases from now they could look back and go all yes in a footnote. In our year we were challenged to not have a footnote in our whole term. And it was the fear that if she had not read it and did not understand the implications, she did not want it. And where her incrementalism comes from, i think in part it is her personality. Part of it was also her deep experience. She had experienced legislature, two levels of courts of appeals and judging. She understood that the world is a messy place. These issues are not black and white. Justice scalia could hold forth with a world encompassing view but she knew the devils were in the details. And she had a large measure of humility. When i interviewed with her, the one question she asked that i will never forget it she said these cases are so hard. They come up and almost every single one could go either way. They are so difficult. And she said is there one case where you thought we really got it wrong . And it was unconscionable . And i picked the case where she was in the majority. What did you pick . It was a case where they said it was ok for a guy to get life in prison for three bounced checks. And i said i understood that different people make different judgments and its hard to draw lines, but we may not be able to tell what was a just sentence. But again, my 27yearold there i am telling the justice what i think, i still cant believe she hired me, honestly i was really of obnoxious. Insufferable maybe. And that is one thing i admired about her, she consistently hired people who disagreed with her and listened to us. And you always knew when the shutter came down. But she listened to me far longer than i would have. And i look back on it and i think what patience she had, what a commitment to good decisionmaking. Because she wanted to hear from controversial views. And what a powerful definition, the willingness to listen to people who disagree with you. A very memorable example. I think she spoke about how her background in arizona politics led to her to compromise. And she would famously have the republicans and democrats over to her house and make chili for them and listen to both sides. Did that influence or approach . There was not a lot o