[applause] [indiscernible] good afternoon everyone. It is a great honor to welcome you to the howard visiting scholar lecture with u. S. Supreme Court Justice kagan and give a warm welcome to special guests. We are honored to be joined by members of Justice Kagans family. We are honored to be joined the daughter of howard treen. D. M. Anand as well as members of our Judicial Branch and number of university leaders. I would like to take a moment to thank our Law School Team in bringing together todays event. Since 1989, the Scholar Program has invited a leading jurist to lecture and offer alumni, students and faculty with a perspective on the judicial process and the program was accomplished by howard treen and in recognition to the firm and to northwestern. He joined as an associate and became a partner in 1956 and headed the executive committee from 1977 to 1993. He had a very longstanding relationship with Northwestern University and received his bachelors agree here in 1945 and jury is doctorate from northwestern law in 1949. He was a member of the board of trustees since 1967 and chairman of the board from 1986 to 1995. He passed away at the age of 97. His daughter is here with us today representing the family and i want to extend my gratitude for the leadership and the again rossity that her family has shown to the law school and to the university for so many years. [applause] and now i have the tremendous honor and pleasure of welcoming u. S. Supreme court just ties kagan this years scholar. She was the scholar in 2015. And its particularly special to have you with us on this day and we are honoring Justice Stephens. Justice kagans visit is giving us an opportunity to learn. So many members of our Northwestern Community and our society, Justice Kagan has been an Important Role model. She was bonn and raised in new york city and graduated from princeton university, the university of oxford and Harvard Law School. After harvard she clerked to the u. S. Court of appeals for the d. C. Circuit and supreme Court Justice marshall. After washington for a law firm, she became a professor at the university of Chicago Law School and then Harvard Law School and made Important School alley contributions. She also served for four years in the Clinton Administration as associate counsel to the president and Deputy Assistant to the president for domestic policy. Between 2003 and 2009, she served as the dean of Harvard Law School and 2009 president obama nominated her as solicitor general of the united states. A year later, the president nominated as associate justice of the Supreme Court and took her seat on august 7, 2010. We are honored to dialogue with Justice Kagan and hear her insights. Please join me in welcoming her. [applause] [indiscernible] his role in shaping and making it into the global law firm. I got to know him even before i was i came here five or six years ago because, i started out my teaching career at another Chicago Law School and people in chicago, they just know who he was. He was so important not only to that firm he developed but to this city and was such a leader in this city. And what i would like what i think of his i think of like a problem solver. And these are the best kind of lawyers, the lawyers who solve problems. So even in the big cases that he did, the big litigations, some of what he was best known for was actual the settlements he reached in the end, settlements that set the rules for entire industries or he was a person that in the end wanted to get things done and get things done in a way that satisfied as many parties as possible and wanted to solve problems and great model for lawyers and for Young Lawyers of the kind who are in the audience today. It is a real honor for me to be here. Talking about what matters in how lawyers practice to ask you what inspired your interest in law and how that interest has evolved over the course of your profession which has provided you a variety of vantage points. Justice kagan the question of what inspired my interest in law. I went to law school before i knew the answer to that question. I was talking to a group of admitted students and i said something, which is a very standard thing for deans to say, dont come the law school if you dont know why and dont come just because its a way of keeping options open or dont come because you have ruled out everything else, you are not good with blood or whatever. [laughter] Justice Kagan you have to have a reason being here. And i thought, i definitely failed that test when i went to law school. I went to law school because i wasnt sure i wanted to do and wanted to keep my options open. My father was a lawyer. At that time, we have immature times in our lives and i didnt understand he loved being a lawyer, but i wasnt quite sure i understood why. Nothing that he did struck me as particularly interesting. I was at law school for the wrong reasons. But im here to say and i hope im talking to a lot of first years, people who are here in their first week, i walked into Harvard Law School and i loved it and i loved thinking about law and it has this kind of annual litically fascinating and appealed to a part of me that just likes a part of me that likes doing analytic puzzles and you can make a real difference thinking about law and doing law and make a real difference in the world. It appealed to both sides of me. I loved solving analytic problems and i want to make a difference. I saw that pretty early on in law school and i have been really fortunate and blessed to have a career where i ended up in some Important Roles. And clearly making a real difference, i wanted since we are honoring Justice Stephens and ask about your predecessor on the court. He was a dear friend of our law school and i wanted to get a sense of what you learned from him during your transition to the Supreme Court and how you would describe him personally as a justice. Justice kagan the first thing that comes to everybodys mind is independence. He was a person that followed his own course. I think in the beginning he was on the court when i clerked on the court and hadnt been there for many years he had been there for a few years, three, four, five. And thinking about that early stage in his career some people thought of him as being i had yeoh sincratic and would opinions and not what everybody else was thinking about. It was a great marker of the justice he was going to turn out to be because he followed his own star and he didnt seek approval from anybody else and if he thought something was right, it didnt matter whether, however many other people thought he was right. He was committed to thinking through a problem independently. And telling you what he had come out with. So independence, first and foremost. Second its brilliance. When Justice Stephens passed away his family honored me by asking me because i was his successor, to make some remarks at the Supreme Court portion of his funeral. The way the ceremony was constructed, there was limited spacing within the great hall and there were a ton of his clerks there, because by that time, he had had an enormous number of clerks. I looked around the room to his clerks and i said, you know, he really didnt need you. And got an enormous laugh, because it was obvious true obviously true. He wrote drafts himself. You know, he liked having clerks around to kind of check his work a little bit and clerks are good for that, but he was so selfreliant and so brilliant. So fast in everything he did. When i clerked for the court again, Justice Stephens only had two clerks and thought who needs more than that. Everybody else had four, he had two. And we wondered what they did really, you know . [laughter] Justice Kagan i guess thats the second thing to say about him. The third thing to say about him is what a fundamentally decent human being he was. When you talk to all those clerks or anybody who knew Justice Stephens, there was a kindness and generosity. I experienced a plightness. I experienced it because i never served with Justice Stephens, i succeeded. But i argued to Justice Stephens when i was solicitor general. He started almost every question by sort of looking at the lawyer and often he would come in at the end of the argument and say general or counsel, may i ask a question . I think no, you know. [laughter] Justice Kagan may i ask a question and you would say yes, Justice Stephens and ask a racierlike question and secure skewer you. What was it like to succeed him on the court then . Justice kagan daunting. I have been thinking about this a little bit because the court is changing. Just tries breyer has left and Justice Jackson has taken his place and every new justice creates a new court and partly because of that justice and im sure Justice Jackson is going to be a fantastic colleague and bring new things to the table. But partly the change in the court is who is not there anymore. And for Justice Jackson, it will be gosh, well look around the room in a few weeks and Justice Breyer wont be there and that will be an incredible change. When i got to the court, i wish i thought more and not think who i was there and hadnt been there before. It was just that Justice Stephens wasnt there and he was on the court for 35 years and enormous change on the court. And so much of the time, it had been a senior associate justice and always the second person who spoke after the chief. It was a big change for the court. One last thing about Justice Stephens, which is the best advice he gave me, which is you know, when he was no end of generous to me. He was lovely in every way and offered his help and assistance but one thing he said to me that i try to live by and im not sure as well as he but i think about all the time. This is a 90yearold man talking to me and a person who was on the court for 35 years. And the thing he made sure to think about all the time, every year, every month, every week, is there is always an opportunity to learn something new. And thats a great way to approach pretty much any job and great way to approach being a justice. You can get kind of into you are sort of doing the same thing and do it the same way and Justice Stephens, he was a lerner. And there was a real there there but also an open mind and commitment to continuing to learn and profit from your colleagues and process other people around you and to dig deeper and do better. You have been talking about the role of clerks in your answer and many of our faculty and alumni show the value of clerking for judges and justice. You talked about you had the opportunity to clerk for Justice Thurgood marshall and what have you learned and how have had those clerkships influenced you as a supreme Court Justice. Justice kagan im sure it did influence my way in what im doing now. Sort of a caveat, im a different person. These are different times facing different questions. So i never had a sense like i had to replicate either one of them and i dont think they would have wanted me. But with that out of the way, these were two important people. Judge medford is not well known but maybe in this city is known pretty well and greatest mentor i ever had when i look back and been pretty lucky. There were a lot of things that i wouldnt have gotten to do i think he helped me get my first job at the university of chicago. After i gottennure at the university of chicago, he asked me, he was counsel to the president and asked me to come to the white house to work for him again. That was an enormously important experience in my life. He was probably my greatest mentor. He i learned a lot from. One thing ill mention, i think he understood government better than anybody i can think of. He was a congressman from the hyde Park District of the city of chicago. He was a judge and chief judge and then he became counsel to the president. He served in very important capacities in all three branches of government and had a better understanding of how each of those branches and all of those branches Work Together to create a more perfect union. My interest in administrative law, a lot of it came from him. Justice marshall was the debatest privilege of my life to have clerked for justice marshall. He was the greatest lawyer of the 20th century bar none. And partly, what did he do . Lawyers like this dont exist anymore. This is a man who argued many cases to the Supreme Court, won most of them, but he wasnt just an appellate lawyer but a trial lawyer. One day he would be up at the Supreme Court and next day he would be in a Country Court in mississippi trying to get an innocent defendant off of death row or prevent him from getting on to death row. He had this incredible range in terms of his lawyerly skills and abilities. But of course, the key thing was, you know, what makes the greatest lawyer of the 20th century is how much justice did he do. Eradication of the jim crow system and many people contributed to it but no lawyer for certain than justice marshall. He was he was a great story teller. So it wasnt as though when he became a justice he closed this part of his life. One of the few people, maybe the only person what they did before. And he was a good justice, it was just he was an extraordinary lawyer who did quite extraordinary things to promote justice in america before he became a justice. He used to tell stories about his life and about the work he had done. Sandra oconnor a very unique piece im not sure when he retired or when he died, but a piece that talked about Thurgood Marshall telling stories in the Conference Room and reminding people of our constitutional commitments. And for sure that was something i got out of that year. And he was the kind of justice who had a very ingrained sense that the law on the books was not always the law in practice and had to think about law making a difference in the way people lived and how it made a difference in the way people lived and wasnt how people may think by looking at a sterile page and thats something i took away from him and continue to think about as a judge. To talk about the things that you value as a justice, you made remarks this week about the importance of judicial legitimacy. And Public Opinion polls shows declining trust in our Supreme Court. I would love your perspective of what is driving that mistrust and what are effective ways of building Stronger Public trust in our judicial institutions . Justice kagan i started a session like this in the ninth Circuit Court of appeals early in july and had occasion this week to talk about it again. Let me start with something that maybe i havent said quite as much just to make clear a little bit what i mean when im talking about legitimacy. And what i do not mean is like is whether the courts opinions are popular. Sometimes the courts opinions are not popular. The court shouldnt be doing things that are popular. Part of our system of judicial review is that the court held the majority when the majority has transcripts, the constitution and those decisions are often going to be unpopular. If a majority of our country think its a good idea to on suppress the speech, the courts job is to say no. Its the courts job to say no. Im not talking about the popularity of particular Supreme Court decisions. What i am talking about is what what gives the people in our country the underlying sense that the court is doing its job and when is the court legitimate it doesnt have authority to make policy decisions but its authority is bounded. And the court should be constantly aware of that. The constraints on its authority, the bounds which it shouldnt go. If it become extensions and people see them as extensions of the political process and people see them as trying to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, thats when there is a problem and thats when there ought to be a problem. What makes the court legitimate is the court is acting like a court and doing something recognizably lawlike and the court will buildup of reservoir of Public Confidence and goodwill. And that i think it is a critical component of the rule of law system. Why does people comply with its judgments. Its not that they agree but presume apply they have some understanding that even if they dont agree that the court is doing its job, that the court is performing this critical function in a rule of law society and a constitutional democracy. And so thats the importance of legitimacy in