Lecture From Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Take the time to show you how to succeed, because nobody knows what they're doing in the beginning. And so I try to be mindful of that. I tried to be mindful of that as a professor with my law students. I try to be mindful of that now with law clerks. And I think that for people who are farther along in their careers, that generosity is really important because most people were the recipients of that kind of generosity at one point. How did you start teaching? How did you get into that? So I, you know, as I said, when I was in college, I thought about either going on to get a graduate degree in English and being an English professor or going on to law school. And I kind of, being a law professor allowed me to blend the two. I was a professor and a lawyer. I was interested in teaching. I was interested in the law and the idea of being able to write about whatever legal topics I wanted rather than just having to write about the topics that a client was paying me to write about. I was unsure, you know, when you go on the teaching market, you are at the mercy of the market and where you get a job. And I did not like lacking control over where I would wind up living. So the idea of just kind of going on the teaching market and having to take interviews all over the country didn't really appeal to me, but I wanted to try out teaching. So I took a fellowship and I worked at GW Law School for the year of the fellowship, working on scholarship and thinking about it. And then I really lucked out because I didn't end up having to go on the teaching market. Notre Dame found out that I was interested in teaching and that I was doing this fellowship. And they called and asked if I wanted to go and interview before I went on the market. And I did, and they offered me the job. And my husband, Jesse, had also graduated from Notre Dame and we loved the university. So it was an easy sell for us to go there, except for the weather. But you survived a long time. I did survive a long time. So we first met in 2010 as members of the advisory committee and appellate rules, and many people in this room probably do not have any window into the rulemaking process. What did you think of the time you spent on the rules committee? So the rules committees, and there are several, help fashion rules for the federal courts to follow. You also spent time on civil rules. And so that's the trial court rules. Those get a lot of action. Judge Dow and I served on the appellate rules to get the committee together. And I was a law professor at the time, so I was the academic representative. And it was a really impressive experience. It's people who take that process very seriously. There were top appellate lawyers. There were district judge. Usually they have state Supreme Court justice. They have appellate judges from all over the country who are really trying to get it right, really trying to make it fair. It was a very collegial experience. So I came away very impressed with the way the process worked. And a tip for those of you who might want to be on the Supreme Court someday, if you lined up all the professional accomplishments with the justices, probably the one they most have in common is not where they went to school or who they clerked for, but that they were on the appellate rules committee. That actually is kind of true. So you mentioned that your husband, Jesse, who is also a lawyer, and he spent a number of years as a prosecutor and now he's in private practice. And you previously mentioned also that you have seven children. How do you guys make it all work? Teamwork. Whenever I'm asked this question, I always give the biggest shout out to Jesse, who's here today, because without the teamwork and without Jesse really doing more than his share, we would not be able to pull it off. You know, we make the kids a priority. We have family dinner most nights. And our, you know, Jesse once said that our Google calendar looks like a piece of abstract art because there's just so many colors and so many shapes all over it. But we try to be very organized. We, you know, this morning I woke up at 4.30. You know, we maybe like cut a little sleep here and there to try to make it all happen. But I will also say that, you know, when you have a large family, they're not all the same age all at once. So we don't have seven toddlers. You know, our oldest is 24. We've got two in college and then the others are in high school and middle school at this point. So it's not quite the intensity. I certainly could not have done the job that I have now when my kids were all in grade school. You talked a little bit earlier about your transition from the academy to the bench and having a good mentors. How did you, did you find the work all that different? It's interesting that you say that because in some ways the work is remarkably similar. When I went on, actually when I was deciding whether I was open to the Seventh Circuit nomination, I talked to a good friend of mine who also happens to be a good friend of yours who was a Court of Appeals judge. But he had come from practice. So if you're coming from practice, you're used to a frenetic pace. You're used to a lot of meetings. You're used to a lot of phone calls. And he said, this is just so quiet. If you do this, you would have to be prepared for it to be quiet. He said, my phone doesn't ring. And when I get messages, I save them up for the end of the day so that I have something to look forward to. The law professor doesn't get that many phone calls either. So when I actually shifted from Notre Dame to the Seventh Circuit, a lot of things were remarkably similar. Law professors spent a lot of time writing and then reading, reading and writing, interacting with law students. And law clerks are pretty young. I mean, they're relatively young lawyers, not that long out of law school. So for me, there were many things about the rhythm of the day that were not that different from the rhythm of the day that I had as a law professor. You should sit by designation of district court for a while. And then how about going from the Seventh Circuit then to the Supreme Court, which happened very quickly in your case. How's the rhythm different there, if at all? So I would say the rhythm, in some ways the rhythm is the same because the job of a Supreme Court justice is essentially as an appellate judge. And so the meat of the work is the same meat of the work that I had at the Seventh Circuit, which is reading briefs, interacting with law clerks, writing opinions, attending oral arguments. So that is the heart of the Supreme Court's work. But the Seventh Circuit, you're operating less in the public eye. You're not so much a public figure and there's not a need for security and all of that. So I would say that the work of the Supreme Court, one of the things that struck me the most about the difference is that you're really just kind of doing law behind closed doors, maybe saving up your messages for the end of the day when you're a Court of Appeals judge. When you're on the Supreme Court, you're doing all of that, but it's really very much happening kind of under a microscope. You have written a wonderful book called My Life in the Law. And in that book, one of the statements that I read that caught my eye was collegiality is an act of will. I thought that was really cool. What do you mean by that? You have to decide it and try. I mean, I think in any human relationship, it's a big mistake to let emotion be your guide all the time because if you just treat people the way that you feel, you will not always treat them very well, right? So I think that you have to decide. When I started at the Court, maybe this is a good way to sum it up. When I started at the Court, one of my colleagues shared advice that another colleague had shared with this colleague, and that was that it's most important to go to lunch. We have lunch together after oral arguments, and we have lunch together after conferences, that it's most important to go to lunch with the other justices the day after a difficult conference vote. So if you are on the losing side of a case and you're very disappointed by that, if you were gonna go with your feelings, if you were gonna do what you felt, you would just head back to your office and maybe stew in your disappointment for a while. But if you are going to really make an effort and make a decision to be collegial and to cultivate a relationship with your colleagues, you will make the decision as an act of will that you will go and spend that time with them at lunch. And I think that's true in relationships generally, and I think that's true of colleagues, both in my job, but at other jobs. You really have to decide how you wanna treat people, you have to decide that you wanna be collegial, and then you have to follow through on the commitment that you make. You've also written a lot about Chief Justice Marshall, and Chief Justice Marshall was certainly an exemplar of that whole idea of collegiality being an act of will and using it not only to develop relationships on the court, but all the foundational cases in our jurisprudence, the history of our country. I've heard Chief Justice Marshall described as having had a greater effect on the history of our country than a lot of presidents have had, though he's outside the legal world, a very underappreciated and under-understood person. Would you agree with that assessment, and if so, can you talk about what made him so influential? Let's see, so I'm not sure if he's had a greater effect than any president, but he certainly had a remarkable effect and an indelible imprint on the Supreme Court in particular and the judiciary more generally. I mean, Marshall was appointed literally on John Adams' way out the door. So he had been John Adams' Secretary of State. John Adams appointed him to be Chief Justice after the Federalist Party, of which both John Marshall and John Adams were a part, was completely routed in the election of 1800, and Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans took over both the presidency and Congress. So when Marshall, I mean, and remember, the country is pretty new. We're talking 1800, 1801 when Marshall went on the court, and the court itself had not been really established as a strong institution. Its jurisdiction was very narrow. It didn't hear cases that often. It didn't have a building of its own, and Marshall comes in and he's facing a president who really hated him. Jefferson was not a John Marshall fan, and he's facing a hostile Congress. Threats of impeachment were constantly hanging over his head and the head of the other justices, and Marshall is regarded as such a great Chief Justice because of the way he navigated those relationships with other branches and the relationships inside the court to establish the court as a strong third branch of government. He was really brilliant at it. I mean, and we're talking about collegiality, though, so I'll focus on that. I don't think that Marshall could have accomplished what he did in establishing the court's strength vis-a-vis the other branches of government if he had not been able to unite the justices as colleagues on the inside. You know, at the time, the justices actually spent most of their time riding circuit, which was in their own geographic areas, sitting with trial judges, essentially, and adjudicating cases. They weren't hearing cases as a court together that often, so they didn't live in Washington, say, or in, you know, Philadelphia. They would come and they would stay at boarding houses, and there was no common place for them to work. When they heard argument, they did it and borrowed space in the Capitol building. So Marshall instituted a practice by which they would all stay in the same boarding house, they would eat dinner together, they would enjoy Madeira after dinner together, and he built up collegiality and relationships in a way that made the Supreme Court a cohesive unit. And in what must have truly been a feat, you know, at the time that Marshall became chief, the court did not write opinions just for the court, so you wouldn't say that there was one majority opinion. Every justice wrote his or her, well, his, sorry, own opinion. It was called seriatim opinions. Each one just said, well, this is how I see the case, this is how I see the case. Marshall not only persuaded his colleagues to end that practice, he managed to kind of say no separate opinions whatsoever. And you can't, you know, when I was in the academy, being dean of any school, and in my case, a law school, was described as herding cats because people have life tenure, and so you can't really tell them what to do. That's how it is for a chief justice and his colleagues. Marshall wasn't the boss, he wasn't in charge, so he couldn't say no separate opinions allowed. Because he was well-liked, just by the force of his personality, he managed to have everyone stop writing separate opinions. So there was one opinion for the court, and concurrences and dissents were actually quite rare, which I think was part of what enabled him to establish the court's strength. That is a perfect segue to my next question, which is, I think there are a lot of, there's a common perception that there aren't very many nine to zero opinions. That's actually not true. Most of the opinions that have come across my desk this term so far, many of them at least have been nine zero with no separate writing. How do you decide when to write separately? What's your process in thinking about that? Yeah, I will say one thing in response to your comment about unanimity. I mean, generally cases are, we hover around 50% for unanimity, which it's sometimes a little above, sometimes a little less, but that's generally the rate of unanimity for the court, not just in the current court, the Roberts Court is currently constituted, but before that too. How do I decide when to write? Well, if you are in dissent, and you're just asking about separate opinions, right? Dissent, concurrence, whichever. So if you are in dissent, the practice would be that the most senior justice in the dissent will assign the primary dissenting opinion. So sometimes if I write a dissent, it's because whoever was the most senior justice in the group of dissenters has asked me to write it. So that you're still writing kind of on behalf of a group. There are other opinions in which you write because you choose to write, and that might be when I write just a separate dissent that's speaking only for myself, or maybe like one or two other people who join it, or a concurrence. And I try not to write too frequently the separate opinions. I kind of like the way John Marshall said seriatim opinions are out. So I generally try to just let the majority opinion speak for the court, the court's opinion speak for the court. But sometimes I will write a concurrence or my own dissent if I have something that I feel like I should explain. Something about my position that I feel like warrants explanation so that it doesn't look inconsistent. If I don't join the full opinion, I usually write to say why. And if I feel like I have something to say that would add to the development of the law, something that I hope that lawyers and other courts will think about, or that law professors might help us by writing about or doing some research in, that's the situation in which I'll write a concurrence. I try to resist the temptation to write one because I feel like I could have said what the majority said better. Very good. So we talked about John Marshall a few minutes ago being perhaps an underappreciated person in our history, but you have a portrait of a special individual in your chambers who is also underappreciated in our nation's history. Can you tell everybody who that is and why you've got that portrait prominently hanging in their central office? Yes, it's Abigail Adams. So it's the 250th anniversary of the United States this year, as you all know. And I spend a lot of time working with the Constitution and a lot of time thinking about the history of the Constitution and its founding. And so when I joined the court and was thinking about what to hang on my walls, I really wanted to hang a portrait of someone from the founding era. But I really wanted it to be a woman, and obviously there were no women in the Continental Congress, there were no women in the Constitutional Convention who participated. And I think, actually, I think it's Cokie Roberts who has this book, Founding Mothers, which is a really great book. But I mean, when you think about who were the influential women at the time, I think Abigail Adams was just remarkable. And I identified with her in many ways. I mean, Abigail had a large family. She had five living children. But she was a sharp observer. She was basically self-educated and home-educated, but she was a sharp observer of the politics at the time, a fierce patriot. We have so many of her letters, which reflected her insight about the day, her influence over her husband, who did have a large role in the affairs of our fledgling government. So I really admire her. And I admire, also, on a personal level, the way that she had to, you know, they were married, they were living in Braintree, Massachusetts. They had to go to France when he was a diplomat in France. Then she was thrust into the public eye when her husband became the vice president. She was only the second wife, the second first lady, following in Martha Washington's footsteps. And so I think about all of the ways in which she herself was a trailblazer, even though she was limited by the limitations that all women faced at the time. And I kind of like what it says about the country and the Constitution to have her in my office and have the contrast. You know, I can do, I say in the book, I mean, I can do what she could not. I am a mother and I have many children, but I also hold, you know, an important public office in the United States government. You mentioned the Constitutional Convention a minute ago, and in your book, you import a New Orleans term, gumbo, and you describe the gumbo personalities of the Constitutional Convention. Can you say a little bit more about that? Sure, when you look, when you read about the convention and when you read about what the conditions were like at the convention, I mean, we're talking about, I mean, the men who were at the Constitutional Convention were generally, I would say, drawn from the same kind of segment of society. I mean, they were generally educated and they were generally well-off, but they were different in so many ways, too. I mean, there was a delegate from New Jersey. He was the youngest. I want to say that maybe he was 26. Benjamin Franklin was 81. You know, you had people who were abolitionists. You had people who were slaveholders, people from the North, people from the South. They had competing interests, and they also, and this is one remarkable thing when you think about the conditions under which they were working, they were supposed to be just amending the Articles of Confederation, and they didn't want it to get out that they were now embarking on this enterprise of creating an entirely new founding document, our Constitution. They kept the windows closed in Philadelphia in the summer without air conditioning in Independence Hall, and they're wearing long sleeves. They're wearing the clothing of the era. It's not like they were showing up in gym clothes. I can't imagine how stuffy that room must have felt or how smelly it must have been, and so they're thrust into this small space. Many didn't know each other before, and in that kind of hothouse environment, they managed to produce this document that is now the oldest written Constitution in the world. Why do you think our Constitution has survived for so long? What's this? There's some special sauce there? I think our Constitution has survived for so long because of the way in which it was written, so call this the miracle at Philadelphia or the genius of the founders. It is a combination of the specific and the general. Most of the Constitution is written in more general terms, and I guess maybe I'll say it this way. When I was teaching constitutional law, I used to ask my students, and I sometimes do still when I teach a seminar, which I occasionally do, I asked them to read the Constitution of Ecuador, and I picked that one because I once went to Ecuador and spoke to people at the Ecuador Supreme Court, and I was struck then by how thick it is. It's very thick, and it is very detailed. Contrast that with ours, which can be put in your pocket. The framers had the wisdom to not try to put too much in the immovable document, the one that would be harder to amend. Most of it, it left to the nimble legislative process, so for states to work out, for Congress to work out. I mean, if we tried to have environmental regulations, for example, or a lot of details about the tax code in our Constitution, it would get out of date very quickly, but because of the way it allocated power and because it delegated so much to the legislative process and the political process at both the federal and state level, we allowed that change to happen and evolve through our legislatures, and I think the Constitution itself balanced well our fundamental commitments that we don't change without much more work, commitments that are expressed in the Bill of Rights and the commitments that are structural, and say, Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution, and I think that that blend, you need to be specific about some things, how legislation gets passed, because you can't be reinventing the wheel when you figure out how many votes it takes in Congress to override a presidential veto, so we have those kinds of things being very specific, but for all the policymaking decisions, largely that's left to the legislative process. Obviously, you work with the Constitution all the time. Does the Declaration of Independence ever come into your thinking as a justice? So I think, obviously, the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate this year, lies at the bottom of all of it because it launched the project, but Abraham Lincoln described the Declaration as the promise and the Constitution as the means for fulfilling that promise, so most of my work deals with the means and the mechanisms, so the Constitution is what has legal effect, so if we think of the Declaration as expressing our aspirations, the Constitution is the document that governs us. The last part of your book is really about thinking about the law and how you think about the law and how it stimulates thought for all of us to think about the law, and in that part of the book, you tell this story about your grandparents exchanging letters during World War II and how that sort of affected the way you look at interpretation. Can you share some of that story with the audience here? So my grandparents lived in a house that my grandmother's aunt had actually built. I mean, one thing that I loved about New Orleans is that it tended to be, at least before Katrina particularly, that people stayed there for generations, so in this house, my grandparents had both passed away by the time that Katrina hit. My great-uncle was then living in the home, and Katrina flooded the house. It went up to the second story. I actually have my grandmother's piano, and that piano was on the second story, and the watermark is still there. It rose kind of to the foot of the piano a few inches up. We don't have basements in New Orleans because it's below sea level, so the basement is really kind of built up like a first floor, so in the basement of that house, which was essentially kind of first floor storage, was my grandfather's Navy duffel. He served in World War II in the Navy, and the water carried it out, and when my family went out to try to clean up the wreckage from Katrina, my uncle and one of my cousins found this duffel bag, and because it was meant to resist water, the contents of the bag, which were these letters that my grandparents had exchanged during the war, were intact. I mean, some of them had to be laid out to dry, and one of my aunts undertook the painstaking project of transcribing all of these letters for the family to have, and then ultimately bound them into a book, which we all have now, and I use that story in the book to talk about how interpretation and language work because sometimes people say, well, what does it mean to be a textualist or an originalist when you handle legal documents and when you think about words, and I think what that means is that you interpret words as they were understood by the people who were using them and understood them at the time, and when you read my grandparents' letters, Cimarron was the name of his ship, or he talks about events, he will share events in the letters, but understanding the context in which he wrote, knowing something about the vocabulary of where he was, it's what enables us to kind of reach back in time or get that snapshot into what their life was like, and so it struck me as a way, many of the things in the book are many of the things I think about because my family was important to me growing up. I tend to draw on those kinds of examples when I'm trying to explain things. You've spoken before about, in your grandmother's lifetime, and I'm not exactly sure how many years that was, how many times the Constitution was amended. Of course, the Constitution has not been amended for something like 35 years now. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the, what is it, Article 4? Article 4? Articles 1, 2, and 3 are quite obvious for probably everybody in the room here, but how you see that process and fitting into, I guess, the overall enterprise that we've been engaged in for the last 237 years? Well, so I opened the book with this description of my great-grandmother's house, and as I was writing the book and was just thinking about what her life was like, I just decided to count up how many times the Constitution had been amended in her lifetime, and now as I'm sitting here, I can't remember how many it was, but it was a surprising number. And we often say now, as Judge Dow says, we haven't amended the Constitution in something like 35 years. The 27th Amendment was the last time. We often say, man, our Constitution is just unamendable. Just nothing will happen. It's too hard to amend. And so it struck me that the Constitution had been amended so many times in her life. And it makes me think that something about our political climate has changed, that maybe agreement was easier to reach then. The country is also bigger. There were many states that entered the Union. She was born in the late 19th century, and she died in the 1950s. After Brown versus the Board, because one of the things that struck me is she was born in New Orleans, just a few miles away from where Homer Plessy couldn't get on the train or couldn't sit in the car during segregation in the same car as white people. And she lived through Brown versus the Board and desegregation in the South. And two of her sons, one of her sons especially, who was a bishop, was active in desegregating the New Orleans Catholic schools. So that whole span of her life, she saw great change, but including the admission of several states into the Union. So we're a bigger country. I guess in some ways we might say that we're a more complex country. And Article IV of the Constitution sets a pretty high bar for amendment, and I think it's a delicate balance to strike. I don't think we want the Constitution to be so easily amended that it's no different from legislation. But maybe it's the case. Justice Scalia used to say that he thought the Constitution ought to be a little easier to amend anyway, because the bar is so high that that ends up putting a lot of pressure on courts to do the updating for us. You just mentioned Plessy and Brown, and many of the people in the room here have probably been across the street to our building and they've seen the Cooper Bench exhibit, and we have an exhibit there where there's a 13-minute film that features the nine active justices plus Justice Breyer. They tell the story of Worcester versus Georgia, which is the case that the Cherokees won just prior to being removed by President Jackson. And then Plessy and Brown and Cooper versus Aaron, which is the Little Rock desegregation case. And one of the lessons of that film is how important it is to respect the law and to follow the decisions that you agree with and to follow the decisions you don't agree with. And in your book, Justice, you talk about how we cannot legislate a culture of respect for the law into existence. And can you talk a little bit about how we might foster a culture of respect for the law if we can't legislate it? Yeah, I mean, you can't make people respect the law. And I think a lot in our society runs on norms. I mean, you can't catch everybody who speeds on the highway, just to give an example. If everybody felt at liberty to just drive 80, I mean, the police can't enforce all of that. I think a lot in our society, when we think about constitutional provisions that are more important than speed limits, like the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, for example, all of those things are important, but look, the courts can't be the only guardians of those rights. A lot depends on elected officials who also take an oath to uphold the Constitution. And elected officials respond to what their constituents want. They respond to what the people want. And if people revere the Constitution, and if people revere the law, that lends itself, that fuels, I think, a culture in which law is respected. And I think if we internalize, I mean, we have to think about the kind of America that we want. I mean, we've committed in the Constitution, which is our foundational document. It's one that has, it represents what our supermajority has agreed to, because the Constitution had a high bar for ratification, it has a high bar for amendment. And if we have really committed to these ideals, freedom of speech and freedom of religion commit us to pluralism. They commit us to tolerance. They commit us to having to respect and allow to be heard, even those viewpoints that we might disagree with, even those viewpoints we might find abhorrent. And the more pressure there is in society, to even in private places where the Constitution doesn't apply, to squash out a commitment to pluralism and squash out a commitment to respect the ideas of others, the more that our public institutions will respond to that too. And so I think that respect for the law, reverence for the Constitution really begins with American citizens. And so I think it's really more of a trickle up than a trickle down. We have a lot of younger lawyers here today. We even have some students here today. What do you tell people who you encounter who are thinking about law as a profession or a career? Are you bullish on that? Are you skeptical about that? What do you tell people? Is this an AI question? It is not because I don't even know how to use chat. You may recall a few years ago when the Chief's year-end report was on artificial intelligence, and one of my kids showed me how to use chat GPT. And I said to it, give me two paragraphs of Chief Justice Roberts' voice about, and I said, Chief, I've drafted the year-end report. He looked at it and said, no. No, that is not an AI question. Not an AI question. I think the law is a great profession. And so if you're asking if I'm bullish on the future of the law and the legal profession, yes. I think lawyers have done great things for our country, and I think they will continue to do great things. And I think it's been a great life for me. It's been a great life for my husband. I don't think it's a great life for everyone. So one of our daughters was thinking about going to law school, and I would give young lawyers the same advice that I gave her. Make sure it's what you really want to do. Just don't default into it because you think, hey, I majored in the humanities and this seems like it'd be kind of good. It's a lot of debt, and it can be a lot of hours. And so before you undertake the opportunity costs of not working in some other job and earning money for three years and then assume the debt that law school will be, I mean, I think it's a big investment, and you should think about it as a big investment and decide if that's where you want to put your time, talent, and treasure. Is that what you want to invest in? If you decide that it is, I'm bullish. I think the law is fun, and I think the law is really important and we need good lawyers. I agree with all of that. What do you think lawyers do really well for our society as a person who's bullish on the profession? So I think that to the extent that lawyers help people navigate hard problems, I mean, everything from people who are navigating civil things like buying houses or businesses, starting businesses, taxes. I mean, there's so many things about daily life that lawyers help with, and then, of course, on the criminal side as well. But then when you think about public law, I mean, when you think about the way that lawyers help keep our institutions running, our institutions of government, I think that the law, in many ways, because it orders our relationships, both our private relationships to one another when we think about property, business, and all of that, and then it orders our relationships of the federal government to the state government, of Congress to the president, you know, of the scope of the Supreme Court's power. Lawyers have the ability to affect all of that, and when they do it well, I think that they can really be instrumental in helping society thrive. If they do it poorly, they can tear it down. And I guess what I would say that one thing I would, I was asked this question recently, like what could those who are lawyers do to help society thrive? Apart from being great at the practice of law, I would say, you know, Judge Dow, you asked me a moment ago about what it means to have a culture of respect for law. I think it would be great for lawyers, you know, when you're at a dinner party or when you're interacting with people, to reinforce that and to speak in a way and to celebrate the law, to celebrate differences, and to model the kind of respectful disagreement that I think lawyers are good at because they spend a lot of time arguing, and the best lawyers know how to argue without alienating people. In our audience today, we also have a lot of law clerks. You've now had law clerks for quite some time, and I think you have four now. Can you talk a little bit about what role the clerks play in making your life better? I certainly miss mine. And anything that, I would say there's probably 50 people in this audience who either are now or have been law clerks. Well, my four current law clerks are here, so I have to say they make my life better in every single way. Law clerks are a lot of fun, so I was a professor for a long time, so I love being with people who are just starting out their legal careers. A lot of people are surprised that law clerks for district judges, board of appeals judges, Supreme Court justices are so new in their careers, but I think that's as it should be because it helps ensure that it is the judge who is in the driver's seat because it is, Judge Silberman used to say, it's my commission that's on the wall. The responsibility has to lie with the judge, but clerks are so helpful in the process. I have four times the cases to manage that they do. They divide up our cases by in fourths, and everybody has a sense of what's going on in other people's cases, but one law clerk is primarily responsible, and so will write me memos, summarizing the cases in the law, and those are great, especially for the morning before argument because I've got a lot on my mind at that point, and in the weeks leading up to argument, I can debate the cases or ask for further research about the cases. Law clerks help with drafting. Law clerks check work. Law clerks help handle a lot of the things that come flying into the court. You might have heard that we're having a lot of these emergency motions and interim motions these days, so law clerks help channel that work and keep justices abreast of what's coming in, and they are someone that the law clerk in charge, I can talk to all law clerks about it, but the clerk in charge is the one who is down in the weeds with me and so can help me think it through as we're going back and forth. It reminds me of something Judge Flomey used to say to us, which is, each of you have one vote and I have four. In the conclusion of your book, you write that no generation starts afresh. Each is shaped by its predecessors, and you've already talked a lot this afternoon about how your family sort of shaped the way that you view things, and not only in your profession, but in your personal life and trying to keep all that straight. I'm just thinking more on a global perspective, or maybe on a perspective of how the court might play a role in how you might see some of your predecessors or role models helping shape the way you do things. Not in your family, though, I'm talking about professionally. Yeah, so I think of my seat on the court that I am the current caretaker of seat that has been held by many other people before me and that will be held by others in the future. So I think that the current occupants of these seats, the nine of us, we are working for an institution and we are trying to care for an institution that our predecessors have passed down to us and that we will pass down to future generations of Americans. And I think we are very lucky, not just in the courts, but just in America generally, that we stand on the shoulders of those who have contributed to America and in my neck of the woods, the law, the Constitution, and given us such a strong and rich foundation to build on. And so when I think about what I've inherited, what we have all inherited, in terms of the place of the court in our government, in the strength of the Constitution and all of the precedent that has built up over these last more than two centuries, I think that I want to hand that off to those who come after me in better shape than I found it. You wrote that Judge Silberman taught you that relationships are part of the work, not a distraction from it. We've talked a little bit about that, particularly with your colleagues, but how does that relate to your life in total? So I am very focused on efficiency. You asked me how Jesse and I make it work, and I am trying to squeeze the most out of every day, but that's also just kind of part of my personality. I was not married when I clerked for Judge Silberman, but I still kind of felt that way. I mean, I was always focused on the work. I mean, one of my great regrets, honestly, from my clerkship at the Supreme Court was that I never attended Justice O'Connor's exercise class. She used to have an aerobics class in the mornings a couple times a week. It was at something like 8 a.m., and I was always thinking, I've got to finish this bench memo, I have to finish this draft, I have to finish this surf pool memo, and I missed out on that, and I wish I wouldn't have. So Judge Silberman, even though I'd already clerked for Judge Silberman at that point, I should have learned that lesson before I missed out on the aerobics class. Judge Silberman spent a lot of time socializing with us, talking to us, being in our offices, joking, eating lunch, that sort of a thing, and it acculturated me to the idea that it can't just be about the work. It can't just be about sitting at your desk and making sure that you've read all the briefs, read all the cases, you're sitting there as a lawyer, you're in front of your screen on Westlaw all the time, that relationships are just as important. We talked earlier about collegiality. It can't happen, you're not a brain that's separated from a heart and a body and personality. I mean, we all operate within a web of human relationships, and goodness knows that I hope that my job's not replaced by AI at any point in the future. But I mean, judgment is a human, judging is a human enterprise, and all of our jobs are. And in the law, when we're lawyers, we're doing this all for humans and to human ends, and we're all working together with other people as part of that enterprise. And to try to cut it out and make it just an intellectual exercise or about the work only impoverishes it and just strips it down. We work at a really amazing building. We do. And we have a lot of visitors who like to see that building. I imagine you've given more than your fair share of tours. I have as well. What do people say is their favorite part of a tour at the Supreme Court? Well, that's easy, like hands down, it's the highest court in the land, which is our basketball court that's up at the top. People are just blown away by the idea that there's a basketball court in the Supreme Court up at the top. I mean, that's when my kids come, if they bring friends, to see if that's all really they care about seeing. They don't want to sit in the courtroom? I mean, yeah, I guess so. But I mean, lots of people have seen the Supreme Court courtroom. Fewer people have seen the highest court in the land, so it's definitely the basketball. It's not too late for the aerobics class. I think it's now known as Zumba, whatever that may be. I'm only going to invite you to play basketball. I don't do any of those things. You're not going to invite me to do aerobics? Okay. No, I don't do those either. I walked in on one once, and it occurred to me that I wasn't particularly welcome. I was dressed like this, so it probably wasn't my day for that. I want to thank you so very much for your time and your wisdom and your book and being an all-around wonderful presence as a justice in our building, and certainly for your time today, and we will look forward to seeing you and Jesse tonight as well. So thank you so very much for this. Thank you.