| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | |
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Agriculture is the main life in Sussex County, and I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I felt like we were being left behind. | ||
| Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. | ||
| When I found out that Comcast was coming, I ran down the road and I said, welcome. | ||
| High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. | ||
| And now future generations will thrive here in Sussex County. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. | ||
| America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation. | ||
| From the nation's iconic libraries, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein. | ||
| As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could. | ||
| Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now from the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Notre Dame Law School professor for 15 years, only the fifth woman appointed to the Supreme Court and the author of Listening to the Law, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. | |
| Thank you very much, Justice Barrett, for being here. | ||
| I'm delighted to be here. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Had you ever been to the Shakespeare Library before? | ||
| I have. | ||
| Many, many years ago, I lived on Capitol Hill when I was first married, and we came to the Folger, my husband and I, back then. | ||
| And then last spring, the library was very gracious, and they had my staff over and we got to have a tour, and it's been redone since the last time I lived in Washington, and it's beautiful. | ||
| So the person for whom you clerked when you clerked in the Supreme Court was Justice Scalia. | ||
| And he was very literate and very interested in Shakespeare. | ||
| And it turns out that if you look at a lot of his opinions, he quoted Shakespeare from time to time. | ||
| Did he ever ask you to get the citations for that poem? | ||
| Or has any of his love on Shakespeare rubbed off on you? | ||
| And do you ever think you're going to be quoting Shakespeare? | ||
| Everyone quotes Shakespeare at some point, so I'm sure that I will. | ||
| I actually was an English major in college, and I did a lot of Shakespeare reading when I was in college. | ||
| So I loved Shakespeare before I made it to the Supreme Court. | ||
| I don't recall Justice Glea ever asking me for a Shakespeare quote, although Cole Porter did get quoted in one of the opinions my term. | ||
| Of course, Shakespeare's most famous quote about lawyers is probably not that favorable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said, I think the first thing we should do is kill all the lawyers or something to that effect. | ||
| But anyway, didn't deter you from becoming a lawyer, I guess. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think I'd like to talk to you about why you decided to write a book relatively early in your tenure on the court and what the message is you'd like to get out to people from that book. | ||
| And why don't we just start at the beginning? | ||
| So you're relatively new on the court. | ||
| You're now beginning your sixth term. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And you're now not the most junior Associate Justice, the second most junior. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So why did you want to write a book now as opposed to 10, 20, 30 years from now? | ||
| Well, I didn't want to write a memoir. | ||
| I shared a little bit about myself on the book because I think when, if you want to draw a reader in, the reader should know a little bit about you and who you are. | ||
| But it's not a memoir. | ||
| Maybe if I did a memoir, it would be later. | ||
| What I wanted to do, and I was a professor before I became a judge, I wanted to draw people into the court. | ||
| And I mean, teach makes it sound boring, so that's not really how I was thinking of it. | ||
| But I wanted to introduce people to the court and how it works and to the Constitution. | ||
| Really kind of, and I was inspired to do it because of all the questions that I got from people who came to visit the court. | ||
| Now, how do you have time to be a justice in the court and write a book like this, which is quite enjoyable, quite detailed? | ||
| Do you do it in the morning before you're doing the justice work, or do you do it in the summers when you're not hearing cases? | ||
| I was doing it in the summers, and to be honest, David, I'm not sure I would do it again because it took a lot. | ||
| I lost all those summers, but yeah, I did it in the summers and then a little bit over Christmas holidays and things like that. | ||
| The main message you would like to get out to people from the book is what? | ||
| Main message is that the court is a great institution, and our Constitution is a great document. | ||
| Both are flawed, both are human institutions, but people should understand how the court works, how the law works, that the court is an institution that's focused on legal analysis, not politics. | ||
| Now, when Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to the court by President Reagan, she was the first woman nominated to be on the Supreme Court and the first woman to serve on the court. | ||
| There are now four women on the court, and you almost have a majority. | ||
| Do the four women ever get together and say, well, we have some things in common, or are there now so many women on the court you don't feel a need to get together? | ||
| Oh, I mean, we enjoy one another's company, but we don't have like a separate women's caucus on the court. | ||
| We get together, we have lunch, but really we're with the group all of the time. | ||
| So, one of the things people don't understand about the court, I think, is that when you disagree with people, you're not necessarily disliking these people. | ||
| You just have a disagreement on the law. | ||
| So, when you write an opinion and somebody disagrees with you, it's not a personal matter. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| That is fair to say. | ||
| Now, when you were appointed to the court in the first term of President Trump, he obviously interviewed you. | ||
| And what was that interview like? | ||
| Had you never met him before? | ||
| The interview was very, it was pretty brief. | ||
| I had met him, and probably because I had met him before, he interviewed me when Justice Kennedy retired for the seat that he ultimately chose Justice Kavanaugh for. | ||
| So, I had met him then, and we had talked, you know, I can't remember how long, but we had talked for a while then. | ||
| And so, then when I came back in the second time, the conversation was a bit briefer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, now that you're on the court, is it as enjoyable being on the court as you once thought, or would you rather be a law professor still or in the Seventh Circuit? | ||
| I was pretty clear-eyed about the fact that it's a lot of work. | ||
| I mean, I had watched Justice Scalia do it when I was clerking, so it's not an easy job. | ||
| And so, now that I am doing it, it is as hard as I expected it to be. | ||
| I mean, the work is a lot of reading, it's a lot of writing. | ||
| But on the whole, you're. | ||
| Oh, no, on the whole, no, on the whole, it's really important work, and I'm proud to do it. | ||
| I think it's really work that I enjoy, and it's also work that I feel like is a service to the country. | ||
| Well, can we talk a little bit about your background? | ||
| So, where were you born? | ||
| I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have a southern accent, but I've been away for a long time. | |
| And in New Orleans, actually, people have less of a southern twang than it's kind of a distinct New Orlean accent. | ||
| And what did your parents do? | ||
| My father is retired now, but he is a lawyer. | ||
| And my mother was a high school teacher before she chose to stay home to take care of children. | ||
| And you were not an only child, I think it's fair to say. | ||
| Fair to say. | ||
| I am the oldest of seven children, six girls and one boy. | ||
| So, what was it like growing up with all those siblings? | ||
| It could be a little chaotic. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| We actually all were just together two weeks ago for one of my sister's big number birthdays. | ||
| And, you know, it was fun and they were and are now my closest friends. | ||
| Now, in your book, you have a picture of you, your siblings, I think your parents, and all the children, all these siblings. | ||
| And it's a big gathering. | ||
| I mean, do you do that once a year? | ||
| We get all these people together. | ||
| Every summer we take a vacation, and everybody who can come comes. | ||
| At this point, there are 34 grandchildren, and there are seven of the children, so it's my parents, the kids, our spouses, and the 34 kids. | ||
| Not all can come. | ||
| Some of my children are older and have summer jobs and so can't get away. | ||
| So, as a little girl, were you a good student in elementary school or junior high school or high school? | ||
| Yeah, I was a good student. | ||
| And were you an athlete? | ||
| Not so athletic. | ||
| I was a better student than I was an athlete. | ||
| So, you did well in high school. | ||
| What did you want to do when you graduated from high school? | ||
| Did you have a career and a plan then? | ||
| I didn't have a plan. | ||
| As I said, I majored in English literature and I minored in French. | ||
| I didn't have a plan, but I was really drawn to the idea of teaching. | ||
| I also wanted to be an author. | ||
| I didn't imagine that I would write a book about the law. | ||
| That wasn't my dream as a child, but I did want to write. | ||
| Where did you go to college? | ||
| I went to college at a small liberal arts college called Rhodes, which is in Memphis, Tennessee. | ||
| And you went there because the tuition was affordable? | ||
| I got a good scholarship, which was important when you are from a large family. | ||
| And Memphis is about six hours of a drive from New Orleans, and I wanted to be a drive away from my family rather than a flight. | ||
| Okay, so you did well there, I assume, and academically. | ||
| Then did you decide you wanted to go to law school in your senior year, or you already knew you were going to go to law school? | ||
| In my senior year. | ||
| So it's not that I was averse to being a lawyer, and my dad was a lawyer, so I knew that was a possibility. | ||
| And I got to be a senior, and I was choosing between pursuing a PhD in English or going to law school. | ||
| So like the good lawyer that I now am, I made a pro-con list and was very analytical about it and decided on the law. | ||
| All right, so you went to Notre Dame Law School? | ||
| I did. | ||
| And when you go to law school the first year, it's always intimidating. | ||
| You always wonder, is other people smarter than me? | ||
| How did I get in here and so forth? | ||
| At what point did you realize that actually you were pretty good at this? | ||
| So in law school, as you know, since you went to law school, David, you don't find out how you're doing until that first set of exams, which happens at the end of the first semester. | ||
| And I did well on the exams. | ||
| And so it wasn't really until I got the grades back that I thought, okay, I'm good at this. | ||
| Well, you're being modest. | ||
| You were first in your class. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's pretty good. | ||
| And so you're also elected to the Law Review and you became the editor-in-chief of the Law Review. | ||
| Executive Editor of the Board. | ||
| Executive Editor. | ||
| Second in command. | ||
| Okay, so that's pretty good. | ||
| Executive editor, first in your class. | ||
| And did you say, what I want to do is be a clerk on the Supreme Court or clerk somewhere else? | ||
| Or what did you decide you want to do when you graduated? | ||
| So I had always thought that I would go back to New Orleans. | ||
| As you see, my close-knit family is a theme here. | ||
| But I had professors I actually hadn't really thought about clerking. | ||
| And I had professors who were encouraging. | ||
| And so they said, we think you should apply. | ||
| And two of those professors had actually clerked for Justice Scalia. | ||
| And so they intervened with Justice Scalia on my behalf and said, you should interview this woman. | ||
| And I interviewed with Justice Scalia. | ||
| I had the job with Judge Silberman first. | ||
| And I interviewed with Justice Scalia when I was a third-year law student. | ||
| And he hired me. | ||
| Judge Silberman was on the DC Circuit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he had been a senior official in the Reagan administration, I believe. | ||
| Nixon, too. | ||
| Put on the DC Circuit, and you clerked for him. | ||
| And when you begin your clerkship, the way it works these days, when you begin your clerkship with, let's say, Judge Silverman, do you already have a clerkship lined up with Justice Scalia, or how does that work? | ||
| I did, but that isn't always the way it works. | ||
| And today that would be unusual. | ||
| Nowadays, I hire my law clerks after they've already started clerking at a Court of Appeals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you did Judge Silverman. | ||
| Was that easy to do? | ||
| Was he easy to work for? | ||
| And was it more difficult than you thought to be a clerk? | ||
| He was fantastic. | ||
| He was intimidating. | ||
| It wasn't easy, but it wasn't because he made it difficult. | ||
| I mean, they were challenging cases, but he was great to work for. | ||
| And Justice Scalia is easygoing, was always easy to work for, and he wasn't intimidating to the clerks or anything. | ||
| Justice Galia was extremely intimidating because he was smart and he was fiery. | ||
| He did quote Shakespeare and lots of other things besides. | ||
| So it was, you know, you wanted to work very hard to make sure your writing was up to snuff and that all of your arguments were up to snuff. | ||
| And when you're the clerk on the court for, let's say, Justice Scalia, did you say I should be on the court one day or I would like to be on the court? | ||
| Oh, absolutely not. | ||
| No, it didn't even cross my mind that that would be a possibility. | ||
| I thought, I want to come back and visit Justice Scalia at the court. | ||
| So when you finish your clerkship, what did you do next? | ||
| When I finished my clerkship, I went into law practice in Washington and I did that for a couple of years and then I shifted over to teaching. | ||
| And how did that come about? | ||
| Did you decide you want to teach or did they call you up and say you're a famous graduate of Notre Dame Law School? | ||
| Come back and teach here? | ||
| I was interested in teaching, so I did a fellowship at George Washington Law School that was for people who were thinking about teaching to start a research project. | ||
| And Notre Dame found out that I was interested in doing this fellowship, and so they called and asked me to interview, and then I wound up getting that offer. | ||
| Okay, so you went back and you began as an assistant professor? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then you later got tenure, I assume. | ||
| And along the way, you got married and had some children? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you have how many children now? | ||
| I have seven children. | ||
| Seven children? | ||
| Seven children. | ||
| Okay, and your husband, is he a lawyer? | ||
| He is a lawyer. | ||
| We met in law school. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And what kind of law does he practice? | ||
| He, for many years, was a federal prosecutor, and now he does a litigation practice. | ||
| A lot of it is white-collar criminal defense or investigations advising companies. | ||
| And at Notre Dame, what did you teach? | ||
| I taught a wide range of things. | ||
| I taught constitutional law, civil procedure, federal courts, evidence, statutory interpretation. | ||
| So while you're teaching, somebody calls you up and says, would you like to be a judge? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did that come about? | |
| That's kind of how it happened. | ||
| You know, there was an opening in the state of Indiana on the Seventh Circuit. | ||
| And so, you know, I got some calls, people saying, you know, do you think you would be interested? | ||
| But of course, there are always a lot of people interested in those kinds of positions. | ||
| Ultimately, I was asked to interview with the White House Counsel's Office. | ||
| So then I had to really decide if we were open to doing it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so you said yes, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And how did you find the confirmation process? | ||
| The confirmation process was unexpectedly difficult. | ||
| I guess I was probably too, I was in wishful thinking. | ||
| I thought that even at the Court of Appeals confirmation hearing, I thought, oh, it probably won't be that difficult. | ||
| All those hard hearings are just for the Supreme Court. | ||
| But the Court of Appeals one was challenging. | ||
| Okay, so you were confirmed? | ||
| I was confirmed. | ||
| And then you began on the Seventh Circuit. | ||
| And where did you sit? | ||
| Where were you based? | ||
| Chicago. | ||
| I continued to live in South Bend, but we heard cases in Chicago. | ||
| Okay, so you did that for how many years before somebody came calling on the Supreme Court? | ||
| Three. | ||
| Three years, which is a relatively short time. | ||
| And so you ultimately served three or four years on the court before you went to the Supreme Court? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay, so when President Trump said, I made a mistake the first time, I should have given it to you the first time. | ||
| That isn't what he said. | ||
| He didn't say that. | ||
| All right, so he met you briefly again the second time, and he said, Okay, you're my designated appointee. | ||
| What was the confirmation process like for the Supreme Court? | ||
| So that was difficult, and I knew that would be difficult, which is one of the reasons that I had to really think about whether to say yes to even the nomination. | ||
| It was a whirlwind, it was fast, but you know, I'm from Louisiana, and so some ways I think that in my mind, I thought of it as a hurricane. | ||
| If a hurricane stops over the water, it stalls and it gains strength. | ||
| So the fact that it went fast, I think, maybe it made it easier to deal with. | ||
| Okay, so you were confirmed. | ||
| What was the vote? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| It was party-line. | ||
| Party-line vote? | ||
| Yeah, I guess that probably was 5149. | ||
| In the old days, when Justice Scalia was confirmed, I thought he was confirmed almost unanimously or something like that. | ||
| It was. | ||
| I think somebody wasn't there, so I think it was 99.0. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, in the old days, it used to be unanimous. | ||
| Now it's more party-line. | ||
| All right, so you're confirmed. | ||
| Did you have a big swearing-in ceremony, and who swore you in? | ||
| So, Justice Thomas administered, justices take two oaths, the constitutional oath and the statutory oath. | ||
| So, Justice Thomas administered the constitutional oath to me at a swearing-in ceremony at the White House, and then Chief Justice Roberts administered the statutory oath to me at the court itself. | ||
| Now, there's a tradition, I think, of the Chief Justice walking the new justices down the steps of the court. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And is that an intimidating process? | ||
| You've got all the press around, and the trick is to not fall or something. | ||
| Yes, but the steps are white marble, and when the sun is shining down on them, it bounces off and it has a blinding effect. | ||
| And there are a lot of this that, you know, it's, you know, it's a hefty staircase. | ||
| So the chief and I stood at the top, and he warned me to make sure that I was looking down enough so that I wouldn't fall. | ||
| Well, it's easier for him to say that because he's not wearing heels. | ||
| That is what I told him. | ||
| Okay, so you did that. | ||
| And so when you become a new justice on the court, you are the most junior person. | ||
| Your responsibility is to take care of the cafeteria or the food. | ||
| Or what are the hazing that you get as a new justice on the court? | ||
| You've said it. | ||
| The cafeteria, you're in charge of the cafeteria and the food, and you have to answer the door in conference when the justices meet. | ||
| It's just the nine of us in a room. | ||
| And if anyone knocks on the door, the junior justice answers. | ||
| Let's talk about the process because most people don't really realize how the justices actually make these decisions. | ||
| So let's go, let's start back. | ||
| When somebody wants a case to go to the Supreme Court, you file what's called a petition of certiori. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That's a legal document that essentially says, this is why you should take my case. | ||
| Not only did the court below get it wrong, but this case is really important, and so the Supreme Court should be the one to decide it. | ||
| Okay, so you probably get $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 a year of these. | ||
| How many can you actually take? | ||
| Because physically you can't do all these cases. | ||
| How many does the court take a year? | ||
| We take about 55 or 60 a year, so not that many. | ||
| And so the clerks that you have, they help sift through all the petitions, they make recommendations to the justices. | ||
| They do. | ||
| So we, you know, say we have about 4,000 petitions for certiorari. | ||
| The clerks will take an initial cut and they pull out anything that seems like it can be an arguable candidate for the court's review so that the justices are not reviewing all 4,000 in the initial cut. | ||
| To decide to take a case, I think it's four of the justices have to say yes, let's grant that petition. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| So four of the justices, which means you don't necessarily have a majority, but you have four who want to hear the case. | ||
| Then when that occurs, the lawyers are told to write briefs, which are really, they shouldn't call them briefs, they should call them longs because they're pretty long. | ||
| Briefs are not what they used to be in the old days, I guess, because now each litigant will file a brief. | ||
| But then we have a thing called amicus curiae briefs where friends of the court send in their own briefs, and they can be quite extensive, right? | ||
| That is true. | ||
| So we have a lot of friends in some cases. | ||
| So when you get the briefs to the case, do the justices walk around and say, hey, I just read this brief and I actually think this is what I'm going to do, or do they talk to each other before you actually have oral arguments? | ||
| No, there's no meeting of the justices before oral arguments. | ||
| So I talk about the cases. | ||
| Our arguments will start on Monday and I'll be talking about the cases. | ||
| And I have been talking about the cases with my law clerks, but I won't discuss cases with the other justices until we have a conference, a formal conference. | ||
| So when you have the hearings, each litigant gets 30 minutes to make their case. | ||
| Yeah, usually so. | ||
| 30 minutes, let's say it's an hour. | ||
| At the end of that, once a week you have a conference, as they call it. | ||
| Is it once a week or more often? | ||
| Sometimes it's twice a week, sometimes it's once a week. | ||
| So you're in a conference room. | ||
| That's why they call it the conference. | ||
| And as the most junior person, when you were the most junior person, if somebody knocks on the door, you have to answer the door and so forth. | ||
| How do they decide in the conference if you could say who speaks first? | ||
| Does the chief speak first or the most junior person speaks first? | ||
| The chief always speaks first. | ||
| He's always considered the most senior, even if he has like, so Justice Thomas has been on the court longer than Chief Justice Roberts, but the chief is the chief and always gets to go first. | ||
| All right, so the chief speaks first and then in order of seniority, each justice will say what his or her view is, is that right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So I'm thinking about that. | ||
| If you have four justices who say they want to do it one way and four justices the other way, the most junior person could be the deciding vote. | ||
| Has that ever happened when you were the junior? | ||
| My lips are sealed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, okay, so sometimes it could be the case where the most junior person is actually the deciding vote. | ||
| In terms of order, but of course, in that case, everybody who's in that majority of five is the deciding vote, in a sense. | ||
| It just would be in time, you know, that that person would let you know who won. | ||
| So the justices give their views, and when they finished giving their views, somebody says, well, you ought to write an opinion. | ||
| Who assigns the opinion? | ||
| Seniority, again, the senior justice in the majority assigns the opinion. | ||
| So if that's the chief justice, the chief justice assigns the opinion. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so the chief justice, let's say, is in the majority, he'll assign the opinion. | ||
| How long does the justice assign the opinion get to write it? | ||
| Well, we don't have hard and fast rules, but we try to turn things around pretty quickly. | ||
| And so you then go back, and does the justice write the opinion himself or herself, or the clerks write the first draft and the justice edits it? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Well, each chamber has its own operation. | ||
| I use the same formula or the same procedure that Justice Scalia did, which is I have the law clerk do a draft first, and then I take the draft and I make it my own from there. | ||
| Okay, and let's talk about your clerks for a moment. | ||
| Each justice gets four clerks? | ||
| Four. | ||
| And the chief gets five? | ||
| The chief has four. | ||
| Four, okay. | ||
| So where do they come from? | ||
| The best law schools? | ||
| And do you have time to interview them or do you have other professors interview them for you? | ||
| So they come from law schools and I hire, I don't hire clerks just from, say, Harvard and Yale. | ||
| You know, I hire clerks from all law schools. | ||
| They come, I have a committee of my former clerks that reviews their applications and then they will decide to screen candidates that they think would be good, looking at grades and recommendations from professors, recommendations for the judges for whom they worked. | ||
| Right, so you then interview presumably more than four, maybe you interview five, six, or seven, however many you interview. | ||
| You then pick them. | ||
| Do you ever pick a clerk and say, oops, I made a mistake? | ||
| So far, not yet. | ||
| I try to be really careful because it could be a very long year if I did. | ||
| Now, the clerks are paid a government salary, but when they leave, they get a high income from starting law firm salaries, maybe $200,000, $250,000. | ||
| And if you're a Supreme Court clerk, sometimes you get $400,000 or $500,000 as a bonus. | ||
| Does it ever make the justices say, this is strange, where I'm getting a modest government salary to be a justice, and my clerk is now going to make three times what I'm making? | ||
| Does that ever occur to you? | ||
| It might have been mentioned a time or two. | ||
| Okay, so you have the four clerks, and then let's suppose the clerk and you developed an opinion, you're happy, you then circulate it to the other justices? | ||
| So I will do more, there's more process in chambers. | ||
| The clerk and I working on the case reach a point where I'm satisfied with it, and then we will have everybody in the chambers vet it, so all of the clerks weigh in, and then I will circulate it to all the other justices. | ||
| And after the opinion is circulated, the draft opinion, do any of the justices ever call you up and say, this is a great opinion, I've changed my mind, and now you've persuaded me. | ||
| Or does that happen very often? | ||
| That can happen. | ||
| We communicate by memorandum. | ||
| So after a justice dies and donates his or her papers, you can see all of these memoranda. | ||
| So we communicate by memoranda, and sometimes it does happen that people will write a memo and say, you know, this was a really good opinion, and I'm sorry to do this, but I'm persuaded by the dissent. | ||
| Now, this is Washington, D.C., where there's a lot of log-rolling or trading of support. | ||
| So does any justice ever come to you or any justice and say, I kind of don't agree with your opinion that much, but I probably can support it. | ||
| But if you could support one of my positions on something else, I would be more inclined to support yours. | ||
| There's none of that in the court. | ||
| That has not happened, and that would be so, like such a gross violation of anything. | ||
| Every case is on its own. | ||
| Every case is on its own. | ||
| Now, when you're a justice of the Supreme Court, people are not supposed to talk to you about virtually anything that could affect the court. | ||
| So how do you like socialize with people in Washington? | ||
| You can't, I mean, people are afraid of talking to you, I assume, because they can't say, what are you working on or got anything interesting to talk about? | ||
| So how do you navigate the cocktail conversation you must inevitably find yourself in with people? | ||
| Well, fortunately, I have a lot of children, so there are always ready topics of conversation that I can pivot to. | ||
| And you're not allowed as well to talk with your spouse or children with about anything going on in the court. | ||
| So it's a fairly lonely kind of decision process. | ||
| Only the eight other justices that you can really talk about this with the clerks. | ||
| Yes, that is true. | ||
| Although, I mean, I can talk to my children and my family about what the court has done. | ||
| That's public. | ||
| And so they have an opportunity to learn. | ||
| So sometimes you've issued an opinion that was not exactly in line with, let's say, President Trump's view on something. | ||
| Has anybody ever mentioned that in the press that you didn't go along with what they wanted you to do? | ||
| Or has you ever seen that kind of comment? | ||
| I assume you've had some of that. | ||
| So I am aware that I have been criticized on both sides. | ||
| I try to have, while I am an avid reader, I am not an avid reader of stories about myself. | ||
| So I try to just not know about it. | ||
| Okay, so how has your life changed now that you're a justice on the court? | ||
| Are you a happier person than you were before? | ||
| Is life just a ball of cherries now? | ||
| How is life when you're on the court? | ||
| I feel it's a less carefree, I think I would say, less carefree, because partly for the reasons you said, I always have an internal monitor going on in my head about what I can say and what I can't say. | ||
| And also just because of, you know, security things or being a public figure. | ||
| So I would say it's less carefree, but it's still a really, I have a really good life. | ||
| I have a great family and really good friends. | ||
| But you and your husband and your children that are still at home are living in Washington or do you commute from South Bend or? | ||
| No, we moved. | ||
| We moved the first year I commuted from Indiana. | ||
| And how many of your children still are with you at home? | ||
| We have five children living at home, although one is living at home while she's in college. | ||
| So I kind of consider it four that we're responsible for. | ||
| Do your children treat you with greater respect for than they did before or the same? | ||
| If only. | ||
| The same. | ||
| And your parents are alive. | ||
| They are. | ||
| So do they treat you with more respect than they did before or they treat you the same? | ||
| No, they still tell me what to do. | ||
| Like, you know, go empty the dishwasher when I'm home. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So in the whole, you're happier on the court? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I'm happy. | ||
| So let's talk about the Constitution for a moment. | ||
| You write a lot about in the book on the Constitution. | ||
| Think about it, as you point out in the book. | ||
| You've had 57 white Christian property-owning men write this document that now 340 million people are living with. | ||
| And obviously aren't that many of them are white Christian property-owning men. | ||
| So how has it survived this long when it was written by such a non-diverse group, you could say? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think for one thing, we can change it. | ||
| So now it's not only, you know, white property-owning Christian men who can vote. | ||
| We've invoked the amendment process so that I can vote and my husband wouldn't have qualified as a property-owning man back then. | ||
| I think it has also been successful in surviving because it is relatively brief. | ||
| So it leaves a lot of change. | ||
| A lot of the change in adaptation has come through the legislative process, and that can be more nimble than constitution-making. | ||
| So I think the brevity of the Constitution, I think the fact that it allows for change has permitted it to survive. | ||
| Now, the person for whom you clerked, Justice Scalia, kind of, I won't say invented, but he kind of perfected the idea of what we call originalism, which is to say when you're interpreting the Constitution or a statute, you look at the words that are written, and those are the words that are the ones that govern your decision. | ||
| Other people have a view that you might call it pragmatism, which is to say, let's look at the Constitution or the statute in the way it might be properly interpreted today, given the way the world has changed. | ||
| So if you were to say, are you an originalist, or are you a pragmatist, or in between, how would you characterize yourself? | ||
| I would say that I am an originalist. | ||
| I would say, too, though, and I try to describe this in the book, that originalism, I think, is sometimes misunderstood as requiring a judge to put on colonial clothing and imagine themselves to be one of the white property-owning Christian men who ratified the Constitution. | ||
| But it's not so rigid, but it does mean that the meaning of the words does control. | ||
| Okay, so in the old days when people were looking at the original intent of something, they used to say, let's look at the legislative intent. | ||
| Let's say if it's a statute. | ||
| Today it's thought by originalists, as I understand it, don't go look at the legislative history because that might not be that accurate either. | ||
| Just look at what the text actually says. | ||
| Is that a fair? | ||
| No, I would say that the legislative history, or when you're talking about the Constitution, we have such a rich, there's so many rich surrounding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, including things like the Federalist Papers. | ||
| No, all of those things are important because they're part of the context of the words. | ||
| I think what an originalist would say, and frankly, I think even a pragmatist would say this too, is that you don't treat any one piece of evidence about what one person thought or one small group of people thought as dispositive, as controlling. | ||
| So you can take it all in as information that's relevant. | ||
| But for an originalist, the goal would be to figure out what does it mean to have an unreasonable search and seizure, as the Fourth Amendment puts it. | ||
| So as you read the Constitution, you must read it many times a day, and many of the justices carry around with them little small constitutions. | ||
| If you could ask any of the founding fathers, James Madison in particular, you know, what were you trying to do with this Constitution? | ||
| Did you realize it would live this long? | ||
| What would be the biggest question you would love to ask any of the founding fathers or the draft of the Constitution about the Constitution? | ||
| Oh, goodness, I'd have so many questions. | ||
| I'd have specific questions like, how did you really envision the executive power was going to work, you know, in the president? | ||
| Or, you know, did you, what did you imagine for the freedom of speech? | ||
| I think I would also have a lot of questions about how they thought the Constitution would be interpreted because they didn't say. | ||
| They didn't say that in the document itself. | ||
| So I guess I would wonder what they thought about how the Constitution would be implemented in particular by the courts. | ||
| In the days when the Constitution was drafted, I don't think it was recognized that the court would have as much power as it did over the years because when the court issues an opinion, pretty much people say that's the law of the land. | ||
| You're the final decider. | ||
| I don't know when the original document was drafted, whether people realized quite how powerful the court would ultimately be. | ||
| Do you think people who drafted it recognized that the court would be the final arbiter of so many decisions, social or other decisions? | ||
| Well, the court's power depends entirely on how much authority that Congress gives it. | ||
| And so at the time that the Constitution was ratified, Congress had not given the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, very much to do. | ||
| And so the court can't be powerful if it's not deciding very many cases. | ||
| And over time, Congress expands the jurisdiction and that increased the power. | ||
| It may be hard to believe, but in the early days of the court, as I understand it, the justices could practice law on the side. | ||
| And some of them did. | ||
| The justices didn't live in Washington. | ||
| They lived in their hometowns, and then they would only come in, they would stay in boarding houses for the very short period of the court's term. | ||
| Some people may not remember that the Supreme Court didn't have its own building for a long time. | ||
| And then when it was finally decided, I guess William Howard Taft, when he was Chief Justice, wanted to get a building, they built this big building. | ||
| But the justices worked out of their homes, I thought, for much of their career. | ||
| They did. | ||
| It was kind of the COVID-era remote work before it became COVID-era remote work. | ||
| They worked from their homes. | ||
| And when the court was built, some of the justices, I thought, said it's too grandiose. | ||
| I'm going to still work out of my home. | ||
| They said it was too grandiose. | ||
| They called it a marble palace. | ||
| And they were comfortable doing things the way they had been done. | ||
| They had chambers in their homes and libraries in their homes. | ||
| So when you look at the Supreme Court building today, which is right across from the Capitol, it says right on the top of the Supreme Court building, equal justice under law. | ||
| And many people, when they walk by, must think, well, that's in the Constitution, that's in the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| Where did that phrase really come from? | ||
| So I believe it was, was it Charles Evans Hughes, I'm trying to remember, who wrote down when Cass Gilbert was trying to decide when he designed the building, and he suggested it. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| I think it was the architect who said, we have the space here. | ||
| And he asked the Chief Justice then, Charles Evans Hughes, if it was okay. | ||
| And he said, that seems okay. | ||
| So it is interesting that the architect came up with this incredible phrase, which we still live with and try to honor. | ||
| So when you are around the country, you make speeches from time to time, like justices do, and they still teach. | ||
| Do you still teach in the summers? | ||
| We still teach, yeah. | ||
| So just a short class a week long. | ||
| When you teach, now people look at you differently, or they're afraid to ask you questions, or they just think they're intimidated by being out in front of a justice? | ||
| I try very hard to put them at ease. | ||
| One of the things I like about teaching is it makes me feel like Professor Barrett again. | ||
| Now, the Supreme Court has been viewed by some people as being, quote, political. | ||
| And the Supreme Court's been criticized for this for hundreds of years. | ||
| Chief Justice Marshall was heavily criticized. | ||
| I think maybe there was even an effort to impeach him at one point. | ||
| So it's not like new, but as somebody my age, I remember this when Earl Warren was the Chief Justice. | ||
| The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 produced a lot of impeach Earl Warren billboards around the country and so forth. | ||
| The court has always attracted some criticism. | ||
| Today, do you find the court is generally respected by people in the country or criticized? | ||
| Or do you feel today that you have an obligation to explain what you're doing more than maybe you would if the court wasn't being criticized from time to time? | ||
| See, it's hard for me to say because the country is big, so I'm not exactly sure how we're regarded throughout the country. | ||
| But as you say, we're certainly under some criticism, and the court historically has been. | ||
| So I do think it's important for the court, really at all times, not just in times where it's being criticized, to explain how it works. | ||
| And I think justices have had a long tradition of trying to teach and write and explain, so bring the public in. | ||
| You point out in your book that while people focus from the five to four decisions, most of the decisions, or a large percentage, are actually unanimous or they're not five to four. | ||
| And was that a surprise to you to realize when you got on the court how many decisions are fairly not controversial? | ||
| It wasn't a surprise to me because I had been teaching constitutional law and just because I had been a law clerk, but I know that it surprises other people, which surprised my students when I taught. | ||
| It's really, you know, I think last term now, I might not have the number exactly right, but I think it might have only been six cases that broke down six, three, by party of appointing president. | ||
| So that's a small percentage. | ||
| So when you talk to people around the country and they ask you questions about the court, what do you think is the biggest misconception about the Supreme Court? | ||
| That it's overly political or every decision is five to four? | ||
| What do you think people misunderstand about the court the most? | ||
| I think people think that it is political. | ||
| I think that they think that justices are making decisions based on some sort of combination of their own judgments, their preferences, or out of loyalty to the party of the president who appointed them. | ||
| And I don't think people appreciate the extent to which across the board for all nine justices, these are decisions that are driven by close legal analysis. | ||
| So when you are writing an opinion, do your clerks ever convince you to go in a different direction? | ||
| You were otherwise thinking or generally, you're the justice and you say, this is what we're going to do, and they don't try to persuade you otherwise. | ||
| Oh, I want them to try to persuade me otherwise. | ||
| That's their job. | ||
| If I, if I'm surrounded by a bunch of people who just say yes yes, you're right, you're right, then I'm not going to be challenged to reexamine my ideas. | ||
| It's their job to present the best arguments on the other side. | ||
| So today you've written the book, and do you intend to write more books Or not? | ||
| So much? | ||
| You know, I write a lot because I write a lot of judicial opinions every year. | ||
| So at this point, I think I'm good. | ||
| I don't have immediate plans to write anything additional. | ||
| So today, if you look at law school students, people who want to be lawyers, would you tell them that this is a great profession to be in? | ||
| You're happy to be in the profession. | ||
| And what do you think lawyers could do to be more consistent with what you think lawyers should be doing? | ||
| So people often ask me what I think about their going to law school. | ||
| And I think that law is a great profession if you're really interested in it. | ||
| I think sometimes people default to going to law school because they can't think of anything else to do. | ||
| But I think law is intellectually really engaging. | ||
| I think it's fun. | ||
| And I think you can have a really good life as a lawyer, but only if you really do love the law. | ||
| So when you listen to an argument on the Supreme Court, and let's say you have an advocate, let's say a former solicitor general or something, are they really great advocates these days who are in front of the court or they get sometimes a person who's never argued in front of the court, but he or she says, I took my one chance to argue in front of the court, and now I'm going to do it. | ||
| Do you feel sorry for these people because they're sometimes not really that good at it? | ||
| Or do you recommend that people get these people who are experienced? | ||
| It's rare for us to have somebody who really just is a terrible, a terrible oral advocate. | ||
| We get really, really good advocacy, and so we're very fortunate in that respect. | ||
| And the best way to persuade a justice to support you, like in an oral argument, justices ask questions. | ||
| Are they asking questions to get information or are they trying to persuade their colleagues to some extent by the questions that they're asking? | ||
| There's some view that they're really persuading their colleagues a bit. | ||
| It's probably a little bit of both, and it's probably, you know, not in every case, not every justice. | ||
| I mean, people really do have questions that they want to ask the advocates, and they also want to let people know what the issues are that they think are important. | ||
| So as you look at law on the legal structure in other countries, how do you compare our Constitution with constitutions of other countries? | ||
| Ours is much more tradition-bound and it's much more significant, I guess, in this country than the Constitutions of other countries. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Well, we have the oldest written Constitution, national Constitution in the world. | ||
| So ours is old. | ||
| It's relatively brief compared to that of other countries. | ||
| And I would say that Americans have allegiance to their Constitution, perhaps because of its brevity. | ||
| You know, people really can carry it in their pocket, but we know the language of the amendments. | ||
| So the Constitution is often cited as a reason for the court to do decision A or decision B, but it's the Declaration of Independence, which we're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of, is that really a significant legal document or not in the court's view? | ||
| It's not that kind of document. | ||
| So the Declaration of Independence is one of our important founding documents. | ||
| And as you say, its birthday is coming up. | ||
| It's not law, so it doesn't have the same legal significance as the Constitution does, but it's certainly part of the history, as we were talking about before, the context of the Constitution, the history, and important to America, of course. | ||
| So for people who are watching this now, let's say they're in college, what are the skill sets it takes to really be a good law school student? | ||
| You have to be really good at reading. | ||
| You have to be really good at writing. | ||
| You have to have an analytical mind. | ||
| What are the skill sets that you think make a really good law school student and a good lawyer? | ||
| Well, I think you just said them. | ||
| And I would say that I certainly hope that those interested in law school are not using AI to do all their writing, because one of the things I think about the law is that the way that you write reflects the way that you think. | ||
| And the ability to write out a legal analysis is part of your ability to reason through a problem. | ||
| And I think that's one of the most important traits of a lawyer. | ||
| Since you've been on the court, one of the most important decisions that's come down was the Dobbs decision. | ||
| And that case was famous not only because it reversed the existing precedent, but it was leaked in advance, which I don't think there had been a leak like that before. | ||
| So the Supreme Court tried to find out where the leaker was, and typically in Washington, you never can find out who the leaker was. | ||
| But has the Supreme Court changed its procedures in any way to kind of make it less possible that somebody could leak something? | ||
| Yeah, as you say, there had never been a leak like that before. | ||
| No opinion draft had been leaked as that was. | ||
| And we did do a review and have tried to take steps to try to ensure that that wouldn't happen again. | ||
| So today, when you are looking at overturning a precedent, is that a very difficult decision for a court when you're overturning a precedent, like the case that overturned Roe v. Wade? | ||
| Was that take more time for the justice to really go through those kind of things because you realize you're overturning a precedent or they're treated the way almost any case is? | ||
| You just look at the votes and that's what it is. | ||
| Well, I wouldn't say that you just look at the votes in any case because you're considering all of the arguments that lie behind the votes. | ||
| In any case where you're considering whether to overturn precedent, there's a double layer to it. | ||
| You're first considering what is the right answer to the legal question, which is, was that precedent, did that president get it wrong? | ||
| But then that doesn't decide the question of whether you should overrule it. | ||
| There's a whole second step at which you consider, okay, even if it was wrong, should it be overruled? | ||
| In the early days of the court, opinions were written, and that was the opinion of the court. | ||
| And then later in the court's history, they began writing dissents. | ||
| That wasn't initially, I think, part of the court's practice. | ||
| Now the dissents often are, I would say, a little more personal. | ||
| They kind of say, well, I can't agree with this. | ||
| This is a really bad decision of the majority. | ||
| Is it, you find the tone in the dissents is a little more personal than it maybe used to be, or nobody thinks that? | ||
| Well, there were dissents from the beginning. | ||
| There were dissents in the beginning, yes. | ||
| So in Chisholm versus Georgia, there was a dissent. | ||
| So there were always separate opinions. | ||
| It is certainly true that the style of separate opinions or their number changes and it ebbs and flows over time. | ||
| But I think one of the important things about dissents, you were mentioning when we started our conversation that in the law, arguments on paper are about ideas. | ||
| And I think that that is one thing about the court, you know, that the court has been successful thus far in maintaining, that these are legal arguments, but they're not personal attacks. | ||
| So when you're looking at cases now, how many cases do you have to write opinions on each term? | ||
| In other words, each justice is probably going to do six or seven opinions or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, roughly if you say, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you may choose to write separate opinions as well. | ||
| And when you write an opinion, are you writing it longhand, as I often write still? | ||
| Or are you typing them up on computers or how do you do it? | ||
| So I will often do a bit of the writing longhand because I just find the words flow better that way. | ||
| But when you're writing an opinion, you can't go home and write it at home so much as easy because the secrecy might be taken away or something. | ||
| Do you do it all in court or can you go do it in a home? | ||
| So when I was a law clerk, you couldn't log into the court remotely. | ||
| So then, yes, everything was not at home. | ||
| And law clerks are not allowed to take any paper outside of the building. | ||
| So that's still the case, but justices can take. | ||
| I log into my email so I can log in on the computer. | ||
| Papers, I do not leave papers around. | ||
| So when you're a justice of the court, and let's suppose you want to go to a dinner, is it hard to get a dinner reservation in Washington if you're a justice of the court or it's not, or you don't go out that much, so you don't have to worry about that? | ||
| Well, I don't go out that much, so I don't worry about it. | ||
| And I don't put reservations under my name. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And but the justices have had, as we know, Justice Kavanaugh had an attack on him and others may have as well. | ||
| Do you have adequate security? | ||
| Do you have to worry about that so much anymore or not? | ||
| You always worried about it. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I try not to dwell on it. | ||
| We do have security, and so I'm very grateful for that. | ||
| Back to when you were a young girl, did you read a lot then? | ||
| Were you a writer then? | ||
| Did you say, I really love books, and books were important to you? | ||
| I loved reading. | ||
| Books were really important to me. | ||
| We used to at my library, my local public library, we would have those summer book clubs when you could fill out the charts with all the books that you read. | ||
| And I used to get multiple ones because I would fill them all up. | ||
| And did you like fiction or nonfiction more? | ||
| Were there authors that you particularly liked? | ||
| I liked fiction more than nonfiction as a child. | ||
| And I can remember the first books that I read in first and second grade when I started reading chapter books were The Chronicles of Narnia and Nancy Drew. | ||
| And so when you were little, did you ever think of being a writer as well as a reader of books, or that wasn't something you were focused on? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I wrote some of my own books, just, you know, nothing that would have been for publication. | ||
| We're talking about when I was 10. | ||
| You know, I would write some books out in longhand on scratch paper from my dad's office. | ||
| Well, if you still have them, I'm sure they'd be valuable. | ||
| I'm sure that somebody would like to read them to see what you were like in those days. | ||
| So the kind of books you liked were novels then or fiction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And today, what do you do for your spare time? | ||
| Not that you have that much with five children living at home and so forth. | ||
| Do you have any time to exercise? | ||
| Do you have any hobbies? | ||
| What do you actually do when you're not writing opinions or dealing with your children? | ||
| Is there no time left for anything? | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| I exercise. | ||
| And what I have discovered for reading, I exercise, my husband and I do do some socializing. | ||
| And what I've decided for reading works best for me at this phase where my time is limited is I do a lot of audiobooks these days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, when Justice O'Connor went to the court, she found out that there was no real program for exercising, and she began a program, I think, for exercising. | ||
| And I think the other justices, some of the female ones, exercise with her. | ||
| Is there any kind of male or female exercise club in the court anymore? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of. | ||
| Not that I'm aware of. | ||
| We have a gym, but not that there's no formal Justice O'Connor's aerobics class like there was when I was a law clerk. | ||
| So when people, you give people tours of the Supreme Court building, I assume you have some friends you might give tours to, what are they most impressed with? | ||
| The grandeur of it? | ||
| Or they get intimidated when they actually go into the court itself? | ||
| They're impressed by the grandeur, but the thing that people feel is most special is when they get to see the court's basketball court, which is the highest court in the land, as a basketball court in the very top floor. | ||
| And do justices still play, I mean, they're. | ||
| Some justices play basketball. | ||
| I don't play basketball, as I told you. | ||
| I'm a better student than an athlete, but the law clerks, the staff, the police, some of the justices. | ||
| I often like to ask people if their parents live to see them be successful and your parents are alive. | ||
| But do they say we always knew you were going to be a Supreme Court justice? | ||
| Or did your mother or father give you advice from time to time in an appropriate way? | ||
| I don't think that they would say that they thought that I would be a Supreme Court justice. | ||
| I think they thought I would be a lawyer. | ||
| I think even my mom thought I would be a lawyer. | ||
| But they give advice when asked, but they've always been very respectful of and careful to let us make our own choices just with kind of a light touch of guidance. | ||
| So in the summers, where do you spend your time? | ||
| In Washington, D.C., or do you have someplace, you don't have to give the specific city, but someplace you go way to and you can chill out a little bit? | ||
| So because our kids are in school, the term ends in July and then the kids go back to school in August. | ||
| So we don't have quite the same block of time, but we do travel. | ||
| We will go away with the kids. | ||
| We'll travel, get away from Washington a bit. | ||
| Now, some justices historically like to teach in the summertime and teach abroad. | ||
| It's a chance to go outside the United States. | ||
| Do you ever teach abroad or? | ||
| We have traveled abroad in the summer, but so far the teaching that I've done, I've really stayed and done it at Notre Dame. | ||
| So how would you say the law has changed the most since you were a law school student? | ||
| Is it easier to get to know what the law is because everything's computerized? | ||
| Is the law more complicated than it was when you were a student? | ||
| How would you say the legal system in our country has really changed? | ||
| I think that having things be computerized has really changed the law because it's made things more uniform. | ||
| I think, you know, a court in one side of the country knows what courts on the other side of the country are up to. | ||
| I think it remains to be seen what AI will do to the profession, you know, and as well to teaching. | ||
| And that, I think, is TBD. | ||
| So when AI is there now, I assume clerks are not using AI to write memos to you. | ||
| They'd be in pretty big trouble if they did. | ||
| And I assume people writing briefs are not using AI either. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| But today, you think AI will change the way the legal system operates as well as every other part of the country, or you think the legal system is too unlikely to be effective? | ||
| No, I think it will because I do know that lawyers who practice in other courts have been using AI to write briefs. | ||
| And I think that there are rules. | ||
| They're trying to figure out how to go about that. | ||
| Rules requiring disclosure that they used AI, that sort of a thing. | ||
| But no, I think it will change. | ||
| I think it's just happening rapidly. | ||
| One of the justices in the court, not too long ago, said in a public hearing, you know, we're not the leading experts in the country on the internet. | ||
| Justice Kagan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so obviously, you're all not technology people because you wouldn't probably be on the court if you spent all your time in technology. | ||
| But how does the court keep up with technology? | ||
| Because as the world is moving so rapidly and technology and things like AI are coming along, how do the justices kind of keep up with that? | ||
| Because that's not your daily expertise. | ||
| Well, I would say, I mean, certainly we don't manage the court's IT systems. | ||
| Fortunately, we're not in charge of that. | ||
| I think everybody has their own interests or tolerance for some of my colleagues are very techie and are interested in learning all of that. | ||
| I actually, another judge recently told me about an app that turns briefs or law review articles into podcasts through AI. | ||
| So I've done that with a couple of articles that I was interested in reading and then can drive and listen to them as a podcast. | ||
| Now, generally, when people are on the court, they generally stay until they just, their age has just become so high. | ||
| It must be that God loves the court because he or she keeps people alive till they're 85, 90, or something like that. | ||
| So this is something you've been on the court at a relatively young age. | ||
| I forget how old you were, but relatively young. | ||
| So you could be on the court for 40 plus years. | ||
| And if you look ahead of the future, does that intimidate you that you might be there for 40 years? | ||
| Or you say, well, I want to be this for 40 years. | ||
| Well, if I were on, so what was I? | ||
| I guess I was 48 when I went on the court. | ||
| So 88, I mean, it's hard for me to imagine whether I'll be alive or not at 88. | ||
| So I'm only 58. | ||
| Longevity efforts now. | ||
| People, and I think there have been some justices who probably made it to that age. | ||
| Oliver Wendell Holmes was on until his early 90s. | ||
| John Paul Stevens was on until around then. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's hard to say. | ||
| It's hard for me to imagine, but, you know. | ||
| But on the whole, if people want to learn about the law, you would recommend that they read your new book, right? | ||
| I would love for people to read my new book. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And if somebody reads the new book, what do you think they're going to get out of the book? | ||
| What will they learn that they didn't know before they got the book? | ||
| And they'll learn more about the law, more about your background. | ||
| What do you hope most people would take away from your book? | ||
| Well, I think they will learn a little bit about me, but I think what I want them to take away from the book is that they should be proud of the court. | ||
| And I want them to be able, I want them to understand the way the court grapples with the legal questions that matter to the country. | ||
| You think right now people think it's not, the court is not grappling appropriately, or you think they just don't know how detailed the effort is. | ||
| They're going to make sure the opinions are well written. | ||
| I think they probably don't know the effort. | ||
| I mean, even some of my family or friends who really like the court, you know, who hopefully like me, just don't know how the process works. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So have you ever thought about the possibility of doing anything other than practicing law, but you never wanted to be anything but a lawyer? | ||
| Once you went to law school, you never wanted to get out of the law. | ||
| This has always been your career. | ||
| This is what you want to do. | ||
| Once I went into law school, then I have not looked back. | ||
| But as I said, before law school, you know, I thought maybe I'll be an English teacher, an author. | ||
| Look, I read your book. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I learned a lot about you, I think, and I learned a lot about your views on the law and the Constitution, some things I certainly didn't know. | ||
| So I certainly would recommend it, and I congratulate you on writing it and hope you'll write more books. | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. | |
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett and David Rubinstein viewed artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library's archive that related to the law. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Nice to see you again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice to see you too. | |
| You and Farah have been so generous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, we're always happy to see you. | |
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we got a few things out to take a look at from the Folger collection. | |
| So we're going to move this way. | ||
| This is a manuscript book all written out by hand, 1575, and it's a justice's handbook. | ||
| So it's all material that was copied out for the use of a justice in their work. | ||
| And it's just examples and things to draw from. | ||
| This particular opening, there's all this poetry copied out, all about sort of aphorisms about the law. | ||
| And it has the Latin phrase in here that translates to, from bad habits come good laws. | ||
| From bad habits come good laws? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's what I haven't heard before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| I'll file that one away. | ||
| That is so cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So this is 1594. | ||
| It's Henry VI, Part 2. | ||
| And it has this reference here at the top that is it not a miserable thing that the skin of an innocent lamb should parchment be made and then with a little blotting over with ink a man should undo himself. | ||
| So in, you know, Shakespeare, of course, wrote about the courts and the law frequently. | ||
| And I think that's one example, but it's interesting because he's referring literally to the physical material. | ||
| And so what I have out here is really that skin of an innocent lamb. | ||
| This is all parchment that has been individual sheets that are stitched together and they make these roles. | ||
| So these are roles of the court from Norfolk in England. | ||
| This is from this, there's actually eight of these total in this collection, and they span from 1511 to 1631. | ||
| See more with Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Folger Shakespeare Library's archive on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page. | ||
| This Giving Tuesday starts now. | ||
| Join us on this global day of generosity. | ||
| Every day, C-SPAN delivers access to the workings of democracy without spin and without commentary. | ||
| Your support makes that possible. | ||
| Help ensure government remains accessible to everyone. | ||
| Visit c-span.org/slash donate and make your Giving Tuesday gift today. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. |