Justice Clarence Thomas: 2021 Tocqueville Lecture

good afternoon welcome to the 2021 tocqueville lecture my name is vincent philip munoz i'm an associate professor of political science here at the university of notre dame a concurrent professor of law and uh it's my privilege to welcome you to the notre dame center for citizenship and constitutional government tocqueville lecture the center for citizenship and constitutional government is the college of arts and letters newest centers i have the privilege of directing the center the inaugural director it's centers made possible by a number of people who are here today and please know how appreciative we are i'm also deeply appreciative to sarah mistilla the i a o'shaughnessy dean of the college of arts and letters and it's my pleasure to welcome dean mistillo to the podium to say a few remarks demastilla [Applause] [Applause] good afternoon and welcome to notre dame we are glad that you are here in 1995 pope john paul ii issued an encyclical called evangelium vitae in it he said even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace come to recognize the natural law written in the heart the sacred value of human life from its beginning until its end and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree upon the recognition of this right every human community and the political community itself are founded the gospel of god's love for man the gospel of the dignity of the person and the gospel of life are a single and indivisible gospel at the university of notre dame we recognize the natural law written in the heart the dignity of life from the beginning to the end and the right of every human being to have his or her dignity respected to the highest degree in that spirit we launch the center for citizenship and constitutional government and thereby expand the university's long-standing efforts to affirm human dignity democracy citizenship and the constitution are at the heart of important questions our country is facing this new notre dame center is well positioned to advance our strength in these areas and to help notre dame fulfill its ambition to be the world's preeminent catholic research university this new center builds on existing strengths and aligns with many of the priorities in the college of arts and letters including innovating our undergraduate curriculum investing in our graduate students increasing the impact of our research and promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration in scholarship and education it will help educate our next genera next generation of leading citizens and citizen leaders this center will help our students grapple with enduring questions like what is justice and what is the most effective form of government how do we protect and promote the dignity of every person how do we secure equity and foster the common good in a world of overwhelming inequality polarization and division the study of constitutional government offers tremendous opportunity to strengthen existing connections between the college and other units on campus such as the law school and to form new ones across the disciplines and across the university this center will also be a bridge between notre dame and washington dc as i've heard phillips say before the center will bring nd to dc and dc to nd these are partnerships that will further our understanding of citizenship in a modern democracy and enhance notre dame's role as a leader in scholarship and in the public sphere like many of our programs this new center brings together faculty scholarship graduate student training in undergraduate research and learning it will bring that together with transformational engagement opportunities including opportunities to hear from speakers at the highest levels of government like this afternoon's conversation with justice clarence thomas the chance to engage with and learn from leaders and top scholars when paired with a strong catholic liberal arts foundation will prepare our students to become thoughtful influential citizens eager to bring their notre dame values into the world and prepared to become ethical leaders in their communities churches careers we are grateful for this opportunity we have today to hear from justice thomas and we thank him for helping us launch this center thank you [Applause] thank you so much dean mistillo as steve mistillo said the center the mission of the center for citizenship and constitutional government is to cultivate thoughtful and educated educated citizens by supporting scholarship and education concerning the ideas institutions and practices of constitutional government the center has a number of initiatives we're excited about but really the heart and soul of what we do is with our undergraduate students the center runs the university's undergraduate minor in constitutional studies for your for you uh students here uh who are interested in questions concerning the constitution uh please come talk to me at some point and i'll tell you all about our minor we host a student fellowship program where our undergraduate student fellows participate in the life of the center tomorrow tomorrow morning our menard family tocqueville fellows will have a breakfast seminar with justice thomas some of our constitutional studies minors have been engaged in a course on jurisprudence during justice thomas's visit this week for all those who are interested faculty alumni and of course you students come visit us on our website constudies.nd.edu you find all our programs including this lecture which is being recorded okay one of our one of our best traditions at the center is to have one of our current fellows or even a former fellow introduce our our guest speakers so let me please call to the podium mega garnett maggie is a senior theology major and constitutional studies minor and she will introduce justice thomas maggie [Applause] [Applause] it is truly an honor to introduce our esteemed guest for tonight's tookville lecture i can't claim the privilege of numbering among justice thomas's clerks though my mother was expecting me when she had that privilege so i like to say that i can claim to be the first unborn supreme court clerk i don't know that the justice would agree if that's a faithful interpretation of the original meaning of my mother's courtship but that said it has been a joy to become a student this week the honorable clarence thomas is the senior associate justice of the united states supreme court where he has served since october 23rd 1991 at the nomination of president george h.w bush he was raised in pinpoint georgia near savannah and attended conception seminary and the college of the holy cross justice thomas then received his degree of law from yale law school in 1974. he has served as an assistant attorney general of missouri an attorney with a monsanto company a legislative assistant to senator john danforth as assistant secretary for civil rights in the united states department of education and as chairman of the u.s equal employment opportunity commission in 1990 justice thomas was then nominated to united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit he served there until his nomination and confirmation to the united states supreme court in 1991. additionally the justice is the author of his personal memoir my grandfather's son published in 2007 and husband to the delightful ginny thomas father to jamalidine and grandfather to judah more personally justice thomas is a mentor friend and adopted father and godfather to his beloved thomas clerk family composed of past clerks and their families of which i am blessed to count myself a member i have learned so much from the justice's deep confidence in god's providential care and his unwavering courage in speaking the truth boldly even if one must speak it alone his is truly a life lived fearlessly in service to his country and to his constitution please join me in welcoming the honorable justice clarence thomas thank you thank you thank you i all feel like i should quit while i'm ahead yeah if i look like i'm squinting it's because i can't see you all very well because of these the lights so um before i start i'd like to thank professor munoz and the center for inviting me and making it so pleasant and i'd like to thank maggie garnett who originally invited me just to visit notre dame and i'm very very fond of maggie and her parents before i get to my prepared remarks some years ago justice scalia told me that i should get out on the road and fly the flag well he tended to be more of an extrovert than i am i'm quite content not to get out on the road but when professor munoz asked me to talk a bit about the declaration actually when i heard that he wanted me to do that my bride and i virginia were in we were rving in the mountains of north carolina and uh tennessee and the but we noticed something there when we were thinking when i was thinking about this and before i started preparing remarks that the large number of flags of people who still believe in the ideal of this country in an environment when there's so much criticism antagonism and actually people with disdain for the very same it was very interesting to be with regular people for three weeks and i love this one of the reasons we've been rving uh rv advocates and been rving for over two decades we simply love to be a part of that the other thing that i might note about the declaration is some years ago i decided to drive with my law clerks to gettysburg it was after particularly difficult terms and you could sense them getting a little irritated but i wanted them to understand why we do what we do it's not about us it's not about winning and losing at the court it is about the entire country and the idea of this country so our annual trip is to gettysburg for that purpose so this is pretty special to me i must admit because i don't recycle speeches these things are quite a bit of work and it's also trying to make sure that you actually talk with not to or at your audience so first of all again let me thank maggie and professor munoz and notre dame it's been quite some time since i've been here and this has been very enjoyable i also like to thank the students that i've interacted with they always stimulate thinking i have never left an interaction with students who really wanted to learn without learning so much myself so i'd like to thank maggie for her introduction which i think was far too generous and kind but it only deepens my effect affection for her as i said it is an honor to be here with you all and south bend i've been fortunate as as i alluded earlier to have visited here a number of times and to have a number of former clerks on the law school faculty i have also been fortunate to have a number of your outstanding law school graduates clerked for me and they were outstanding indeed and now i have one of your graduates as a colleague and of course i knew justice uh barrett as a law clerk for justice scalia some years ago and as a member of the notre dame law school faculty faculty i pray that she has a long and fruitful tenure on the court this university has been a stalwart and that add as an aside had i seen this university when i applied to college there is no doubt i would have been here in fact i think i still have a few years that i could go to college but this university has been a stalwart of american academia and one of the universities we revered from afar in savannah georgia during my youth its stated mission has been unwavering the pursuit of truth for its own sake and its inspiration has been divine jesus christ as the source of wisdom in whom all things can be brought to its completion i should come it should come as no surprise then that notre dame attracts and produces so many talented scholars and students i am particularly grateful for the outstanding scholarship and graduates this university has produced this is further demonstrated by the outstanding students as i alluded to in professor munoz's class that i've had a chance to interact with from time to time justice scalia and i talked about how similar we were yet so different we tended to independently arrive at the same conclusion in so many cases yet he was from an educated family in the urban northeast while i was from an uneducated family from the deep south of course the condescending media elites accused me of being his flunky which bothered him much more than it bothered me i was used to bigotry unlike him i was used to bigotry paternalism and condescension he was not after justice scalia died i mentioned our conversation to one of his sons father paul scalia he immediately attributed our shared judicial approach to our formation we were both catholics attended parochial schools and despite the geographic separation benefited from a common culture this may seem somewhat anachronistic today so when so many of our common bonds have been severed the differences are now much more pronounced since they are there they are no longer ameliorated or temporized by what we all have in common in my youth we believed in our country's aspirational motto e pluribus unum despite the reality of unequal treatment in this post-modern multicultural world the emphasis is decidedly on the pluribus and not the unum so much of my thinking about the constitution and the declaration of independence is influenced by this formation and the world of my youth much the same can be said for the declaration itself it was decidedly influenced by the shared culture and the attitudes of the founding generation it was not a grand theory cooked up by a few men i'm sure you are you all are somewhat aware of my aversion to esoteric theories that have little or remote bearing on day-to-day life past or present it could be that be the case that having grown up with people who did not have the luxury of contriving theories unrelated to daily life i have become uncomfortable with a deductive approach to reasoning no one in my life started by coming up with a theory first and seeing how it squared with the facts second there was no time for that my families friends and neighbors subsistence depended on a more inductive experiential approach they did they did what worked best based on experience not on theory i believe this was the case for the founding generation as it was for me i'm a product of the state of georgia the georgia of the 1950s and 60s the world where i grew up was quite different from the world of today that is obvious and borders on a truism in the race-based a race-obsessed world of today one would think that or could think that i'm talking about or referring solely to race but alas i'm not i mean much more than that in those days of the 1950s there was of course quotidian and pervasive segregation and race-based laws which were repulsive and at odds with the principles of our country it was a world of the solid south when the democrats were routinely referred to as dixiecrats but despite that there was a deep and abiding love for our country and a firm desire to have the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship regardless how society treated us there was never any doubt that we were equally entitled to claim the promise of america as our birthright and equally duty-bound to honor and defend her to the best of our ability we held these ideals first and foremost because we were raised to know that as children of god we were inherently equal and equally responsible for our actions in my generation one of the central aspects of our lives was religion and religious education the single biggest event in my early life was going to live with my grandparents in 1955. my grandfather was a catholic convert and very devout as a result my brother and i were sent to saint benedict the more grammar school where i entered the second grade between my grandparents and my nuns i was taught pedagogically and experientially to navigate through and survive the negativity of a segregated world without negating the good that there was or as my grandfather frequently said without throwing the baby out with the bath water to this day i revere admire and love my nuns they were devout courageous and principled women the first to teach me was sister mary dolorosa my second grade teacher i was not catholic at the time and had only one or two memories of ever having gone to church before saint benedict's as a part of our catechism lesson sister mary dela rosa asked why did god create you in unison our class of about 40 kids would answer loudly reciting the baltimore catechism god created me to know love and serve him in this life and to be happy with him in the next through many years of school and extensive reading since then i have yet to hear a better explanation of why we are here it was the motivating truth of my childhood and remains a central touch it remains as a central truth today because i am a child of god there is no force on this earth that can make me any less than a man of equal dignity and equal worth this was an apriori truth that was repeatedly restated and echoed throughout the segregated world of my youth this accepted truth reinforced our proper roles as equal citizens not the perversely distorted and reduced role offered us by jim pro a role that is not unlike the reduced but apparently more palatable image of blacks that is bandied about or assigned to us today whether deemed inferior by the crudest bigots or considered a victim by the most educated elites being dismissed as anything other than inherently equal is still at bottom a reduction of our human worth my nuns at saint benedict's taught me that that was a lie and to paraphrase solzhenitsyn we were not to live by that lie in god's eyes we were inherently equal and that was that this truth permeated our home life as well the less with a focus on rights and more with a focus on what was required of us as children of god my grandparents held fast to this belief in god's eyes we were all equal and because of that not only did we deserve to be treated equally but we also were required to conduct ourselves as children of god hence we were to live our lives according to his word my grandparents repeatedly stressed that because of our fallen nature we had to earn our bread by the sweat of our brows there was no room to doubt this and even less for self-pity my grandfather would let us know in no uncertain terms that there were to be no excuses though he knew as well as anyone that many were convenient and possibly legitimate as he often said old man can't is dead i helped bury him and it wasn't just my grandparents who were watching us as they saw things on judgment day we would be held accountable for the use of our god-given talents and our opportunities as i overheard one of the the deacons from my grandmother's baptist church say god is a big eye god he was all-seeing and all-knowing it behooved us to walk a straight and narrow path admittedly much of this sounds anachronistic today perhaps we have grown too cosmic cosmopolitan or cynical for the theology of barely literate but wise people but my grandparents beliefs were not unique to that era if anything they were commonplace and virtually universal there was little that was different about us except our catholicism which was quite unique as i reflect on my life the family that my grandparents provided for my brother and me was the fountainhead of the moral guidance in our lives the catechism of the catholic church puts it well the family is the original cell of social life it is the community in which from childhood one can learn moral values begin to honor god and make good use of freedom family life is an initiation into the life in society that was certainly the case in our house during my childhood those around us took this calling seriously our neighbors and those in our daily lives taught us that god loved us equally and that america stood for that same ideal even though it had failed to live up to it despite this failure our christian duty was to still love our country even as we objected to its evidence shortcomings this was more than a belief it was a way of life i lived in a world of unexaggerated but pervasive patriotism we were to be good productive and loyal citizens and that was that this was our country and no one could deny us that inheritance nor were we to disinherit ourselves by rejecting our own country and our birthright of full citizenship so at the beginning of each school day we lined up by class two by two and said the pledge of allegiance and when the local television station signed off at night an event which we rarely got to see there was a beautiful rendition of the national anthem and the poem high flight up up the long delirious burning blue i've topped the windswept heights with easy grace where never lark or even eagle flew and while with silent lifting mine i've trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space put out my hand and touched the face of god no matter how much others might deny our full inheritance we were not to act as though we had been disinherited and we were not to act badly because others had acted badly i cannot say that i have always lived by this injunction unfortunately for too many years of my life i lost sight of that lesson and saw it as a sign of weakness or cowardice when dr martin luther king jr was assassinated in 1968 i lost faith in the teachings of my childhood and succumbed to an array of angry ideologies indeed that was why i left the seminary in may of 1968. i let others and my emotions persuade me that my country and my god had abandoned me i became disoriented disenchanted with my faith and my country and deeply embittered and perhaps worst of all i let my family down this was further exacerbated when my grandfather asked me to leave his house following my abandonment of my vocation i was 19 years old i was consumed by negativity cynicism animus and any other negative emotion you can conjure up sadly the destructive disposition that i exhibited then appears to be celebrated today i left savannah for college at holy cross that following fall where i fell in quickly with radical ideologies such as black power it was an era of disenchantment and deconstruction the beliefs of my youth were subjected to the jaundiced eye of critical theories or perhaps more accurately cynical theories what had given my life meaning and a sense of belonging that this country was my home was jettisoned as old-fashioned and antiquated it was considered preposterous to believe in such outmoded things having rejected my faith my family and my country i was searching for something to occupy me it was easy and convenient to fill that void with victimhood a black man with an axe to grind so many of my folk time focused intently excuse me so many of us focused intently on our racial differences and grievances much like today i'm afraid my grandfather a man of reality not theory often asked me in an exasperated tone when you get your way and undermine this country then what other times he would simply walk away wondering out loud why he and my grandmother had made so many sacrifices for me from time to time he would ominously forewarn me you just live long enough you'll see as usual he was right as i matured i began to see that the theories of my young adulthood were destructive and self-defeating after recognizing that i was adrift what i realized more than anything else is that i needed to regain common sense and judgment and what i had jettisoned i had rejected my country my birth right as a citizen and i had nothing to show for it perhaps that is the ultimate destination of nihilistic ideologies the wholesomeness of my childhood had been replaced with an emptiness cynicism and despair i was faced with a simple fact that there was no greater truth than what my nuns and my grandparents had taught me we are all children of god and rightful heirs to our nation's legacy of civic equality we were duty bound to live up to obligations of the full and equal citizenship to which we were entitled by birth on the morning of april 16 1970 after returning from a riot i stood outside the chapel at holy cross and ask god to take hate out of my heart i use this background to set the stage for my later and more in-depth encounter with the declaration of independence in the mid 1980s at that time having run agencies and seen how the federal government actually worked i became deeply interested in the declaration of independence i had hoped it would bring some clarity to the concoctionist world in which i found myself studying the founding though studying the founding however felt more like a return to familiar ground the ground of my upbringing the declaration captured what i had been taught to venerate as a child but had cynically rejected as a young man all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and so declaring the declaration of independence did not propose to have discovered anything new its truths were self-evident they were beyond dispute they were a priori in the society of my youth imbibed at school home and in the culture they were given and as i rediscovered the god-given principles of the declaration and our founding i eventually returned to the church which had been teaching the same truths for millennia that the declaration set forth self-evident truths was no accident the founders quite frankly didn't have the time or the mandate to reinvent the wheel or the world between april and july 1776 the fervor for the it for independence was palpable throughout the colonies the colonies their counties and towns and even trade associations were drafting their own declarations of independence the late historian pauline mayer estimated that there were 90 such declarations during this time frame though not all were specifically denoted as such these lesser-known declarations typically began with lists of grievances against the british empire among them were george iii's rejection of the olive branch petition great britain's use of indian tribes and german mercenaries to wage war against the colonies and parliament's prohibitory act cutting off all trade between the colonies and england the declarations then asserted that these usurpations were at odds with man's invaluable rights and privileges to quote a rhode island declaration or the first principles of nature to quote a declaration from pennsylvania thus to maintain and violate our liberties and to transmit them unimpaired to posterity as one maryland declaration put it separation from great britain was the only remaining course when the continental congress convened in spring 1776 the colonists did not need to be reminded of their grievances or the righteousness of their cause their declarations made their points clear rather what they sought was leadership from a united congress as another maryland declaration explained national independence could be achieved only upon a close union and continental confederation yet when thomas jefferson arrived in philadelphia on may 14 1776 he was torn and arguably did not want to be there the commonwealth of virginia was about to debate its constitution and jefferson had spent weeks preparing a draft for the commonwealth's consideration but jefferson due to illness had been the last of the virginia delegation to arrive in philadelphia so he was chosen to stay behind in philadelphia while the other delegates headed back to virginia when fellow delegate george white left for williamsburg jefferson tucked a copy of his draft constitution in white's baggage virginia cribbed from jefferson's proposed preamble but not much else in philadelphia congress tasked jefferson and his committee of five to prepare the first draft of the declaration of independence jefferson submitted the committee's draft to congress a little more than two weeks after receiving the assignment john adams later recounted that jefferson had drafted the document in only a couple of days jefferson was a busy man in june 19 in 1776. he oversaw multiple committees regarding canadian affairs drew up the rules and regulations for congressional debates and participated in other matters moreover virginia was operating with a skeleton delegation providing little opportunity to spread the work around nevertheless adam urged jefferson as busy as he was to pen the draft as it would be better for a more measured southern gentleman rather than a divisive independent-minded new englander to take the lead in drafting and promoting the declaration as time was of the essence jefferson drew heavily from two sources the preamble of his draft of the virginia constitution and the recently enacted virginia declaration of rights jefferson's preamble included many of the grievances against king george that up that ultimately appeared in the declaration likewise the virginia declaration of rights already had declared men equally free and independent and endowed with the inherent rights including the right to pursue obtain and obtain happiness and safety so ultimately jefferson did not propound a new political theory often the he wasn't even introducing new language rather he reiterated what his fellow countrymen already believed and what they had already repeatedly set out in their own declarations there was no time or appetite for a new theory of american independence even the words in the virginia document were not original the american founding drew upon centuries of british history most notably the british declaration of rights of 1689 that declaration like the british declarations of the centuries prior had three basic parts one to raise grievances against the king another to declare the rights of englishmen and the third to fashion a government to protect those rights the american declaration of independence adopted the very same structure in so doing the declaration made clear that like much like the english declaration of rights it was a constitutional document that set out a foundation for government it was a clarion call to the new americans you are men of innate and civic equality who are now duty bound to defend your new country indeed once published the declaration was distributed not only among the colonies but also to each commander of the continental army what followed was a revolution and the founding of a nation the later adoption of our constitution did not consign the declaration of independence to a preparatory status to the contrary the declaration remains central to and often preeminent in the american project as frederick douglass later put it the declaration of independence was a ringed boat to the chain of our nation's destiny america's fight against the most glaring contradiction the peculiar institution of slavery immediately put the ring bolt to its greatest test from the beginning the founders understood that slavery violated the national call to equality james madison wrote in his notes during the constitutional convention where slavery exists the republican theory becomes still more fallacious governor morris likewise condemned the nefarious institution as the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed in fact because many of the founding fathers were so deeply ashamed of slavery they refused to include the word slave in the original constitution slavery now appears only once in the 13th amendment that abolished it nevertheless slavery persisted for eight decades after the ratification of the constitution it was the rot at the core of our country's foundation to some that made america irredeemable william lloyd garrison the fiery abolitionist called the constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell he refused to vote and called for the dissolution of the union he would even burn copies of the constitution during his speeches in his view america was a slave-holding nation and there could be no compromise with the evil of slavery others of the era however were unwilling to give up on the american project equal citizenship was a black man's birthright and to give up on america was to concede that america's blacks never were equal citizens as the declaration of independence had promised them to demoralize freedmen and slaves in that way as frederick douglass argued served only to increase the hopelessness of their bondage the real goal douglas repeatedly made clear was to convince americans that the country was unmoored but not lost but many americans even those who did not live in the south or themselves own slaves undermine douglas's message take for instance another douglas of the of that era stephen a douglas the illinois senator touted an odd brand of popular sovereignty in his view each territory had the right to determine whether to permit slavery within its border when confronted with the simple clear and direct language of the declaration declaring that all men were created equal douglas responded in 1857 by arguing that the text did not mean what it said to him the declaration's famous opening meant only that quote british subjects on the continent were equal to british subjects born and residing in great britain thus he reduced a universal truth to a narrow national one a large group of illinois citizens were dismayed by douglas's attack on the declaration of independence so they invited a young lawyer to respond to douglas in springfield illinois that man of course was abraham lincoln who became perhaps the declaration's greatest proponent and advocate lincoln conceded that the declaration did not assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying equality nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them but man's unequal station meant only that the dream was deferred it remains to be attained as lincoln explained the declaration proposed a standard maxim of equality for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all constantly looked to constantly labored for and even though never perfectly attained constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening in its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere to lincoln this promise of equality was not merely important to the nation it was foundational there was no american nation without the declaration of independence a year after his debates in springfield lincoln made this strikingly clear he he declared think nothing of me take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever but come back to the truths that are in the declaration of independence you may do anything with me you choose if you will but heed these sacred principles you may not you may not only defeat me for the senate but you may take me and put me to death unfortunately president lincoln would later pay that ultimate price so too with almost 700 000 americans decades of racial strife followed but time and again the declaration of independence remained our national north star or as pauline mayor describes it our american scripture we did not surrender our inheritance as equal men endowed by our creator with inalienable rights neither slavery nor jim crow defeated us we recognize this dr martin luther king jr declared decades ago that the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence were a promissory note to which every american was to fall air the history of our nation is our shared struggle to live up to that promise it is a slow arduous battle but we have yet to fail today there's a notable pessimism about the state of our country and cynicism about our founding there are some who would even cancel our founders we are all aware of those who assert much like garrison that america is a racist and irredeemable nation but there are many more of us i think who feel that america is not so broken as it is adrift at sea some of you come from my generation you remember reciting the pledge of allegiance the fourth of july celebrations and the shared belief that our nation was destined for greatness others of you are younger you lived in the twilight of that life or feel nostalgia for a world that you missed or you don't remember it at all in all cases we sense among us an american spirit we cannot quite capture we sense amidst the noise and din telling us that truth does not exist that there is something true something transcendent something solid something that pulls us together rather than divides us as i said my wife and i this summer were inspired when we saw in the rv parks the people who still hold these values and who still believe as they flew proudly so many flags in the rv parks i lay no claim to the answer or to the gospel but this i do know for whatever it is worth the declaration of independence has weathered every storm for 245 years it birthed the great nation it abolished the sin of slavery and it endeavored to address its effects while we have failed the declaration time and again in the ideals of the declaration time and again i know of no time when the ideals have failed us ultimately the declaration endures because it articulates truth it was not a grand philosophy contrived by clever academics it came from antecedent shared values unlike so many of the theories of more recent vintage as lincoln taught us the declaration reflects the noble understanding of the justice of the creator to his creatures and the enlightened belief that nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and embroidered by its fellows the declaration simply recounts what the church is taught for millennia and what we once universally accepted as a given all men are created and all men are created equal no force on earth can take away what god has given us thus i leave you with this thought the declaration of independence may or may not be the american scripture as pauline mayer's book is entitled but it establishes a moral ideal that we as citizens are duty bound to uphold and sustain we may fall short but our imperfection does not relieve us of our obligation my nuns and my grandparents lived out their sacred vocation in a time of stark racial animus and did so with pride with dignity and with honor may we find it within ourselves to emulate them lincoln put it best as in his gettysburg address it is rather for us to be the here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we find increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead will not have died in vain that this nation under god shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth may we as a people and a nation endure and prosper may god bless you may god and may god bless and preserve our great country thank you and go irish thank you [Applause] [Applause] i can't believe in you [Music] [Applause] justice thomas thank you um as we always do we have uh time for questions from the audience now with kova this is a little bit more difficult we can pass microphones around so i believe you were given a card uh when you entered the building there's a way to uh basically electronically submit questions to me i have them in front of me and uh if uh you want to write your questions you can do so on the card and we'll pass them this way and then we'll collect them and we'll go through as many questions as time allows and i see you can vote on the questions too so i'll relay them to the justice and if you put your name on the question i'll i'll relay your name as well okay shall we begin uh our first question was from david green what if any threats do you foresee to the autonomy of the judicial system in the united states over the next 10 to 20 years oh i think one of the difficulties that you are going to have to deal with is judges going beyond what article 3 requires and staying within the limitations on judges there's always a temptation i think to go beyond we see it with the development of substantive due process justice scalia railed about it and i think that when we do that and we begin to venture into political uh the legislative or executive branch lanes and resolving things that are better left to those branches where people actually have some input and some opportunity to participate in the elective electoral processes to who those leaders are those of us particularly in the federal judiciary with lifetime appointments are asking for trouble i think a lot of the pressure the that on the nomination and selection process is because of that i think the court was re was thought to be the least dangerous branch and we may have uh become the most dangerous and i think that's problematic and hence uh the craziness during my confirmation was one of the results of that it was it was absolutely about abortion a matter i had not thought deeply about at the time but i think it a lot of it's our own doing and i think the threats are you we have lost the capacity even i think as as leaders to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don't get the outcomes that we like when for example president roosevelt threatened to pack the court there was enough sense of what the court meant and what separation of powers meant to criticize him today you see almost no criticism or very little when you have those kinds of conversations so i think part of it's our own the judge's own doing by venturing in the areas we should not have ventured into uh through your lecture you interspersed a little bit about your own life with your understanding the declaration um there's a few personal questions here please answer if you will but of course don't if you want the question is uh you left the catholic church when you were in the seminary or maybe right after you left the seminary when you're at holy cross uh what brought you back to the church oh i think i'd be glib a little bit growing up and i think you do things at 19 that 25 years later you undo and um i will simply repeat what i said in class if i had a friend like maggie garnett i probably more than likely would never have left the church um they i just think that um when you're 19 and you're upset and you're angry uh you do things that are not the best thing to do and my grandfather understood that but at 19 i did not and like i've said to my law clerks i ran away from the church in 1968 and crawled back 25 years later and i also say to them sort of rather straightforwardly that they say why did you come back i said i ran out of options so i there were no it's as though it was a hobson's choice it was the only way out and i'm glad i did i just regret that i ever left this question is from margaret mathis i think a student i like this one if you could go back in time would you be a federalist or an anti-federalist boy that's really interesting i don't know i think those were different times i'd probably be closer to the anti-federals so i'd be uh i'm not i mean i'm not against the union but i do think that there's limitations and i can't say i was totally with jefferson but the you know i just think that we see we see what the anti-federalists were concerned about with this but uh with the expansion of the commerce clause with the effort to uh expand uh you know the power of the national government and the reach of the court through the doctrines of incorporation and other theories substantive due process and the other branches going into areas that are somewhat attenuated from the uh limited uh powers it was supposed to have the enumerated powers so i think that they you begin to see in retrospect some of the points i was reading one of the letters um written by a an appeals court judge in um virginia i think on criticizing marshals of chief justice marshall's opinion in mcculloch versus maryland and what was ironic about is some of the points that he was making and criticizing uh the the decision and it's pointing out how that was would mean that the government the federal government the national government would expand into all these areas and it has already expanded into those areas and those were like his list of terribles and it's now our list of realities so i don't i think you could object i'm not going to to to be too harsh in my criticism because they did wind up creating a country and it is flawed it's very flawed like every human institution and i've been on the court for 30 years it's flawed but you know i will defend it because knowing all the disagreements it works it work may work sort of like a car with three wheels but it still works you know somehow you sort of hobble along and you recognize its imperfection and i think we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don't give us what we want when we want it i think we should be really really careful and because i'll say what my grandfather said after you've done that and now what you know what's your next step so the so i'm not i can't be too forceful in my criticism of the federalists good yeah but i do tend toward uh you know i didn't go watch hamilton i can tell you that [Applause] okay this question was uh submitted anonymously how often do oral arguments actually change your mind and never it you know it's sort of like when i used to watch basketball a lot they'd talk about the big man in the paint you know like you do your work early and you get low and then it's over i mean the guy you can you can try to block shaquille o'neal three feet from the basket well good luck with that you got he did his work early and he got low and he received the pass i think that um the real work is in the briefs the real work is what is in the written product and occasionally someone comes up that we had one guys many years ago when chief justice rehnquist was uh was there we agreed but i think it was an afternoon case and we all kind of agreed oh this is an easy one it's a 9-0 a firm well the guy gets up there and turns it in you know he his own case if he sat down and said i'm done i'm submitting on the brief he would have won 9-0 affirm he opened his mouth and lost reverse 9-0 so that is the biggest swing i have seen it's sometimes you just shut up and sit down uh a question from katie alexander uh has there been times in your career when the legal questions you must resolve conflict with your catholic faith if so how do you proceed no not really i think i if if it did if i think if it could something conflict that great uh where i fundamentally think it's wrong i would just go and do something else um the i'm at a point you know and i said that early on and i still believe that but um i have lived up to my oath um there are some things that conflict very strongly with my personal opinion uh my policy preferences and those were very very hard particularly early on but you don't i don't do a lot of hand wringing in my opinions and tell people oh i'm really sad that's not the role of a judge i mean you do your job and you go cry alone but there have been some where but there have been some that broke my heart um and that just was really really really hard and i mean there are sometimes particularly early you sit with the more seasoned members of the court and you explain to them what's wrong and when i first became a judge in 1990 my colleague judge silverman larry silverman sat down with me and one of the things that's really interesting is no judge ever tells you how to do your job the only people who tells you tell you how to do your job are people who've never been judges but anyway he said to me he said i'm just going to give you a little bit of advice unsolicited advice before you sit on a case ask yourself this question what is my role in this case as a judge not as a citizen not as as as as a as a catholic or any what is my role in this case as a judge that is a hard one because if you stay in that lane there are some things that you as a citizen or you as a personal preference would want uh to come out a different way and that's what i've tried to do the other thing and then i'll be quiet about it but i have four law clerks four wonderful law clerks and they're very very bright like your students and they watch you i tell them to watch me and that's something my grandfather always told us watch me and do as i do not as i say so he didn't really mean that do as i don't do as i say part i can tell you that but the i tell my clerks that you watched me for a full year and my job is that you leave here with a clean with clean hands clean hearts and clear consciences we will never do anything that's improper and i encourage them to tell me every clerk works on every case so if you see something your job is to let me know and we sit and we talk about it but in 30 years or 30 terms we i don't think a single clerk will ever tell you we have done anything other than our job uh this question is for andrew no no last name uh what is the most significant misconception you think the american public holds about the court or its role in democracy well that could be a long list you know i don't blame them um i love one of the reasons i like rv well i got to tell you one little thing about rv now you have to remind me so i go in these truck stops because i have a i actually have a bus and i have a i have a 30 year old bus too so it is so i'm in a truck stop i'm in like a pilot truck stop because you like to act like you're one of the big truckers you know you get you're getting diesels you put on like your diesel gloves and you sort of kick the tires i still can't figure out what that does but uh you got to act professional so you you take on your fuel and you um go in you pay it's usually i mean 100 gallons of diesel fuels a lot of money i can tell you that much but at least it's not a boat or a plane so you go in and you're paying and so the on the way in we were in pennsylvania or maybe new york and we passed this black gentleman who was also a driver and he says to me he looks at me he said you'd had judge that literally was one of my favorite moments and he and he said i heard you were a big rig man like me but i didn't know i think i'd ever meet you is this so of all the accolades you can get in life oh you're a big rig man like me so i really started kicking the tires then so would you ask me [Music] i forget what you asked me yeah i do oh was that an intro what is the most the misconception you know i think that they think that we make policy i think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal oppression so preference so if you they think you're anti-abortion or something personally they think that that's the way you always will come out they think you're for this or for that they think you're you become like a politician and i think that's that's a problem to the when i think you're gonna you're gonna jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions um the and and i think the media and the interest groups further that and i give you an example of of of the so i know there's a football game this weekend and nebraska is playing oklahoma and or you all have one too huh so at any rate let's say this weekend that you know like if a referee makes a call that favors notre dame and notre dame wins people would say well that was a fine referee that's what you're supposed to do as a fan but the but if the referee makes that very same call and it works against notre dame oh my goodness i ain't this guy can't even see i mean come on anybody could have seen this exact same call that's because we're fans we're not acting as judges we want a particular outcome and so we look at the outcome and that totally colors what we think the uh level the quality of the refereeing was so if it's for us that was excellent referee it was against us horrible absolutely horrible the guy should give it up so the but that's not what you can do when looking at cases but that's precisely read any article about sort of one of the big cases and that's precisely what you have it's like if the outcome is what i want it to be excellent work you know another marbury versus madison if it is against what you uh for look dread scott all over again this is horrible i mean that's just the way it works but i think that's wrong i think if you go back and you look at some of the new york times articles in the 30s and 40s on supreme court cases the few that i've read are excellent because they summarize the case they talk about the arguments they summarize the holding and then they there may be a short paragraph on the implications now put that side by side with what you would get today so i think that's problematic and that sort of encourages these preconceptions about the court that's all just personal preferences this question might be related it's by blake ziegler who's one of our student uh fellows uh a core tenant of originalism is a hesitancy to legitimize rights not enshrine not enumerated in the constitution claiming that if such rights are desired the constitution should be amended and not revised by the courts what's your response to supporters of judicial activism who say the difficulty of the amendment process makes it a unattainable goal during this age of partisan division well i mean how many times has the constitution been amended i mean so yeah it's not unattainable because it's been amended so maybe in this political climate the same climate that would do things that um that you know i mentioned before as far as leadership but i don't think it's unattainable just uh i think the the the changing the age of the voting age that was attainable uh it was intended to be difficult so you're not amending it every few minutes it's not like a statute or something it's not by a majority so yeah it is difficult but obviously not impossible or we would not have amendments and the so i don't really buy that argument and even if that were the case you lose your constitution if judges can amend it because in effect what you're saying by that argument is you accept amendments by nine members of the supreme court well that's really outside of our process and by definition it's illegitimate and that's the criticism of justice scalia even if you want someone else to do it to substitute for us don't let us do it you know i give an example you know the we were um we have no idea half the time of what going what's going on in pop culture i have no idea um people start talking about these rap artists i have no idea who they are i don't listen to that kind of music and you don't we we're not in touch with probably it is the public it is you've heard the term marble palace this is as close to it as you will get i go in i go in the basement i go up to my office i end the day i go down to the basement i get in the car and i come home we don't we don't have town hall meetings uh we don't go and meet with constituents uh we don't take polls we don't we don't visit with the local the local areas uh to see what our constituents feel we don't take the pulse of the community we're supposed to be outside of that and you don't want us making those decisions we are incapable of doing that this next question um no uh name but it relates to what you just said do you think it would be better if more regular americans read supreme court opinions and recognize the justices second question should justices meet regular people by traveling through flyover country oh god i love flyover country um that's why i got i've we've been motor homing for almost 22 years and we have done 42 states i have been i love flyover country people my wife said it's really flat across north dakota it looked fine to me so we've been we've been in walmart parking lots we've stayed on flying jays pilots rv parks and virtually every all of the 42 states uh that we've been to um we um you know we you go to parks that have fifth wheelers trailers pop-ups people live camping out of motorcycles you meet them it's not really a problem until they recognize you once they recognize you then it messes everything up but that's the world i'm from uh i love that world and it's really interesting when you listen to them about our country that's why i mentioned the flags in uh in west virg in tennessee and north carolina in the mountains those people have a different perspective and it's really interesting to see how they are reacting to these sorts of things do i think that about regular people writing opinions that really leads me to the type of clerks i hire i we write in order to i think that the regular people have been disenfranchised i think that we write these opinions that you are almost like hieroglyphics i mean they're like double entendres and negative pregnants and levels of generality and then a little latin sprinkled in for good so what we try to do and this is again editing and it's the approach is the change just so i tell my clerks and i'll end it with this that it is not genius to put a two dollar idea in a twenty dollar sentence it is genius to put a twenty dollar idea in a two dollar sentence without losing any of the meaning so the audience that we write for our fellow citizens not the law reviews not not just the legal community but our fellow citizens so we were at gettysburg one year right at little round top and a guy he was a bit overweight so i mean i'm not against overweight people you gotta but the so he runs up the hill and he's out of breath and he says i'm not a lawyer but i want you to sign this for me it was a copy of one of my opinions it was on the federal maritime commission or something and he said i want you to sign this and i want to thank you for making it understandable by a regular citizen i said wow thank you you know and it really made me feel good that federal federal you know like a regular citizen who was not a lawyer understood that opinion and i said why are you reading this opinion and why do you want me to sign this opinion on the federal maritime commission and he said he looks at gettysburg and he waves his arm that's what this was all about i said i'll be dying we fought the civil war over the federal maritime commission but i think the thing that's all to make the point that i really like the fact when people regular people find the work accessible that's what we should do and so i hire clerks from regular backgrounds hence my trip to the mountains of tennessee and north carolina because i wound up having so many clerks from that region and none of them even knew each other and they come from very regular backgrounds i they go to schools like last year i had no clerk that went uh they went to south carol university of south carolina undergrad on university of um let's see i'm trying to think of where all these kids these kids come and go so fast phil went to university of minnesota but every single one went to a state school and they went on scholarship and those are the kind then they go on to other schools but that's what i like and because they have the ability and the capacity to write in normal english and to think with common sense and judgment so that's i that's really important to me how about a couple more um this is from andres solorzado any words of wisdom for young aspiring lawyers and law students aspiring to do good work while waiting to fo well wanting to follow the faith and path of sanctity path to path of sanctity wow well i'm a total failure so you know i just think i think that the for me the i gotta hate to say this but my favorite prayers are litany of humility it is just i have it on my wall in my office so i'm a big believer in saying that you know that i can't and that i need the having having been humbled i have every reason to be humble and i think you start with that and right being true being honest with yourself about what you know what you don't know um [Music] and also but not lose sight of what's good the good in people all right we've gotten to a point in the society where we're really good at finding something that separates us from others and when i was the only black kid in my seminary in savannah in the mid 60s in fact to my knowledge the only black kid in a white school i could be wrong on that but i didn't know of any others every time i walked into a room i had to look for something i had in common and that's the way we grew up with what do we have in common with the other person now look at us we just seem like we keep dividing subdividing subcategories this sub sub categories of differences and emphasizing those differences so i think you look for the good in people i think you even if others around you don't do things um in a in the proper way you still try to do it and i think you be you're honest with yourself about learning you know as i said and i meant it i wish i had a friend in college like maggie garnett um and you ask yourself am i do i help make my friends better or worse and that's a hard one and it puts a load on you but i don't know i just i struggle i mean i'm i go to mass i try to do things um try to do the right thing but i think it starts with humility i truly believe that two final questions um first one for me will you come back huh will you come back oh yeah well you know i will i i have to tell you i spend very little time on university campuses and that's probably not good um i think the i think the when i was in college the university was where you exchange ideas it's like your class like being here with my one minor outburst um it's like being here today this is what universities were and you thought about things you debated things you learn how to engage you learn how to disagree without being a jerk you learn how to grow and um [Music] i don't know whether or not that's totally the case but i can tell you i've had that positive kind of experience here and every time i've been here um and i i have to tell you a lot of it where those kids in your class and the brightness i mean it's i don't know what their views are and i really don't that's their business what i am interested in exchanging these ideas letting them think and form their own opinions and that's what the university i thought was supposed to do for all of us so the answer is yes i will and plus i have my kids are here uh nicole and rick and meg steve and um and mara i saw i've got a lot of my clerks here so i i do have to come back so yeah unless i like it here i would i'll tell you if i had seen notre dame i would have got there was no way i would have signed everything i needed to sign before i left campus this i mean maybe in january i would be have a different opinion but my and this is a i was so the first time you all may not notice but i drove my bus on this campus years ago i parked at the police station um and we went to the grotto and that did it for me the grotto pretty much ended it and then going to the chapel pretty much did it for me okay last question don't don't mess this one up um what's the score of saturday's game um this is going to sound horrible but that's going to be a tough game and i saw i think you all will win by at least seven but i think it's going to be a tough game i think purdue has that they're good offensively i think and i don't watch as much college football as i used to i watch a lot of volleyball and that's and you all have a decent volleyball team but but nebraska is well we lost two games and that's really bad but if you have not been to women's volleyball you are missing a treat it is unbelievable it is fast it's athletic it's it's um it's really a good game and i know nothing about volleyball but i like it but if that's the last question i do want to say goodbye i'm going to thank you all thank you for being the way that i would expect notre dame students faculty and friends to be and the way that used to be in all the universities i said at the beginning positive things about notre dame and you are exhibit a as to why that's true thank you all very much [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Vincent Munoz

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Length: 89min 43sec (5383 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021