Supreme Court in Review with MSNBC's Ali Velshi

minutes so let's kick off on time welcome everyone we are so excited to have you in class today my name is curie sotner i'm the chief learning officer at the national constitution center and i want to welcome you all to this fantastic class and it's the last class of our seasons which is very sad but also amazing because we saved the best for last this class is the first time that we have ever done a classed version of the supreme court in review so because it's the first time brought out the big guns here we have ali velshi and jeff rosen to walk us through the big four cases that are going to be hitting the news and people are talking about in the supreme court term this year so without further ado send your questions in the chat send your questions in the q a and just i will turn it over to you thank you so much curry and welcome ali it is such an honor to welcome you to the class um friends you're so lucky to learn from ali velshi he's a central member of the national constitution center family um ali and i have a conversation every week about constitutional issues in the news and we've just returned from miami where we had the most meaningful series of conversations about current constitutional questions and ali had some amazing insights about the media in an age of polarization and he moderated all sorts of great conversations so i'm really eager to um have you learned from him so ali welcome and we we have you know four cases if we can get through them abortion guns and two religion cases we'll see how far we get but let's begin with abortion and why don't you set up the constitutional stakes and and give a kind of capsule version of what you'd like our students to know about the case then i'll talk about the constitutional arguments and then we can have a conversation about it oh sorry i think you're muted there we go i think i think abortion is a is a good place to start because there are three things you have to look at when discussing the current debate about abortion uh one of them is abortion and and what one's views are and what one thinks about abortion and that's a an ongoing conversation that's been going on since the beginning of time there are polls that indicate um more stability than not in what americans views are on abortion over the years uh a a small plurality of people have begun to uh it's all in how you ask these questions but that you know have have gotten behind abortion rights um the group that is not behind abortion rights uh is getting a little bit smaller but it's it's slower than you might think given other social changes in in society and the fact that abortion has been legal in this country for closing in on 50 years but that's one discussion the second of discussion is the issue of abortion rights separate from whether you think about abortion so you'll notice in all of the polling there are questions about whether people support abortion or don't support abortion and there are a lot of people in america who don't and a lot of people who do but when you talk about abortion rights the way the question is often asked and again this is all in how you ask the question but a lot of people ask do you support the criminalization of abortion and that means would a woman and her doctor and in the case of some of these states that are passing laws people who help a woman get an abortion including and up to people who drive them there and things like that do you support them facing criminal charges um and and then the number of people who support that drops precipitously even if you do not like abortion the that's a different story and then you have the the specificity of the supreme court which has to adjudicate when a state or the federal government uh creates a law uh whether or not that is constitutional and that's a third issue and at the moment it rests on a number of issues obviously roe v wade and other cases about abortion have a lot to do with privacy um and and that's an issue but one of the things that uh in the draft version of a decision from the same supreme court that was leaked and subsequently confirmed to be true uh justice samuel alito as part of other arguments makes the case that the right to an abortion is not enumerated in the constitution and that's a tricky and complicated discussion because there are a number of rights we enjoy today and we take for granted and assume that they are constitutionally protected because they've there have been some court cases that have uh have demonstrated that but they're not written into the constitution right everything that is done is not made into an amendment to the united states constitution the first amendment is there and we can discuss it a lot but it's written into the constitution in 1791. abortion is not the word abortion does not exist in the constitution and by the way there's nothing in u.s federal law that protects a right to an abortion so when roe v wade came into force in 1973 a lot of states that had prohibited abortions wisconsin michigan among them they just kept their old laws so for instance if rogue v wade gets struck down as a result of uh of a hearing or of a decision that that we're expecting there are a lot of states who'll go back to laws that were on the books in the late 1800s and the early 1900s so even if you don't like abortion you may not think that's exactly the right place to go so that's why this is not a question of whether you like abortion or not that's that's entirely separate just like a burger fell is not a question about whether you like gay marriage or not it's what you what rights you believe americans have access to and how you feel um that should that should be uh reflected by our courts and i'll i'll leave by saying doesn't matter what you think about it that we have a system here and what the supreme court thinks about it at the moment is is might be more important wow ali that was such a great answer um you teed up so well those three separate issues the polling about abortion the questions of abortion rights including criminal charges and then that third question about the constitutional arguments for and against a right to privacy let's dig in on that third question because we because our students want to understand the constitutional arguments on both sides justice alito's draft opinion as you say notes that the right to an abortion is not enumerated in the constitution and says that when deciding whether or not liberties are protected by the 14th amendment which says no state shall deprive any person of liberty without due process of law the court should look to history and tradition it should basically see what states have done in the past from the founding until today it's not just a snapshot of what they thought at the time the constitution was ratified but a wide-angle lens of a tradition and justice alito says the history is complicated but in his view at the time of the founding there was no clear right to an abortion by the time the 14th amendment was ratified in 1868 all the states restricted abortion and many from the moment of conception and by the time roe v wade was decided in 1973 30 states banned abortion from the moment of conception although the states were liberalizing the argument on the other side and the dissenters will certainly make it if the draft opinion goes out is that the history is more complicated at the time of the founding common law which is the law that courts decide that's not written down in federal statutes or state statutes basically did not criminalize abortion until what's called fetal quickening the moment that the fetus begins to move in and that's around 16 weeks so there's an argument that there actually is not a tradition of prosecuting early term abortions before fetal quickening um from the founding until the 19th century and then as you said by the 1970s by the time rose decided states were liberalizing their abortion laws and many of those old 19th century laws that are going to leap back to life and criminalize abortion from the moment of conception arguably are not consistent with that tradition of protection for abortion before fetal quickening ali i know that's complicated it took me a while to get those arguments out but have i accurately stated the historical arguments on both sides and what do you think of them sorry i think we're you're muted again i apologize um i think you have and and one of the issues that we have to think about is you and i both love the constitution and reading the constitution and it's it's not really a complicated document it it gives uh birth to a lot of very very important discussions that have taken you know hundreds of years for us to interpret and we'll will be that way for another a few hundred years but that is important to understand that when discussing rights-based issues of which the constitution and the supreme court deal with you have to understand that these are complexities right we've got abortion is not one abortion rights are not one thing they are many many different things and are they about abortion are they about uh the protection of life as some people argue is it about uh a woman's autonomy to make decisions about her own body and it's about all of these things but what carries more weight under the law and it is complicated because a lot of these laws as you state were written a really long time ago and and uh thinking about things evolves and and social positions evolve but in this particular case if roe v wade is struck down what you haven't seen is a whole lot of other laws there are a lot of states that that go back to laws that were written at a time uh when we did not think about a woman's right to have an abortion as as something that was principally enshrined and that's the problem we've got right now you have a lot of people who say i thought this was settled in fact that term settled law uh is used when when they uh vet uh a potential justice for the supreme court so that's where people sort of they're not sure they thought roe v wade protects right to abortion um casey versus planned parenthood uh had some adjustments to to what you thought that right right is but basically for more than 40 years we've had what people have believed to be the right to an abortion and when you peel away the first two layers of that onion you realize it was never as clear as people think it is it's all really really complicated now in your mind it might be entirely clear this is black and white there's a right to an abortion and if you take it away that is exerting control over a woman's body and then that is a that is the beginning of the removal of certain rights that exist on a continuum of rights some people think is the same discussion about gay rights is the same discussion about civil rights is the same discussion or similar discussion to voting rights so it is highly politicized in that the people who are against a supreme court decision that would would come down and strike down roe v wade are making the argument that this is a slippery slope this is the beginning of something that is going to uh eliminate a lot of other things that we all thought were rights that were established law so that's a lot of the motivation right now in in a lot of people in groups who are very very worried about what this decision will mean for a broader range of rights some people say don't think about it that way don't think about it as broader range of rights this one is actually crucial and important but but both of those are in the ether right now you're you're so right about that and um you're it's so important to stress as you do that it's complicated regardless of your political and moral views there are constitutional arguments on both sides and also that the question of whether all those other rights are at issue has to turn on two things you talked about first how you conceive of the underlying right and whether you think abortion is different because of the presence of a fetus um and also whether you conceive of it as a right um that's rooted in history or a broader right to you use the word autonomy and that's really crucial because if abortion is based on an autonomy right it was autonomy that was the basis for the gay marriage decision and if this supreme court thinks you can't find an abstract right to autonomy in the liberty clause of the 14th amendment then those cases could be imperiled as you say if by contrast you're just talking about uh the narrow abortion right and um justice alito says well there may not be a historically rooted right to an abortion and the presence of a fetus makes abortion unique but marriage is a right that is historically rooted then you might come to a different conclusion about marriage so much turns as you say about the level of abstraction on which you conceive of the underlying right and then the second thing you said which is so important is the question of precedent is the decision settled law and a big part of justice alito's decision um he comes up with a bunch of factors for whether the court should overturn previous decisions including ones the court has recognized before first is are there reliance interests have women structure their lives around this right second are there changes in facts and law that would call the previous decision into question third is the decision workable but then he adds two other factors he says was the original decision egregiously wrong and is its legal reasoning convincing and the the fear of critics of the decision is that he could be embracing something close to justice thomas's position which is that any decision that's wrong should be overturned and that the previous precedent should be given basically no wait because the constitution is what mattered not previous presidents justice scalia used to say that i i don't embrace that view of precedent because the difference between me and justice thomas is i'm not a nut he was making a joke but he basically said you've got to give some way to decisions even if you think they're wrong or um the law will change every time the courts change and the court will look really political how do you see this question of precedent playing out and should our um how should our students think about the court's approach well i think there are there are two ways to think about precedent and one of the things about how you interpret what happens at the supreme court um or or how much for instance how much power the president should have in a given administration often has to do with whose side you're on or what what the topic is right so uh there are people who may not argue that that uh precedent uh should have primacy uh but if if you rely on or believe in uh a woman's right to abortion as as decided by roe v wade and casey versus planned parenthood then it's it you would like the precedent to be meaningful so i i you know again i don't know as a rule what the average person feels about if it's precedent it it it must hold weight because obviously we have had supreme court decisions over the years that today we would not agree with or we would say don't seem right the argument might be that they seemed more right at the time but some people say they weren't even right at the time so so should we should we be reliant on that and that of course speaks to the idea that was the original ruling that set that president president fundamentally wrong uh the the problem with all of this this is all important legal stuff the problem with all of this is if you don't trust that the conversation is being had in good faith if you believe that the conversation at the level of the supreme court is politicized uh and we're you know we're not naive judges justice is our people but how much do you trust that they are putting their personal and political views aside to make the right decision for the country increasingly the american public doesn't believe that of many of our institutions but the supreme court has largely gotten away with being thought of as fair and and an honest broker in this thing now we are having difficulty with that there are a lot of people who who don't think that's true they think that their right to an abortion will go away and they think it's got to do with politics on the supreme court and that's a that's a supreme court problem but it's actually all of our problems because you realize what happens when our our faith in institutions erodes we stop trusting them we stop relying on them we stop believing in them and then who knows what what order governs our society after that you're so right to identify trust in institutions and in the court in particular as a central issue in this decision and it's such a complicated question ally because on the one hand justice thomas just said last week this leak has so undermined faith in the court as an institution and we justices will always have to be looking over our shoulder justice thomas's response is the way for the court to be trusted is to only follow the constitution and not to take anything else into account and he thinks that a leak like this would call that into question chief justice roberts has a different view he says people will trust the court um when they perceive that the justices are not acting like politicians and the way to do that is to move slowly and to take account of previous decisions and to respect precedent and to care about questions like the court's perception of legitimacy even if you might reach a different constitutional conclusion if there were nothing else on the books so trying to figure out how to maintain that trust basically is really tough and both sides are using the other of the politicians undermining that trust right we know that trust in the court is is deteriorating but regard regardless of where you are there's an argument to be made that the other side or the court is is contributing a a great deal to that deterioration and trust exactly there are some great questions um including from barry beef about the religious freedom arguments uh in the abortion case which will indeed become relevant if the court overturns roe some folks will go to court and argue as as barry beef asks why doesn't religious freedom the first amendment come to play because christians are trying to codify their beliefs into national doctrine and then bobby gershman in the chat says i also see this as a religious rights concern and jewish tradition life does not begin at conception but when the child takes its first first breath this means the christian view of one life begins would be overriding my rights bobby gershwin and barry b these are really important observations and let me just i'll respond to them and then ask for ali's thoughts um it's true you could argue as both of you did that because religious traditions disagree about when life begins and many religious traditions including protestant jewish and non-christian or non-western traditions uh don't believe that life begins at the moment of conception you could say that you're imposing uh one doctrinal view which is held by the catholic church and some other religions um which overrides the right of individuals to make a decision about life begin where where life begins and that violates the free exercise of religion rights of the individuals who are not being allowed to make their own decision and also might even constitute an establishment of religion in some ways the argument on the other side is it begs the question of when life begins and what is a hard question to ask is does the constitution tell states when they can decide when life begins you and there's no easy answer to that question you might say individuals have to be able to decide on their own up to a certain point but how do you set that point one way to do it is through history and tradition and you could say well the common law allowed individuals to make that decision according to the dictates of their conscience until a fetal quickening or until around 16 weeks you can't decide forever when life begins but um maybe until a certain point but there's nothing in the constitution that clearly says that you can look to history but the history of men were back to the complicated historical arguments and the final thing that makes the argument really tricky um barry and um bobby is that if um states traditionally had broad authority to regulate what's called health safety and morals and if you suddenly say no when it comes to moral decisions about when life begins individuals have to be able to make that decision according to their own religious traditions that would call into question any law that might be supported by some religions um as a violation of the establishment clause so are all murder laws unconstitutional because catholic doctrine or protestant doctrine or jewish doctrine finds murder to be unconstitutional you can in other words it's it's difficult to translate your intuition which seems exactly right to me as a descriptive matter into a clear constitutional argument but ali what do you think about all this because this is going to be the cutting-edge discussion if ro is overtaken yeah and and this is where uh people uh sort of misunderstand or or or have a disconnect with the court on this front because we have evolved into a society that in which rights are their own discussion all right so so at this point there are people who will say in a pluralistic society there are people who have different religious views and we have to have a system which respects that and allows that dialogue to exist but uh notwithstanding the first amendment of the constitution which prohibits the establishment of a religion by the state and one could interpret rules that are governed by uh religious views to be uh directionally in the in the in the in the direction of establishing religion there there's a growing argument amongst people that might my rights and it's it's written are unalienable inalienable so so do you think about your thoughts and your feelings and your your morality around abortion or are is this a conversation about rights and and what a woman's right to autonomy and privacy is and that is an important discussion for the courts and for lawyers but it's also important for people to understand that that um what i find when i talk to people who are on opposite sides of the this argument is that they're often having different discussions right and someone may say i don't like believe in abortion i believe it's x or i believe it's y and and somebody on the other side will say i'm not disputing what you think about abortion and where life starts i'm talking about my rights um and and whether or not you have a right to do that so people who are are fighting for abortion rights often sort of bring up uh you know the imagery from a handmaid's tale right what happens when the government starts to determine your reproductive freedom and choices and others will say hey we're just talking about banning abortion after x number of weeks we're not talking about controlling women's bodies and and making them into reproductive factories but then again you have things that are going on in oklahoma right now which seem to go much further than the constitutional argument that we're discussing right now these are states that are looking to ban abortion entirely much earlier and there there are some pieces of legislation now being introduced in congress in preparation for the overturning of not in congress but in state legislatures in preparation for the overturning of roe v wade which discuss limitations on contraception believe it or not which if you thought abortion was a right that you had you kind of think of the contraception the choice to to make decisions around contraception with your doctor also a privacy issue is is yours to have so you can see why there are some people who are uh fighting for abortion rights who say this is not only a slippery slope but i'm i can tell you how the slippery slope is going to go first it's going to be abortion after a certain number of weeks then it's going to be all abortion then it's going to be uh contraception and then tell me why i shouldn't believe it's going to be gay rights and it's going to be voting rights and it's going to be marrying uh people of a of a different race so that's one could argue that that conversation can get carried away but it does seem real and practical to a lot of people to a lot of people they're saying i live this life this reliance idea i live my life on the basis that these choices can be made either about abortion or whom i marry or whatever the case is this fundamentally changes the way i look at the society in which i live and this you and i have discussed this over time the court will come to reflect the changing values in society but a majority of people in this country think that this change has happened and it would be very very unusual to go back to what they think is a different era in which women were not free to uh get an abortion that's so true uh and you're so right that many people think it is an unalienable right it's very important that you use that phrase and that picks up on victoria williams comment could criminalizing abortion be seen as infringing on the natural right to the pursuit of happiness no law can be made to restrict that natural right and donald hughes asked what role does the ninth amendment play in this debate um both excellent questions both excellent questions so um as as ali said um and as victoria suggests many people think that well certainly the right to make your own decisions about uh to think as you will and to speak as you think and to follow the dictates of your conscience when it comes to matters that are spiritual and not scientific is an unalienable right and in fact i'm my fake backdrop is the first amendment wall and when we unveiled that tablet a few weeks ago i talked about the history of the natural or unalienable right to freedom of conscience which thomas jefferson and the founders thought was the most basic unalienable right because the opinions of men as madison said being dependent on evidence presented to their minds cannot be controlled by other men or women in other words people can't tell you what to think if you think in conscience that life begins uh you know uh after 16 weeks and not at the moment of conception it's the state is violating your unalienable right if it imposes a religious view to the contrary the problem is and what makes this so difficult is other people believe in the dictates of their conscience that life does begin with conception that fetuses have total rights of full human beings from the moment of fertilization and there's a possible bill pending in congress that would literally criticize uh criminalized abortion from the very beginning based on the view that life begins at conception so who decides what makes this so tricky is that uh the cons the the the methodology so you asked about the ninth amendment the night and i'll try to do this fast and and ask what ali thinks but this is sort of you know the central questions in com law the ninth amendment says the enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people so that means donald that don't assume if it's not written down it's not protected the framers definitely believe that there are certain natural rights that are not alienated or surrendered to government and that we retain those rights um the question is how do we figure out which ones are by the constitution and the method that the court has historically used is history back to where we started what have the states done in the past so that's why justice alito is on firm enough ground when he says when we figure out what a you know unenumerated right is we're going to look to history and then we're back to the messiness of the history and the fact that even though there's a really good argument that the right to decide when life begins as a matter of conscience the common law basically said you can exercise that until maybe 16 weeks and not afterward and then things got more restrictive so ali i don't know if that clarifies things i think it does so i think that a lot of people said when alito said what he said about unenumerated rights he he they would have appreciated if he had been very clear about the fact that this is what the ninth amendment also says about unenumerated rights but the concept of unenumerated rights and and the ninth amendment has been uh in dispute uh between experts since since adam and eve right well before there was a ninth amendment or a u.s constitution there are people who believe it's not written it's going to be very hard to determine that that's actually a right and there are people who believe it's not written but we understand what rights evolve into and so does the court and so do our legislatures and so do our states um so so that that has never been sorted out we've never been clear on the idea of what do you do with an unenumerated right and this is as you said more complicated than most things because the states have decided about uh weeks in a pregnancy and you know we're at these complicated things where we've got pregnancy we've got uh abortion rights being uh curtailed as early as six weeks and and again maybe this is a problem with laws being written mostly by men you know there's a there's a possibility at six weeks of pregnancy a woman does not know that she's pregnant so there are people who for health reasons for many other reasons uh this is this is the reliance clause comes into the reliance factor comes into play here however remember there are a whole lot of people abortion rights believers who say this is not about proving that this is a risk to a mother this was a right that women had that's being taken away and that's you know they're looking at it from that perspective that this is a right on the continuum of rights and it would be a it would it would set a bad precedent to to to eliminate roe v wade's protections absolutely and your observations about reliance are so important and there was a disagreement there too justice alito said a woman doesn't rely on the right to abortion beyond the term of pregnancy itself in other words if you have an unplanned pregnancy then you might uh be relying on the right to abortion but if the court overturns roe everyone who's not pregnant once the decision is overturned won't rely on it the argument on the other side that justice ginsburg made is what are you talking about women are structuring their whole careers they're presuming that they're going to be able to decide when to be mothers and when when to be members in the workforce based on the availability availability of a right to abortion and this will unequally impose burdens on women that are not imposed on men to overturn roe um and then your the the the question um of uh well one of our friends asked if abortion isn't written into the constitution how can the decision in this case affect other rights that aren't written as the constitution maybe one more word about the contraception case which ali you mentioned uh it was called griswold versus connecticut it was decided in 1966 and there were about three different ways of deciding the case and which way you decided affects whether or not the contraception case might be overturned the most abstract way which is the one that justice douglas picked in his majority opinion is that the constitution contains a right to privacy which comes from what he called penumbras formed by emanations from the other parts of the bill of rights like there's no explicit right to privacy but part of the first amendment protects privacy and the fourth amendment and the third and all of these create a broader sweeping right to autonomy that includes your right to use contraceptive this supreme court doesn't buy that argument anymore and if you're resting the right to contraception on this sweeping penumbra autonomy right then contraception's in trouble justice thomas has a sign in his chamber saying please don't emanate in my penumbras because he's like don't do all this really abstract loosey-goosey reasoning however there's a narrower way of deciding the case connecticut was the only state in america in 1966 that banned contraceptive use by married couples therefore the history and tradition argument says this is an easy case one state says yes 49 say no there's a tradition of protecting the right to use contraception if that's your approach then the contraceptive decision should be safe because there's no tradition of banning contraceptives and at least in 1966 uh connecticut was an outlier are you persuaded ali by justice alito's reassurances hey don't worry about contraception because you know we could decide that on our grounds or do you think that those cases might actually be up for grabs well i'm not i'm not i'm not smart enough to opine on it but what i do is collect a lot of views all the time right and and i think that this idea of relying on uh justices and what they're saying right now is is imperil right there's a sense of i i've stopped trusting uh certain institutions i kind of had some trust in the supreme court and something has happened that to make me not trust that their decision makes sense because one of the things that you'll hear about is all of the current sitting justices of the supreme court were asked about a number of these decisions anything having to do with abortion generally and cited that it you know without committing to whether or not they would overturn it in the in the in the face of an actual uh case because potential supreme court justices try to be very careful about how they deal with that they all seem to imply that things that are settled on things that are precedents will be uh given that weight going forward and something has changed about that too so i i think this concept of whether anybody wants to take anybody's word for it anymore is part of the erosion of trust in the supreme court it used to be that if the justice chief justice of the supreme court uh said something or a justice said something you could rely on that but there are a whole lot of people who did not believe that we would be where we are today in in terms of being possibly weeks away from the overturning of roe v wade so i still have conversation people who say this is really bad but it's not going to move on to anything else like contraception or gay marriage and they might be entirely right but i also hear from a lot of people who say why would i trust anything that the court says is safe when i thought for almost 50 years that this was safe and done and so i don't know i don't know the answer to that one but the the faith in the court and and you and i have talked about this before i think a lot of people don't think about the supreme court every day and and what role it has in their lives but they're starting to and and unfortunately for a lot of people who are being woken up to the constitution and the the supreme court right now it it's not clear how they're supposed to think about it and it's it's not it may not be the best introduction well that's very well put and that's um uh yeah uh you know an understatement uh as you know because uh i it could be a very great challenge to the legitimacy of the court well let's i think it's very productive to spend this time focusing on the abortion decisions friends i think we're not going to get to guns and religion because it's so important to really dig into the dobbs case as we're doing and ali why don't we just take a few rounds before we close how we want to teach our students about how to think about the supreme court we always say at the constitution center let's separate our political from our constitutional views don't assume that it's all politics and evaluate the arguments on both sides and i guess the first thing i would say is do just what you're doing spend your friday listening to me and ally talking about the arguments on both sides this is not a five second conversation it's taking us at least a half hour to work through all the complicated uh questions of methodology and levels of abstraction and precedent and and the implications for other decisions and when the decision comes down friends i want you to read the majority opinion and the concurring opinions and the dissenting opinions and the lesson i've learned from you jeff read the dissenting opinions you learn as much from a court case uh from the descending opinions as you do uh from the majority opinion absolutely but on the other hand aly you know we're you're so generous with your time our friends are able to devote a half hour um and and you confront all the time the question of how to talk to the court for people who have less uh time shorter attention spans only or tuning in for you know five-minute snippets and stuff how how would you tell citizens to evaluate the decision and think about the court and the decision you use the term abstraction and i i'm gonna i'm gonna say that there are two parts of abstraction that i think people should consider when when thinking about the supreme court and the constitution and by the way i think it helps me to think about both of them at the same time right to think about uh the constitution which is a like i said an easy to get through document and to become familiar with uh but so complicated that it's been uh you know all these years of of taking what's written in there and reinterpreting it through the changing values of the society but two things don't think of the supreme court as an abstraction as an abstract body that rules on things that are uh removed from your life number one understand that every one of these cases that you and i talk about every week does not have to do with the the plaintiff or uh you know it's it's all big it's all big and it all has major implications by the time a case gets to the supreme court and they agree to hear it it means it's got implications generally speaking beyond one person or one town or one place's uh existence number one the second one is embrace the abstraction there is something about laws that are built through argument and debate and and are then tested and are pressured and and pushed against and and and collapsed or are rebuilt that creates a certain durability in society so you may not like a particular supreme court hearing you make a decision you may not opinion you may not like how it goes but understand that there's the durability of democracy and a system of justice exists by virtue of the fact that ideas are challenged um and they should be challenged and it might be your ideas that are being challenged in this particular environment there are a lot of people who say i believe in an uh in the right to an abortion absolutely and anything short of that is an invasion or a deterioration of my rights i don't disagree with that and i believe in a pluralistic society where you can believe anything you want but understand that the pressure on everything to be to be argued to be debated to be brought before a court as long as you trust that court and you believe the court is not uh overly politicized is is a healthy thing for a society to have right you don't want the supreme court to be your supreme court in that way it shouldn't just have rulings that suit you but you do need to think about the fact that there is despite how much you may not like a side of an argument there is value in the the institutionalized debate that the supreme court has because i cover a lot of things in a lot of countries that don't have this kind of system a government comes in sweeps out all the laws that another government comes in sweeps out all those laws and you talk about reliance no one can rely on anything they and you know what they do they leave the country they take their money and they go live somewhere else that's why this is something we should preserve it should bother all of us if the court is losing certain legitimacy because it is important that we have a supreme court upon which we can rely wow ali that's such a powerful point i mean you've just returned from ukraine where you've been for a while and you're reminding us that this is not the norm uh to have trust in a non-partisan uh court and there's so many countries as you say the new admin the new thugs come in and the old judges go out and people somebody's cousin becomes the chief justice and all this kind of nonsense so you may not like what they're doing and i i totally i get it and everybody's got a right to not like it but understand that the system we should be working to prevail for this for a system of impartial uh a judiciary that is impartial to prevail a beautiful uh note to end this this part of a conversation on um regardless of what you think of the decisions is important to obey decisions even when you disagree with them justice breyer made the same point he said that's the whole basis for the rule of law and if we don't have that then and you have a right to protest it absolutely right and that is also a protected right that that one people should embrace protest is a part a healthy part of our democracy you do not have to embrace or agree with a supreme court decision there's just some understanding of pluralism that we have to we have to embrace and say people have views that are different from mine i don't like their views but i do live in a system in which all of our views get some space pluralism what an important word and we do live in a pluralistic society the constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of views and we've got to respect decisions even when we disagree with them in order to preserve the rule of law wonderful um curry ice uh any any last uh thoughts or questions before we uh let our friends go no i think that was brilliant ali thank you so much we started we started the year talking about civil discourse and methods of constitutional interpretation you bro both have brought us back there to understand it's about having a disagreement but also listening to different perspectives that we have lots of tools of understanding how this works and how we move it forward but i also want to thank you so much of giving us that global perspective too because that's not something we often do in this class is looking to compare this to the world and it's really important so for the final class thank you so much for being a fantastic wrap up of the year jeff as always our fearless leader leading us through these constitutional issues and really engaging in such a meaningful conversation so thank you both so much and students i gave you jeff homework because you never get away without it um and i will send all the cases to you so you can review them and have a conversation with somebody who might think differently about the outcome of that case and try to understand their perspective and why they think that so thank you all so much final words jeff no what a great note to end on curry have a discussion about the case with someone who might have a different perspective and try to understand their point of view that's exactly what we're trying to do here curry thank you for leading this great year so well friends thank you for joining us every week and learning and growing together your most important homework is to read the decisions when they come down and that's the majority and the concurring and the dissent and ally thank you for being an inspiring friend of the constitution center a great teacher for our students and giving us a lot to think about when we realize just how high the stakes are in the importance of preserving the american commitment to pluralism and the rule and and i want to just say one last thing curry because what you said really move me be empathetic open your mind listen to why people think a certain way do not feel any obligation to change your mind the idea that you listen to other people means that you're just being a good citizen you're listening to other people you have a view and if it's if your view is that abortion the right to abortion is an absolute right to abortion cool stay with it go with it protest with it i i come out there and talk all the time every time there's a protest i support that right i don't think people need to have their minds changed they just need to have their minds open just just keep an open mind to the idea that other people have a view that may not be your view and that's the beauty of the society in which we live but you do not have to change your view as a result of engaging in conversation you might but you don't need to and i think that is so important because people always think you're listening to change your mind david french said it he's like you know what it could be listening to make your argument better and i was like that was a great answer but it's just to understand it's just about understanding it doesn't mean a change and i love that thank you for adding that to ali wonderful thanks to all and huzzah to curry as everyone says in the class thank you query have a great weekend all bye-bye have a great one bye bye

Channel: National Constitution Center

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Id: bwk-uCvOaIM

Length: 43min 43sec (2623 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022