First Principles Sandra Day O'connor's Prescription for an Angry Nation with Professor Lisa Kern Griffin
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First Principles_ Sandra Day O’Connor’s Prescription for an Angry Nation with Professor Lisa Kern Griffin (720p HD) CONNER COOK: Thank you, everyone, for joining us. We're going to go ahead and get started. My name's Conner Cook. I serve as the assistant director of alumni engagement at Duke Law School. We're pleased to have Professor Griffin with us today to do this presentation. Professor Griffin is part of our faculty that have worked with us over the last two years to do a program on the road. So we're real excited have the opportunity to do this program virtually for you all today. A few housekeeping notes before we get started. We will be recording all the video and chat from today's program. Please mute your microphone when you're not speaking. If you experience any technical challenges like slow video, turning off your video can improve your connection. If you continue to experience any technical difficulties, please email our office, and our team will assist you. We'll put our office email address in the chat feature in case you need to contact us. If you're dropped off at any time, just please reconnect. It's not disruptive to the meeting. And now, please let me introduce our speaker for today, Professor Griffin. Professor Griffin's scholarship focuses on evidence theory, Constitutional criminal procedure, and federal criminal justice. She joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008 and was a recipient of the 2011 distinguished teaching award. She's an elected member of the American Law Institute, has filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court, served as a legal advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has testified before the United States Congress. Prior to coming to Duke Law School, Professor Griffin taught at UCLA Law School. She graduated from Stanford Law School, where she served as president of the Stanford Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States. Professor Griffin has also spent five years as a federal prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney's Office. And now, let me turn it over to Professor Griffin. LISA GRIFFIN: Hello and welcome. And thank you all so much for being here. It's nice to see you, or virtually see you. And I'm going to have some remarks. And then I look forward to having a discussion with you, so that I can actually talk to you. Some of you are my former students. And I'm especially glad to have the chance to connect with you. And the topic that I chose for today seemed appropriate because, of course, we are in what keeps being described as challenging times. And as many of my students know, Justice O'Connor is a touchstone for me that I always refer to when things get a little bit challenging. And I have a sort of theory about her and a little bit of her personal story to share with you today to try to explain why that's the case. My theory is that, once upon a time in American public life, there were people who we could all admire at the same moment, who could achieve universal acclaim. Sometimes, once upon a time, it was possible, even, to earn the trust of people with whom you disagreed. And I think that Sandra Day O'Connor might be the last public figure in American life who was universally well- regarded and whose image could transcend partisan divisions and polarization. If you look around and think about this, it's hard to spot another one. Not just in the government, but in the media, in the entertainment world, among athletes. Even acclaimed athletes like, for example, the victorious World Cup women's soccer team recently was the target of a lot of vocal criticism from certain groups in American public life. We don't share any trusted news anchors anymore. We don't have the same sources of information. And it can seem as though someone is always mad at someone else. And things were really different for Justice O'Connor. And one of the things I want to talk about today is an effort to understand why that is so. When she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1981, 100 million Americans watched her confirmation hearings on television, which is the same number who turned in for the Super Bowl in February of this year. She was confirmed 99-0. And she emerged from those proceedings a celebrity. She was notorious 12 years before the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court. And when she walked into a room in Washington, flashbulbs went off. She was immediately famous. She received 60,000 letters her first year on the court and was the first recognizable Supreme Court Justice, an icon, especially to young women. Over 25 years, she cast the decisive vote in 330 cases. And again, I think the interesting things about her is the incredible breadth of admiration that she received across a spectrum, culturally and politically. Wide consensus and high regard, even as she waded into really emotional debates about things like abortion and affirmative action. And if you fast forward to the present day, the court right now is facing contentious and momentous issues. And there's no center on the court anymore. The spot that Justice O'Connor once occupied is certainly frayed beyond recognition. But I have not entirely given up hope on the Supreme Court as an institution. And I think if, ultimately, the court is the thing that holds up under pressure, that keeps the country together, that has the authority to speak across the divides that we see, a lot of that will be due to Justice O'Connor. There are a lot of different ways to leave a legacy. And one of Justice O'Connor's legacies is that, compared to the woeful state of the discourse in the political branches, the court is quite civil. They avoid vitriol. They will usually talk to each other. And they owe that norm at the court almost entirely to Justice O'Connor's influence from when she joined the court. And I think that could be a lasting significant part of her legacy in the months to come. In thinking about her legacy, we have amazing material to draw from, a book about which I've written a review essay that will be available to you, I think, if you signed up for this webinar. This book by Evan Thomas, First, came out this last year. And it came out at just the right time. Because although Justice O'Connor has announced her withdrawal from public life because of her health challenges, her voice is being reintroduced into the national conversation through this book. It's an intimate book. It's based on private papers, 20 years of her husband John O'Connor's personal diaries, hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and clerks. And so even though she's not taking part in this challenging national conversation, I think her voice has been reintroduced at this really critical moment. And it's caused me in writing about the book to think a lot about how it is that Justice O'Connor did it, what she would say to us now, and the way in which I think she serves as a lived example of how we can thrive in the face of challenges, how it does take a lot of courage to compromise with others, and what the necessary ingredients are for a healthy American democracy. So as a person, as a professional, and as a patriot, I think she still has a lot to teach us about why she was so admired and about next steps for the country that she loves. The book makes clear that it's not that she was just, as is so often thought, at the right place at the right time, but that she was the right person for a very rare assignment. And here, I think there's an interesting contrast. Because the notorious RBG is actually equally prim and anachronistic in her demeanor, but in persona has this edgy celebrity culture now that is built up around her. And as far as I know, Justice O'Connor has not inspired a whole lot of memes, or really any. They're difficult to find. Nobody has any O'Connor tattoos, although there are quite a few RBG tattoos out there. And of course, RBG is the subject of a lot of contemporary culture and now has celebrity that transcends Justice O'Connor's And that's in part because Justice O'Connor's modern edge is on the inside. She was a sort of guru before there were podcasts and best sellers to give us all the buzz words about what to do next. She was a Buddhist without the Buddhism. She was a walking self-help book, even though she would never, ever have read a self-help book. She was not a person who you could really imagine having a mantra. But I like to think that if Justice O'Connor had a mantra it would have been something like, look only forward. She was always and ever without grievance and expended her energy in only one direction. When she graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952, as is widely known, many employers rejected her because of her gender.