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. But she never once looked back or expressed any bitterness about that, only humor. And she credited the need to pivot as the fortuity that landed her in the public sector and set the course for her life. She also rigorously avoided regret. She never talks about things that she regrets. She always says that the time to worry about a decision is before it is made. Even with regard to the Bush versus Gore decision that stopped the Florida recount in the contested 2000 presidential election, she sent a belated holiday card that year far and wide with one message, may your new year be free of hanging chads.

And she was not inclined to look back on those things. Even if she rued them, she wouldn't express regret. She never apologized for the things that she could not attend or accomplish. She would just say no. And she was fond of pointing out that tomorrow is another day. She was also intensely mindful before there was a buzzy word for mindfulness. She never really relaxed, but she was always completely calm. She would focus so intently on every conversation that when she was listening she held incredibly still, but her eyes would sort of sparkle. She made an unnerving amount of eye contact with people. Her clerks knew that when we left drafts of opinions with her to read, we would have to race back to our offices and get settled, because moments later, she would appear in our doorways having digested the entire opinion. She was sort of a superhero or a cartoon figure who could magically reappear and read extremely quickly.

And she always seemed to us like a magnet who could bend events to her will. When she said it was time to go, it was time to go. When she pointed in a direction, people followed. If she did not like the weather, it would seem to us entirely possible that she could change it with the power of her mind.

And another thing that we hear a lot about in terms of resilience is this concept of grit. And O'Connor had it before it was labeled as well. She never would deny that she faced challenges, but she never, ever let adversity define her in any way. Vulnerability and weakness are not the same thing. And she was willing to be vulnerable, but she was always strong.

The canonical stories about this locate her self-reliance in a childhood on the Arizona range that included branding calves, and firing rifles, and changing tires, and encountering life and death at an early age. And she often said, and Evan Thomas writes about in his book, how she drew upon that when she encountered the intransigence of the male legislators with whom she tangled in Arizona in her early political career or irascible colleagues on the court, like Harry Blackmun, who gave her a hard time. She knew how to stand up for herself. She knew when not to take things personally.

She never complained, but she wasn't afraid now and again to show emotion. And I think the most poignant section of First is the description of her reaction to her breast cancer diagnosis. She did indulge in some fear and some grief when she received that diagnosis, but only briefly. She quickly turned her attention to learning everything she could about the disease and to getting well. And she continues to inspire others who confront cancer just because of the way that she was in the face of it-- honest, practical, well-informed, and, ultimately, optimistic.

When she first joined the court, she had no experience as a federal judge and very little knowledge of Constitutional law. Nor did anyone really take her aside and inform her about the court's rules, and traditions, and practices. She wasn't given much advice about how to organize her chambers. At the first conference that she attended, which is the-- of course, as you know, the Justices' regular meeting to decide which cases to hear-- she had the relevant cert petitions filed in all the wrong order and some difficulty following along.

Later on, she was well known for her incisive questions from the bench. And she often liked to ask the first question at an argument. But in her first term, she sort of woodenly read questions off of index cards provided by her clerks. And she was very, very concerned about the scrutiny of her every phrase. So she arrived at the court ambitious, and intense, and determined, but also humble about everything that she had to learn. And at the end of that term, she told her husband John O'Connor that she didn't feel that she was on par with the great intellectual justices of the history of the court. But she understood what was going on around her, expressed herself clearly, and felt that she could hold her own. And indeed, she could, and she did. And that's how she found her way through every situation.

There are a lot of former law students of mine on the call. And so they know that when they ask for advice on new positions, or new transitions, or professional development, I have to tell them that there really isn't any magic formula. There's just Justice O'Connor's not so secret formula, which is a refrain, and honestly, not always what people want to hear. But one of her other mantras, had she had one, would have been, do the work.

Her earliest jobs were far from glamorous posts. When she was a state attorney general in Arizona, she worked at the state mental hospital and occupied a windowless office, dealing with the legal problems that arose in the state mental health system. At one point, she hung out a shingle for solo practice in what was effectively a strip mall. And yet, her professionalism demanded that she treat every single case as though it were the most important one in the world and do her best at it every single day.

And 30 years later, when she developed a close professional friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the court, Justice Ginsburg expressed some disappointment to Justice O'Connor about her first assignment from the Chief Justice, which was to write a very technical labor law opinion. And the response that Justice Ginsburg got from Justice O'Connor is a classic. And it was, Ruth, just do it. Now, you just go and do it. And that's pretty much the way that Justice O'Connor responded to everything.

I worry that these remarks start to suggest that she was some grim grinder. But all to the contrary-- if her biography is anything, it is a story of a life well lived and thoroughly enjoyed. She had a sense of humor. She had a sense of joy. And there is another-- perhaps the most useful mantra that I think Justice O'Connor brings to life, which is that other people matter. And this, actually, positive psychology in the academy has taught us, is the key to equilibrium, the relationships that people have with others. And I think Justice O'Connor's defining characteristics are decency and a desire to care for the people around her, to listen to them, to take an ongoing interest in their lives, to cook for them. She would cook for her clerks on the weekends when we came in to work and prepare her for arguments.

She wrote personal letters to each of her clerks at the end of every term. She sent notes to celebrate new babies or recognize professional accomplishments. She could remember conversations that had been left off a year before and pick up right with what she was last talking to you about. She had an extraordinary capacity to account for other people and to remember the things that were important to them.

And there are thousands and thousands of these notes, and bits of correspondence, and memories of conversations out there, every one of them treasured as I treasure mine. And one of the things I love most about Justice O'Connor is that a lot of powerful people can make others feel less important when they walk into a room. And Justice O'Connor elevated other people. Every room, every event, when she walked in she made the people around her feel more special and more important themselves. And she gave this feeling like a gift wherever she went. She would work a room, greet everyone, no matter how grueling the event, and give them a moment of her time.

So that's a little bit about her personal legacy. And I say a little bit less, because you can read about it in the essay, if you'd like, at a later point about her professional legacy. But I think the least understood aspect of it is that she was sort of the perfect first, in the sense that her pragmatism and her moderation made it possible for her to build consensus. And that has led most commentators to focus on the flexibility of her jurisprudence. Not a lot of people notice the incredible fortitude that it takes to be the moderate on the court and that it takes to craft a compromise in any situation.

There's a connection between the personal qualities that I've described and the position that she occupied on the court. It was not that she lacked conviction, or felt uncertain, or fell short of clarity. It was that she cared about outcomes. She cared about fairness. She was willing to weather crosscurrents and criticism from all sides. For example, both Justice Scalia, who was a savage critic of Roe versus Wade, and Justice Blackmun, who authored the opinion, attacked the accommodations that she made to uphold its core holding about reproductive rights. But she was willing to weather that.

She didn't care as much about what it sounded like when she announced an opinion from the bench as she did about what it would do in the world. And she was willing to patch together five votes on issues that she cared about, even in ways that didn't garner her terrific press.

She had a sort of personal humility about the pace of her jurisprudence, as well. This is true especially in the realm of affirmative action, I think, where she kind of felt her way through case by case and tried to be responsive to what she saw as public attitudes about that. And I think it's important to recognize that flexible and incremental jurisprudence is not small. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well, has been characterized as a moderate and a centrist. And her measured approach from even before she joined the court, from when she was an advocate, on gender equality is what ultimately produced significant shifts in the law over time. And she's best known for her dissents today, but Justice Ginsburg also had this idea that hearkened back to Benjamin Cardozo's observation that you do not take justice by storm, but rather woo it by slow advances.

And so Justice O'Connor's minimalist jurisprudence was quite consequential as well, especially in the abortion and affirmative action debates. And that's how she cast the deciding vote in 330 cases. And a lot of commentators started to recognize that after her retirement and thinking about her legacy. One of her detractors when she was on the bench was Jeffrey Rosen. He was quite scathing about her split the difference jurisprudence during her tenure. And he called her opinions often a ticket for one train ride only.

But he later published an essay right after her retirement called "Why I Miss Sandra Day O'Connor." And it was all about her pragmatism and the significance of it. And he wrote that, she had a knack for expressing the views of the moderate majority of Americans more precisely than either Congress or the president. And I think her sense of where these views come from and how to express them really hearkens back to her background. She understood how Congress works, because she came from the Arizona legislature. And she had this idea of American government not as a sort of Darwinian struggle for power, but as a Newtonian solar system where the forces were orbiting bodies that held each other in place through a continuing conversation.

And her intuitions about this come from a place that no justice can speak to now. This Supreme Court, for the first time in history, has no justices who have been elected to any legislative or executive position and no former cabinet members. When the court issued its 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, one of the nine justices had previous experience as a federal judge. And ever since Samuel Alito replaced Justice O'Connor in 2006, every justice has been a former federal judge. And I think with that shift in personnel, we've seen a lot of O'Connor's pragmatic legacy dismantled.

But I don't think that it is a legacy that is dead. And I think that drawing lessons from it teaches us something about next steps for American democracy and public life, as well. Because her favorite word was constructive. And what she believed in more than anything was people talking to each other and engaging with each other. And this is what I mean about the legacy that she left about norms on the court, and about professionalism, and about conversation. Her point of entry into every relationship was relentless civility, daily, concrete expressions of her commitment to a civic conversation.

Justice Thomas pronounced Justice O'Connor, the glue that brought him into conversation with his colleagues after his bruising confirmation battle. She insisted that the justices eat lunch together and initiated a tradition that continues to this day. And this is the O'Connor Constitution, what I think is now being recognized as what she means to American democracy and hopefully portends for it.

In her October 2018 farewell letter to the public, to her family, to her clerks, she called upon all citizens to participate actively in their communities and to solve problems. She would say that our democracy is not something that's passed down in a gene pool, but that it has to be taught from one generation to the other. And she established after her retirement a nationwide civics education program that half of all middle schoolers in the country now learn from. More than five million a year are learning about the structure of government from iCivics.

And this is, I think, finally what I think about when I think about her and the nature of our discourse. This is one of my favorite recent photos of her. Because she was such a patriot at heart. And she loves America so much. And she understood that it's always been an angry nation. It was born of revolution. It is steeped in combat, on battlefields, and in newspapers, and at ballot boxes. But it is also, essentially, American to be, as she would say, constructive-- to have discourse, to have dialogue, to engage in conversation.

And the thing that she would worry the most about is the political tribalism of today and the way in which media environments are hermetically sealed off from each other. But she also understood, wrote about, and expected that it was a long game, that this is an ongoing conversation and a constant balance between the branches and between citizens and their government. And she would never, ever give up on American democracy. Evan Thomas has also written biographies of Nixon, Eisenhower, Kennedy, John Paul Jones, a lot of others. And one of the things that he told us in talking to us about the book is that his point of entry into a biography is always to find the flaw in a person. And after talking to hundreds of people about Justice O'Connor this is what he said-- no flaw. He couldn't find one.

And I think these are some of the reasons why she earned such wide acclaim, because she was a very, very ordinary person, but exceedingly rare at the same time. She was confident, but knew how to be humble as well. She had a piercing intellect, but a generous heart. She spoke to us very bluntly, but she had diplomatic instincts in entering into relationships with people. She was traditional to the core, but also the boldest of trailblazers. And she was a clear-eyed pragmatist about the way that our government works, but an idealistic patriot with a cherished idea of what it means to be a citizen.

And I'll leave it there. And I'll invite you to read more if you want in Evan Thomas's amazing book or in a very short review that I did of his book. And I welcome your questions about Justice O'Connor, who, as you can tell, is one of my favorite topics.

CONNER COOK: Thank you, Professor Griffin. That was wonderful. We're going to use the raised hands feature today if you'd like to ask a question. So to use that feature, you'll want to scroll down to the bottom of your screen. And you can click on the Participants button. And you'll see the opportunity to raise or lower your hand. We'll also put these instructions in the chat on the right hand side of your screen.

LISA GRIFFIN: Hi, Michael. Go ahead.

CONNER COOK: We have a question for Michael.

AUDIENCE: Professor Griffin, why do you think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been the subject of so many memes, and yet, nothing caught on about Sandra Day O'Connor.

LISA GRIFFIN: So I don't know that nothing has caught on about her. I think it's partly a chronological issue because, of course, we're all quite focused on RBG now. And she's still on the court. But I also think that it has something to do with meme culture and the fierce, fashionable way in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg sort of enters the world. She lends herself to icons.

Justice O'Connor is a bit anachronistic in her demeanor, I think. And partly for that reason it's sort of harder to find the contemporary culture that resonates with her. She didn't follow contemporary culture all that closely, although there are things that she really likes about it. And I think that a lot of it just has to do with timing and with personality as well-- perceived personality, really. They're surprisingly similar in their demeanor. But it's an image issue.

I could make lots of O'Connor memes if I were into making memes. [LAUGHS] I would have many. Hey, Sam. Go ahead. AUDIENCE: Hey there. I wondered if you could speak to maybe some of the reasons for the shift that you describe on the court between Brown and currently, and what you think would have to happen before we can see another consensus-driven Sandra Day O'Connor type figure emerge on the court.

LISA GRIFFIN: Yeah, so there's been a lot written about this. A long time ago, Akhil Amar sort of wrote an essay about the end of legislators on the court. And it clearly makes a huge difference, just in terms of the way that they interpret what legislative intent is or what is possible in the statutory realm, the way that they interpret the deployment of executive power. It's very significant not to have-- Earl Warren was a governor. And there have always been justices who were cabinet members who were elected to various offices, who served on the state courts.

And Justice O'Connor was the last. And yes, I think it makes a really significant difference in terms of a clear understanding of-- so what Justice O'Connor used to say, for example, when she felt that her colleagues were being naive about how Congress might react to some sort of deflection of responsibility to them or some kicking of the can over to the legislature is that what she understood from her days in the Arizona legislature-- which, in her day, was very rough and tumble-- was that you can't really rely on the state legislatures to do certain things or approach things in a certain way.

She was very realistic about sort of what they were up to, and what they could be counted on to do or not do, and how that power might be balanced between the different branches. And I think that it's become much more reflexive for the judges who have all only been judges, or academics, or advocates, but not really in the other branches of government, to have unverified ideas about what exactly the executive or the legislature is up to.

And the reason for that is obvious. I mean, the confirmation proceedings are so contentious that having taken positions, having run in elections, having written widely, these are not things that one can survive anymore in a confirmation proceeding. So the careful and judicious approach that longtime federal judges have taken is sort of the portfolio that you want to enter into a confirmation proceeding with. And so we've certainly hamstrung the deliberative capacity of our own court system by the politicization of the confirmation process and the extremes to which Congress has gone with that.

I think Jessica raised her hand. I'm not sure who raised their hand first, though. Let me see if I can pull it up.

AUDIENCE: Hi. So you said that she was blunt with you. And when you use the word blunt, I think of Justice Scalia as blunt and almost harsh. So when you apply the word blunt to her, I guess I'm thinking Scalia. But everything else that you say about her doesn't seem to be the case. So can you talk about that some more?

LISA GRIFFIN: Yeah, I mean, that's what I think is so magical about her, is that she had this duality about her, where she was this incredible trailblazer, the first woman to lead a-- she was the majority leader of the Arizona senate, the first in that position, and the first on the court. And so many firsts. And yet, also a very traditional person at heart.

So she could be a trailblazer and traditional at the same time. And she could be compassionate and diplomatic while also being incredibly plainspoken and direct. So she was nothing if not direct. She wasted no time, ever, and was incredibly efficient. And so she would tell us what she needed us to do, whether we had done it correctly, and what needed to be changed without sugar coating anything. And she was always quite direct with her colleagues as well. No ball hiding or game playing, ever, at any point.

But she sort of teaches that you can be plainspoken, and sincere, and authentic, while at the same time being kind. And that it's possible to combine those things. So that's one of the things that I loved about her.

She also didn't care that much about-- so Scalia was direct but acerbic, which is a different thing. And he also loved a turn of phrase. So he was very direct in his opinion. She did not do that. She never attacked colleagues in any drafts or published opinions.

The only really famous phrase that she ever turned in an opinion was actually about this issue I was just talking about, which is the balance of powers. It's in Hamdi, when she says that the declaration of war is not a blank check for the executive. And I'm not quoting it exactly right, but that's the line. And it's the one that she always gets quoted as-- the phrase that she's known for turning.

And that is really the only famous phrase in all of her opinions. Because she wasn't about coining phrases and trying to-- she was sort of an anti-stylist in the way that she wrote and her opinions.

CONNER COOK: It looks like Jennifer has a question as well.

AUDIENCE: Professor Griffin, you mentioned that you still have hope that someone will rise onto the court with the ability to kind of see things from the middle in a way that we haven't really seen in recent years. And I was wondering if you could speak to how you would see that manifest in future judicial nominees, or why you believe that hope still exists.

LISA GRIFFIN: Well, partly because I believe in the judiciary. And I still do. I mean, obviously, the composition of the judiciary has shifted. But especially the federal judiciary, the American federal judiciary, is resilient, and in some respects, uniquely nonpartisan institution, in part because of the way that Article 3 works.

Even now in some really contentious cases that we're seeing work their way up through the trial courts, through the D.C. Circuit, up to the Supreme Court-- yes, of course, there is this kind of undercurrent of partisanship to a lot of it. But there's also this adherence to a sort of noble idea of the rule of law. And that's what life tenure is supposed to be about, giving judges the freedom and the confidence to make those hard rulings, to know that maybe there's going to be some vocal criticism of those rulings, but that they're going to carry on. I think we've seen that over the last few years pretty consistently. The courts have been, I think, the one institution that, so far, despite its changing composition, has been solid. And I feel like things could get to the point where the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is the most important issue in front of us and the thing that everyone is waiting to see whether or not it will hold up. And this is where I think this sort of quiet, under-celebrated legacy that Justice O'Connor has.

I mean, when she arrived to the court they didn't spend time with each other across divides. They didn't break bread together. They mostly exchanged written memos only. There just wasn't a lot of discourse. And of course, the chambers are still quite separate. And they mostly exchange paper, partly to maintain a record and partly because they're each operating sort of their own little office or firm up at the court. But they also engage socially. They have real relationships with each other.

Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia were famously close. There are a lot of-- her closest friend on the court was Justice Breyer, I think. There are a lot of relationships like that. And I think it's possible in institutions as solid as the federal judiciary and as sort of-- how could I put this-- cohesive as the Supreme Court can be. There's hope. I think there's hope. Because we know that resolution comes only from conversation. The constructive thing that has to happen for American democracy to be healthy requires engagement.

One of the things I love about courts is that people have to sometimes sit in the same room as their adversaries and the people with whom they disagree. It's kind of the magic of our court system, that you have to joint issue. You can't just post on social media. You have to show up, and face judges, and say what you want, and acknowledge true facts about the world. And I think from the trial courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, that's the most hopeful institution that we have in our public life right now.

CONNER COOK: We've still got time for a couple more questions if anyone has questions.

LISA GRIFFIN: Sarah Boyce, if you're on-- I saw that you might be. I'd love to hear from you about whether any of this resonates with you. I think there's one other O'Connor clerk in the group.

AUDIENCE: I'm here. Can you hear me?

LISA GRIFFIN: Hey, Sarah. I can.

AUDIENCE: Yes. I've been wrangling a two-year-old getting lunch. So I popped in and out. But so I clerked on the court when Justice O'Connor was retired, for those who don't know. So most of my ability to get to know her was either over the phone or through the anecdotes told by the justices on the court who had been there when she was there.

And I was the fortunate recipient of so much warmth just because of all of the affection that the justices there had felt towards my boss. They just unanimously echoed the gentility and civility that you were discussing. They, of course, shared anecdotes about her insisting on lunch that you mentioned. But she was just notoriously known as a welcoming spirit. And I was the beneficiary of the goodwill that she generated.

And the other way that I got to know her was through her friends in her workout class. I don't know if you mentioned that. I didn't hear you mention that. But she had a workout class. And so twice a week they would meet in the gym at the top of the Supreme Court. And her old friends were able to get an exception and come into the building up to the gym.

And so I got to know a lot of those people who, again, just emphasized the warmth that she radiated. And these were women from all walks of life in Washington, many of whom were in their 70s and 80s by that point in time. But they echoed the theme that you mentioned in terms of her making everyone feel welcome, making everybody feel like they matter. And they shared so many wonderful stories with me about her ability to elevate all those around her, regardless of occupation, or standing, or anything like that.

So she's a treasure. And thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about her.

LISA GRIFFIN: Thanks, Sarah. So I want to mention one other thing that she said all the time. Because there are some recent graduates in the group. And that is that she really believes that one person can change things. And she's a lived example of that. She's one person-- and again, I think it's important to emphasize, a relatively ordinary person in many respects, who had some extraordinary opportunities and met them with this combination of personal characteristics and prodigious energy that I don't think any of us can really muster or mimic. But at least it's a lesson that we can draw from her example, which is that individual steps, small things, can lead to big ones.

And she said it all the time, that everyone can make things a little bit better in their own fields and in their own way. And she was striving for that every day. Never bitter, only looking forward, always thinking about what she could do that would help others, and always focused on the work that was in front of her, just intensely focused, and mindful, and generous. And again, hard things to copy, especially when there are challenges. But she would absolutely never, ever give up on anything. And she most certainly would not give up on next steps for our civic life, next steps for a recovery for our country that has some challenges, of course, right now.

And she believed very, very strongly in every single person having the capacity to make a difference. That's why she so treasured the opportunity to reach out to middle schoolers and chose that as the way to end her career. She thought engaging them in citizenship was planting a seed, and that each and every one of them then had the capacity to make things a little bit better.

And it so speaks to the core of what she was all about, that without ever having really sent a single email of her own, she developed a computer game, or had assistants help her develop a computer game that she knew could reach millions and millions and millions of kids, so that they could understand what she learned, that she liked to say at Stanford, about American democracy, a system that she thought was unique in the world, that she sought to export, and that she believed made space for everyone to do something helpful for others. And that's a lesson that I think about when I need to be reminded of the right direction to look in.

CONNER COOK: We've got time for probably one more question if there are any final thoughts from the group. All right. Well, Professor Griffin, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. Loved hearing about Justice O'Connor. This was a really wonderful opportunity. And thank you to everyone that participated today. We appreciate you joining us.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our office. Other than that, have a great afternoon.

LISA GRIFFIN: Thank you all for coming. And feel free to reach out to me individually. And I'm happy to share the essay as well, for those of you who'd like to read it. Thank you.