Sally Katzen
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PERSPECTIVES ON MODERN REGULATORY GOVERNANCE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT RETHINKING REGULATION @ KENAN INSTITUTE FOR ETHICS SALLY KATZEN Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, 1993-1998 Interviewed by Edward Balleisen and Jonathan Wiener October – November, 2012 Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Durham, NC Katzen - 2 Interview I: October 24, 20121 [start of audio track 1] Edward Balleisen: This is an oral history of Sally Katzen, conducted by Edward Balleisen, Associate Professor of History at Duke University, and... Jonathan Wiener: I'm Jonathan Wiener, professor at Duke University in the Law School, School of the Environment, and School of Public Policy. Balleisen: We're here at the Kenan Institute of Ethics on Wednesday, October 24th, 2012. We're mostly going to be discussing Sally's career as a lawyer, legal scholar, government official and policy consultant. We're going to be focusing particularly on Sally's engagement with the process and politics of regulation. Sally, good morning. Sally Katzen: Good morning! Balleisen: We'd like to begin with your formative years and educational experiences, and maybe hear a little bit about how those experiences led you into law as a career. Katzen: Probably the earliest seeds would be found when I was in college. I went to Smith College expecting to major in math -- in part because I don't take SAT...exams very well, and I had done passably well in math and terribly in English at the time. I thought ..."if you can't fix it, flaunt it. I would be a math major." But, Smith refused to give me credit for a year of calculus that I had in high school, and so I had to take that course again, and I was, therefore, casting about for something of interest because Calculus wasn't, the second time around, any more interesting than it was the first time. I took a course … called Government 11 in the Political Science department, and first semester was Political Theory and the second semester was Comparative Government. I had a section teacher who I thought was terrific, a guy named Bruce Carroll, and I found out that he was teaching something called Constitutional Law first semester of the next year and I signed up for it, totally oblivious to its being a level three course, and I was only a sophomore then. Totally oblivious to what it might entail. I liked him and I thought I would just take another course from him. So, I found myself in con law, the structural side, with mostly seniors, mostly honor students and after the first day of slight tremors, I loved it! We were reading all these cases and I thought this was terrific and much more interesting than anything else that I had encountered. Second semester was a professor named Leo Weinstein who was working on the Bill of Rights, First Amendment style, and he was so inspirational and made such a difference in my life. I chose him to advise me on my thesis. Being my thesis advisor, I took every course he offered 1 Note – Sally Katzen has reviewed the transcript of the interviews and furnished minor edits to clarify or improve flow for the reader. These revisions occur within brackets. Katzen - 3 and we remained friends until his death. Again, I just found the reading of the cases, the analysis of the justices’ thinking, the probing, to be fascinating. Smith had a program called -- I don't actually remember the name of it, but you spent the summer in Washington as an intern after your third year. I signed up. I … ended up at the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam J. Ervin of the great state of North Carolina and staff that mostly consisted of North Carolinian lawyers. Bill Creech was the staff director. Robinson Everett, who was a very famous North Carolinian, was one of the staffers. I think they were kind of curious, I guess, or whatever, with this little girl, though I'm not little, 6 foot, tall, but this young lady from Smith who had taken a couple of classes in con law and thought that she would be interested in this subject matter. They were more indulgent and humoring me than anything else, but very encouraging. That was the summer of 1963. That was the summer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was a marshal in the march and got to stand at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial when Martin Luther King gave his phenomenal speech. The earlier part of the summer was when President Kennedy sent what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 up to the Hill [and] Bobby Kennedy as the attorney general, sat at the witness table, and I was the staffer. Each of the southern senators -- the judiciary committee was staffed with southern senators -- was going to have “extended remarks,” the polite term for it, and keep Bobby Kennedy sitting there for day after day after day. Senator Ervin suggested something on the order of 10 to 20 hours of a statement. He did not want to read the recipe for bean soup, which was frequently invoked when you wanted to filibuster. He wanted something on states rights, and he particularly wanted to show that North Carolina took its states rights seriously and was very advanced in the civil rights movement. I'm sitting there writing away this long statement, even though I was for civil rights. As I said, I was a participant in the march in Washington -- a marshal. It was phenomenal to see all of this play out. Well, this was hardly how a bill becomes a law, because it was the formative stages. There was one disastrous moment, when I was pouring water for the senators and I managed to pour water down the back of a junior senator from Massachusetts, named Ted Kennedy. His little "Eek!" caused everyone to take a look...Aside from that momentary blip, it was relatively informative, interesting. I thought then, that I really should seriously consider law school. I had thought that maybe I'd be a paralegal -- we didn't really have paralegals then, but I'd do something. My professors, again, Leo Weinstein and Bruce Carroll, said you've got to go on to school. I was terrified -- that's an overstatement -- I was very nervous about going for a Ph.D. because that was endless. It's only completed when you finish your thesis -- and that could be years. Law School had the attraction of only being three years, at the end of which time you had a degree, or you didn't. Katzen - 4 Leo Weinstein gave me the very practical advice that you could go for just one year. If you do really well, stay, and if you don't, go do something else, but you will have had that experience of critical analysis and legal thinking. So, with his encouragement, I took it very seriously. Then on November 22nd, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. It was my 21st birthday, and I remember very little about that weekend, other than my parents had sent a huge sheet cake for 50 people to my dorm. To be greeted with that when you've just heard the President had died was a shocker. That weekend, I think, was when I applied to law school. There are some interesting stories along the way, but I'll talk about getting into Michigan. Balleisen: What was your experience like at Michigan? How many women were in the class with you? Katzen: There were 12 to start, out of a class of 400 -- 2.5 percent, which was what Michigan was striving for. They had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get 2.5. I'd mentioned I didn't do SAT tests very well. I don't do IBM tests very well. You give me a No. 2 pencil and tell me to fill in some blanks, all the answers are wrong. I had literally flunked the law boards. Back up for just a second, if I may. I really wanted to go to Yale. I mean, I was at Smith College. I couldn't get into Harvard, but I wanted to get into Yale. Leo Weinstein, every year, got to pick in effect the Smithy whom he would recommend to go to Yale Law School. It was me! I had applied, I had taken the Law Boards, and I had an interview scheduled for a Monday morning. On the preceding Saturday, I got a postcard -- it was so embarrassing, a postcard in my mailbox, it's [Yale] rejecting me. I was crushed, and I called Bruce Carroll, who I had mentioned earlier, and said "I've just been rejected from Yale." And he said, "Are you 21?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Do you drink Scotch?" I said, "Never." He said, "You're about to learn." Katzen: He picked me up and we went down to Rahars, which is a bar in Northampton, and he started drinking scotch and I started sipping it. He told me this was not the end of my life, and I had other opportunities. Then he said, "Wait a second. Did they cancel the interview, or just reject you?" and I looked "They just rejected me." He said, "I'm driving you to your interview, Monday morning." We drove down Monday morning. I went in to see Dean Tate, who was quite a formidable Dean of Admissions. He had been in World War II and lost the greater portion of his arm.