Sandra Day O'Connor
Thank you, Tom. And what a pleasure it is to be back here at Chautaqua. This such a special place, tucked under Lake Erie and along our border with Canada. The United States has only two next-door neighbors, Canada, and Mexico. I lived most of my life closer to the Mexican side of our border. I was born in El Paso, Texas and grew up on a ranch. And it was mostly in Arizona, and partly in New Mexico. And it's a far cry from the shores of Lake Erie and Lake Chautaqua to that dry, semi-arid desert where I spent my early years.

When I first moved from Arizona to Washington, DC, John and I lived in an apartment in the Watergate that was kindly secured for us by my colleague Justice Lewis Powell as a temporary residence. We could look out our window, a view of a splendid statue of President Benito Juarez of Mexico, the former president. It's inscribed with his words, "Respect for the rights of others is peace." President Juarez has a place in Mexico's pantheon of heroes, just as President Abraham Lincoln has in ours.

I thought of these two men as I reviewed one of the themes you've been considering this week, that human progress and human violence have been linked historical forces. In the 1860s, both these leaders, Juarez and Lincoln, led their countries out of violence and deadly conflict. Mexico faced a threat from outside in the form of the French intervention led by Napoleon [III]. The United States, faced a threat from within. Now, having led their young Republics out of war, Juarez and Lincoln understood what their societies needed for progress: respect for the rights of others. And each day while we lived at Watergate, I rode past that statue of Benito Juarez on my way to the Supreme Court. His elegant words served to remind me of the high value that free people everywhere must place on individual rights and on opportunities and responsibilities.

When I spoke here five years ago, I suggested that in the 20th century, protecting individual liberties had moved to the heart of judicial decision-making. Today, I want to reflect on how we got there. How did old and new promises to respect the rights of others, constitutional promises if you will, come to life. More specifically, I want to speak about how this nation and the court on which I serve, transformed the law to bolster racial equality, the rights of women, and free speech.

[Video jumps ...]

In that very same year, Belva Lockwood, a woman who had managed to gain admission to the national law school only by dealing directly with then-President Ulysses S. Grant applied to practice law before the United States Board of Claims. She was rejected with a simple announcement: "Mrs. Lockwood, you are a woman." Only 40 years earlier, American colleges had finally allowed women to enroll. Oberlin college was the first to break with tradition and admit female students. But for the first years they were at the college, female students were not allowed to speak in class.

Government control over speech was, of course, familiar for those times. In 1874, it was still possible to be prosecuted in this country for blasphemy or for political dissent. At the turn of the century, a newspaper editor was held in contempt of court for daring to publish articles and a cartoon accusing a Colorado judge of corruption. In a case called Patterson v. Colorado, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of that newspaper editor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then on the Court, explained that our nation's free speech guarantees prevented prior restraints on publications, but not the subsequent punishment of such as maybe being contrary to the public welfare. Justice Holmes thought that any comments that obstruct the administration of justice could be punished. And it just did not matter whether the editor's criticism of the judge was false or true. Belva Lockwood and that hapless editor, not to mention Jim Crow, seem far away from us today. Triumphs over injustices can seem inevitable, if you know how the story ends. But our nation--

[...]

... in individual rights was hardly inevitable. It is the product of intermediary steps, of efforts from people who sometimes did not dare to expect victory. To me, they embodied the wisdom of an old Talmudic saying: "It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from pursuing it."

Now, this past May, this past month of May marked the 50th anniversary of what some people call the most important decision of the modern Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, the court held that the segregationist doctrine of "separate but equal" was unconstitutional as applied for public school children. The court struck down the legal fiction that children of different races received the equal protection Law, even though they were forced to attend separate schools. That opinion would have been impossible had it not been for a number of crucial decisions that paved the way, stones paving the road to equality, you might say. The first step towards Brown actually came at the end of the 19th century. Just as the Court first endorsed the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In Louisiana, white and black training passengers were separated by law, but Mr. Plessy defied that law by refusing to move from a white rail car to a colored rail car. He claimed that Louisiana's law violated his rights under the 13th and 14th amendments.

In an opinion full of sentiments that now see as terrible and foreign as silencing a woman in class, or jailing a journalist for his political criticism, the Plessy Court held that laws requiring the separation of the races do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and were normally within the power of the state to enact. As examples, the Court offered state laws segregating schools and forbidding interracial marriage. It thought that such laws were quite permissible under the Constitution. In fact, the Court thought that the legal separation of the races was not a problem at all, because it had nothing to do with political or legal equality. If any such law created a badge of inferiority for African-Americans, it was, and I quote, "Solely because the colored race chose to put that construction upon it." Now the sole dissent in Plessy came from Justice John Marshall Harlan. Although it was only one of many dissents he would write over the years, including one in the Colorado newspaper case I just described, it is the most famous. And rightly so. Justice Harlan first said what everyone knew. The Louisiana law was not really meant to exclude white people from black railroad cars. It was only meant to exclude black people from white railroad cars. That meant that the law obstructed the civil rights of blacks and whites to travel together at will.

Once he established that, Justice Harlan found the case easy to decide. He said this: "In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or his color when his civil rights, as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land, are involved." Justice Harlan predicted that in time, that case of Plessy v. Ferguson would turn out to be as pernicious as the old Dred Scott case. And of course, he was right. By explaining the legal arguments that would eventually win the day, Justice Harlan laid the first stone in the bridge that all of us in this nation would eventually cross--the bridge from a nation plagued by the inequity of Jim Crow laws and segregated schools to the one in which we now live.

Before Brown, Justice Harlan's immortal words stood as a beacon of hope to my late colleague, Thurgood Marshall, and the countless of others who struggled tirelessly for racial equality under the law. And indeed, the Supreme Court eventually began to chip away at the Plessy case, first in the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer. A unanimous support struck down enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to black people. Chief Justice Vinson in that Shelley case wrote that the constitution confers upon no individual the right to demand action by the state which results in the denial of equal protection to other individuals. Like Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy, the Shelley opinion was a crucial symbolic victory. It boosted the morale of the civil rights movement, and it provided the motivation for further legal challenges.

Two years later, again, Chief Justice Vinson issued two opinions for the Court that represented the final gasp of the Plessy era. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents considered the case of six African-American students who had been admitted to a formerly all-white institution, but were forced to sit separately from white students in classrooms, libraries and cafeterias. Chief Justice Vinson wrote that setting African-American students apart in that way handicapped their pursuit of an effective graduate education.

In the case of Sweatt v. Painter, meanwhile, the University of Texas claimed that it gave an African-American man an equal education by creating a new law school for him in a Houston basement as a counterpart to its all-white law school in Austin, Texas. Now, cutting through the rhetoric of segregation, Chief Justice Vinson focused on the practical differences between the two schools, finding it difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close. To him, Heman Sweatt was entitled to the rich traditions and prestige of the Austin campus, not the false equality of the Houston basement.

While neither the Sweatt case nor the McLaurin case directly addressed the validity of the "separate but equal" regime of Plessy, these opinions all but completed the bridge that Justice Harlan had begun to build in his dissent in Plessy. Immediately after these two more recent cases, Thurgood Marshall wrote to his NAACP supporters that the Sweatt and McLaurin cases have gutted Plessy and that the end was in sight. Indeed, Justice Vinson only narrowly missed the opportunity to be part of the momentous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He was still Chief Justice when oral arguments were first heard in the consolidated Brown cases. And he ordered reargument in the cases in hopes of getting a unanimous Court. But he suffered a heart attack before that could occur.

A new Chief Justice, Chief Justice Earl Warren, picked up where Chief Justice Vinson left him. Justice Harlan also passed away before he could see his prophetic words become law. But if he had not taken up his pen against injustice, our nation might have taken a much slower path to equality. And while it surprised me to discover that Chief Justice Vinson died a poor man, he left behind a gift worth more than any vote. He helped make reality the Constitution's commitment to equal protection under the law.

Women, of course, invoked the same Constitution in their own search for freedom and opportunity. Like their brothers and sisters who fought for racial equality, they did it step by patient step. Let's go back to Belva Lockwood, who was told that lawyers were, by definition, men. Mrs. Lockwood did not stop at that defeat. She went on to become the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States. Indeed, we're going to have a little celebration about this in the Library of Congress, by the way, when I return to work. This redoubtable woman even ran for President of the United States. She garnered 4,149 votes without, of course, the benefit of any women voting in the election.

Across the country, meanwhile, in 1869, Myra Bradwell in Chicago, who had studied law under her husband, applied to the Illinois Bar and was refused admission. The Illinois Supreme Court reasoned that as a married woman, her contracts were not binding. And contracts were the essence of an attorney-client relationship. That court also proclaimed that God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws. The Supreme Court of the United States, I blush to admit, agreed with the Illinois court. Justice Bradley, who concurred in the Supreme Court's opinion, cited the natural differences between men and women as the reason why Myra Bradwell could not be admitted. He wrote, "Man is and should be woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life."

Now, I myself after graduating at the top of my class at Stanford Law School in 1952, failed to obtain an offer of employment in any law firm to which I applied other than a possible job, depending on how I typed, as a secretary. Yet I have since had the privilege of serving as a state senator, state judge and a Supreme Court justice. Indeed, the progress that women have made across America, in my own lifetime, has been nothing less than astounding. That progress has been reflected, as most social change eventually is, in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. And I have to say that jurisprudence at the Supreme Court is seldom the first start for making these major social changes. Those changes come from within the country itself, and they're only later reflected in the jurisprudence of the Court.

But the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 had little immediate effect on the legal status or rights of women. Its strictures were limited initially, as you know, to just the federal government. The states were free to continue as before in fashioning the political and legal rights of their citizens. State legislation affecting women was drawn primarily from British common law, which gave women few property or contractual rights. Only in the case of unmarried women were the laws in this country somewhat more generous than in England, at least insofar as property ownership was concerned. It was not until after the Civil War and the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to our Constitution, that there were national guarantees for certain individual liberties, which the states could not abridge.

But even these additions to our Constitution did not easily translate in the concepts that benefited women as a group until the last half of the 20th century. Until that time, despite the efforts of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, society as a whole, including the Supreme Court, generally accepted the separate and unequal status of women. Now, the 14th amendment prohibits states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws. There's little evidence to suggest that at the time of its adoption in 1868, this amendment was seen as a vehicle of women's equality under the law. In fact, the 14th amendment, for the first time, introduced sex-specific language into our Constitution. Section two of the 14th Amendment, which dealt with legislative representation and voting, said that "If the right to vote were denied to any of the male inhabitants of the space, age 21 or over, then proportional representation in that state would be reduced accordingly." For the first half 20th century, the Court continue to defer to legislative judgments regarding differences between the sexes, just as it had done in rejecting Myra Bradwell's claim.

In 1948, a woman named Valentine Guesser and three other women challenged the constitutionality of the Michigan statute forbidding a woman from being a bartender unless she was the wife or daughter of the male owner of the bar. Now, the Supreme Court, in an opinion offered by Justice Felix Frankfurter, rejected the claim that the statute violated the equal protection clause, saying that despite the vast change in the social and legal position of women, the state could unquestionably forbid all women from working as bartenders.

Even as late as 1961, 20 years before I went on the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Florida's practice of restricting jury service to men unless women registered separately. The Court said despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved to men, woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life. The Supreme Court finally began to look more closely at legislation providing dissimilar treatment for similarly situated women and men in the early 1970s, 10 years before I joined the Court.

The first case in which the Court found a state law discriminating against women to be unconstitutional was Reed v. Reed and was offered by Chief Justice Warren Burger. In Reed, the court struck down an Idaho law which gave men an automatic preference in appointments as administrators of probate estates. Reed signaled a dramatic change, and in subsequent cases the Court made clear that it would no longer swallow unquestioningly the idea that women are different from men. In 1972, striking down federal statute which made it easier for men to claim their wives as dependents than it was for women to claim their husbands as dependents, Justice William Brenner wrote this: "There can be no doubt that our nation has had a long, unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of romantic paternalism, which in practical effect put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage."

Two years later, the Supreme Court struck down a Utah statute providing that child support was required for girls only until their legal majority at 18, while child support for boys was required until they reached majority at age 21. The statement justified the difference by arguing that women matured faster, married earlier, and tended not to require continuing support through higher education, while men usually did require this additional support. And the Supreme Court took a hard look at these justifications, concluding that, "A child, male or female, is still a child. No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas. Co-education is a fact, not a rarity. The presence of women in business and the professions, in government, and indeed in all walks of life where education is a desirable, if not always a necessary, antecedent is apparent, and a proper subject of judicial notice," said the opinion. In 1976 the Court made its more careful standard of review explicit, ruling that sex-based classifications would be upheld only if they serve important governmental objectives and were substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.

And through the next two decades, the Court invalidated, on equal protection grounds, a broad range of statutes that discriminated against women, sometimes by favoring them in condescending ways. For example a Social Security Act provision allowing widows but not widowers to collect survivor's benefits. A state law permitting the sale of beer to women at 18 but not to men until 21. A state law requiring men but not women to pay alimony after divorce. And a social security provision allowing benefits for families with dependent children only when the father was unemployed, not when the mother was unemployed. The volume of cases in the Supreme Court dealing with sex discrimination declined somewhat in the 1980s. With the constitutional framework in place, several of the more recent cases brought before the Supreme Court have involved interpretation of civil rights statues rather than of the Constitution. In all these cases, though, constitutional and statutory, the Court has finally looked with a jaundiced eye at the loose-fitting generalizations, myths and archaic stereotypes that previously kept women at home.

[...]

...against government restrictions. It still doesn't. Consider pornography, by way of an example.

The early 20th century was a dark time for free speech. In 1904, the Supreme Court decided Turner v. Williams, its first free speech case of the century. The Court unanimously rejected the appeal of an Englishman named John Turner, who had been denied admission to the United States because of his anarchist sympathies. In rejecting his claim for admission, the Court said, "The tendency of his views were so dangerous to the public weal that aliens who hold and advocate them would be undesirable additions to our population." The same thing sealed the fate of the Colorado newspaper editor I mentioned earlier.

Soon after, in 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. And true to our country's mood, Congress passed the Espionage Act. This law criminalized "uttering, printing, writing or publishing any disloyal profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or using language that would bring the country into scorn or disrepute." More than 2,000 prosecutions took place under this law, even for criticizing the Red Cross and the YMCA. One citizen was convicted for writing a personal letter that said, "I am for the people and the government is for profiteers."

I'm sorry to report that things did not improve for political dissenters when the Supreme Court became involved. The Court upheld a conviction of the General Secretary of the Socialist Party for the crime of disseminating an anti-graft leaflet, in violation of the Espionage Act. In now famous words, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the Court: "The most stringent protections of free speech will not protect a man in falsely shouting 'Fire' in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

A week later, the Court again, in an opinion written by Holmes, sustained two more Espionage Act convictions. In one of these cases, Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving an anti-graft speech. Debs' crime was to say to potential draftees, "You have your lives to lose. You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder." I cannot resist adding one detail to that story. Apparently he learned a lesson from Belva Lockwood. That is, when the law is against you, run for President. In 1920, while he was still in prison, Debs ran for president. He received almost a million votes.

Remarkably, it was Justice Holmes himself who led the Court in reconsidering these decisions and an understanding of the intrinsic value of free expression. Interestingly, he might have been influenced by Judge Learned Hand from New York, the great libertarian jurist, with whom Holmes corresponded in earnest about free speech after they met on a train trip in 1918. In Abrams v. the United States, a case that like Plessy v. Ferguson is remembered for its dissent as much as for its holding, Justice Holmes disagreed with the majority's decision to uphold another conviction for distributing anti-war leaflets. These leaflets asserted that the war was being fought to benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary workers. And this time, in dissent...

[...]

...when men realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct, that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas. That the best test of proof is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." Justice Holmes' insight about the marketplace of ideas...

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...and the Court was ready to proclaim his dissent as part of our national tradition. So in 1943, the Court ruled that the Barnett children of West Virginia, children who were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, could not be compelled to pledge loyalty to the United States by saluting the flag or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. According to Justice Jackson, a near neighbor of Chautaqua from Jamestown, "Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom." With obvious reference to the totalitarian regimes we were then fighting, Jackson remarked that, "Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating the dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."

Dissent, by definition, means disagreement. And we hear a lot that we don't want to hear. You've probably heard some this summer at Chautauqua. But understanding that free speech is an indispensable part of democracy is our consolation when the law protects even the rights of repugnant speakers. It explains, for example, the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. By that time, the Court had already held the First Amendment applies to the states, too. And it held that Ohio could not imprison a Ku Klux Klan member for giving a racist speech at a Klan rally. Making Justice Holmes' dissents into the law, the Court dispensed with the "clear and present danger" test, explaining it was too restrictive on First Amendment rights.

I think the power of the idea inherent in decisions like this, that democracy needs free speech, cannot be underestimated. After all, we know there are so many places in this world where people think that societies cannot survive if citizens really criticize those in power, or even freely criticize each other.

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...free speech, operating to our mutual benefit, the major judicial trends of the 20th century are, of course, interconnected. And the expansion of First Amendment rights accompanied the fight for racial equality. What has been described as the most important Supreme Court decision about free speech was also an important step for civil rights. The case that became New York Times v. Sullivan began in an ordinary way. An organization called The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South wanted to take out a full-page editorial announcement in the New York Times. A month earlier, four black students, it said in the announcement, had been refused service at the Woolworth's counter in the South and staged a sit-in. Dr. King, their supporter, was now in jail.

The advertisement called heed to their rising voices. It sought to raise money for Dr. King and others who struggled in the South. It described some recent incidents of racism, including a story of how after some college students sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee" on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol, they and their fellow students were expelled, and the school padlocked the dining hall in an attempt to starve them into submission. The problem was, that story wasn't true. It turned out to be false. Now, Mr. Sullivan, a Montgomery City Commissioner, thought that was enough to ensure victory in his libel suit against the newspaper and the writers of the ad. But the Supreme Court held that a free press needed more breathing space than that. A rule requiring a critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of the assertions on pain of punishment would lead to too much self-censorship, and that the First Amendment protected honest mistakes in the marketplace of ideas.

Now, having tracked some of their traditional trends for safeguarding individual rights in the 20th century, I want to look forward for just a moment. I think the challenge for judges now is to solve some of the paradoxes of these rights. What happens when individual rights are on both sides of the judicial scales? In the context of election laws, the Court's recent decision to uphold legislation restricting campaign contributions allows Congress to experiment with a line between free expression and the appearance of corruption.

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...some differences, for example, for pregnancy. We've also recently returned to the question of how constitutional liberties function in the context of war-time. Now, these are not easy questions. I'm confident, though, that just as legal developments of the last century did help forge us as a better nation, and the Court as an institution, grappling with these new questions about rights will eventually draw us closer, and I hope, bring us peace.

Thank you.

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Q&A

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...he was employed as a dishwasher as the Atheneum. That's what he tells me, but in 52 years of marriage he has yet to wash the dishes addition to taking note of this

Host
The first question is, "Because I had a number of cases being appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, would you please discuss how the Court chooses the hundred or so cases that are granted?"

Sandra Day O'Connor
We take so few cases percentage-wise, 2 or 3% of the petitions that are filed are accepted by the Court for review. That may sound shocking, but you have to remember what the role of the Court is in the eyes of the founders of the Constitution. They hoped to establish a Supreme Court to help develop a reasonably uniform and consistent body of federal law. We only take cases normally, that enable us to address the differences in opinion among the courts about the meaning of some federal law or the Constitution. Now, there are a few exceptions. But by and large, that's our standard.

What is remarkable about the process of deciding which cases to accept for review, is that we still follow the so-called "rule of four." And that was the notion put forward by then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft of Ohio, when he went to Congress and asked Congress to give the Court discretion over which cases to accept for review. This was one of the most important legal changes affecting the Court to have occurred, and thank goodness Taft was successful. When he went before for the Judiciary Committee, members of the committee were skeptical about giving the Court discretion about what cases to take. They said, "Well, maybe you'd rather just go play golf. And so, ease your workload." And as a matter of fact, Taft did like to hit golf balls and would go out to the Chevy Chase Club every now and then back when he was President and later when he was Chief Justice. But Taft was very shrewd, and he said if you will give us that discretion, we will agree to follow the "rule of four," it will take only the agreement of four of the nine of us to accept a case for review, not even a majority of the Court. Congress thought that was sensible.

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...well I'm not going to take it on head on, but let me say this about that, as they say.

Our Constitution has lasted longer than any in the world today, of any nation. I carry it with me. [Pulls out a copy.] See that little thing? This also includes the Declaration of Independence and an index. But the whole Constitution printed in this little booklet is only 34 little pages long. The genius--that includes the amendments, 22 of them, and the first 10 were the Bill of Rights. Now when the Framers wrote this constitution, they used very broad language to write. Look at this, for example, the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated." Well, what is "unreasonable"? Is it living or not living? Is it flexible or inflexible? At the time that was written, we didn't have DNA sampling. We didn't have blood tests. We didn't have telephones to tap. We didn't have night vision glasses. I mean for goodness sakes, things change. And we have to look at it, what's reasonable today under that Fourth Amendment.

While I'm on this subject of the brief Constitution. You know, one of the most remarkable developments in the last 25 or 30 years is the formation of the European Union. Now, you look back through history, all the wars that have been started in the continent of Europe. I mean, that was the origin of most wars, face it.

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...the International Criminal Tribunal, the treaty that was drafted in Rome that proposed the establishment of a court to sit in the Hague that could have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and genocide. And it also says crimes of aggression, but that hasn't been defined. Now, that court has, in fact, been ratified by enough nations to bring it into existence. It is now in existence. The United States has not ratified it. And it was first proposed for ratification under President Clinton's time in office. And it has been brought back under President Bush. And under neither administration did the President propose ratification of it. And I think that was in response to concerns by some of our major military leaders who were concerned that the treaty could be broadly interpreted to result in charges being brought against military leaders and political leaders of this country because we're often on the scene and trying to put down international problems, like back in Kosovo, for example.

And so we haven't ratified it. And that is a political decision, a decision that will come to the Court and I'm not going to weigh in. I do understand that there are legitimate differences of opinion about it, but the court is now functioning and sitting and the judges have been appointed, and they are looking at a couple of situations in Africa currently. And I think we will want to watch what happens in the years ahead as that court proceeds.

We have, you know, two temporary courts considering things like that. The International Court for the Former Yugoslavia. It is considering at present, among other things, the trial against Milosevic of former Serbia. It sits in The Hague. There are judges appointed to that. In fact, the chairman, the president of it is an American judge named Tim Meron, some of you may know him. And that court has been--it was very hard to set it up because there was no place for it, there was no building, there were no rules, there were no judges, there were no procedures. There was nothing. And yet horrendous things had happened in Bosnia Herzegovina, and all over Croatia and Serbia. And the world did want to create a court to enable us to hear some charges, and the court is safe. But it has not functioned very efficiently. And it will provide some kind of example for this new war crimes tribunal, I assume.

And we also have a temporary tribunal for what happened in Rwanda. And that also has functioned very slowly. There are many thousands of cases still pending before that court. It does not sit in The Hague, it sits in Africa.

Host
Looking back at the last century and excluding, if you wish, the last 20 years or so you were on the Court, which justice's scholarship or which justice do you admire the most?

Sandra Day O'Connor
Well, I'm not going to talk about my colleagues. But I will tell you that I think what John Marshall Harlan contributed to the court, when he sat, was really remarkable, not only in connection with the Brown decision and his decision in Plessy and in other cases, but every time he had an issue and addressed himself to it and wrote, I found his method of analysis very persuasive. And I think he contributed enormously well and effectively to the jurisprudence of the Court.

But there are others. You know, Robert Jackson wrote beautifully. He is the last justice who never went to law school, did you know he never went to law school? And he was just a gifted writer and legal analyst. Anytime you have a Jackson opinion, I think you'll be impressed.

Host
Based on your own personal history outside of the context of the Court, did you believe that an Equal Rights Amendment was needed?

Sandra Day O'Connor
When I was in the Arizona State Legislature as a state senator in my home state, and that was when the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed. And a number of states had ratified it, it bogged down eventually. But I conducted hearings as chairman of the State, County, and Municipal Affairs Committee in the Arizona Legislature...

[...]

Host
Have you experienced that as a particularly difficult thing, and is it possible for you to share an example?

Sandra Day O'Connor
Well I think every judge would have occasion to experience things. I've been a legislator, and I've been a judge. And there's a difference. Sometimes judges have to interpret and apply laws that as a legislator, you would never want to approve, I mean, as an individual. You might say, "Oh, that's terrible! Why would the legislature ever pass that crazy law?" But if it's valid, if it's constitutional, as a judge you just put that aside and apply it like the legislators wrote it if it's a valid law. Yes, of course you find those things that you don't think personally make much sense. But reaching a decision on the meaning of a law or its application is something that judges are trained to do. And it doesn't really bother me to do that even though I might not think the particular law I'm applying is a very good one. I think that's okay.

Host
What advice do you have for young women wanting to enter public service? Where do you think they should begin, how do they get involved in political life, and who have been your own role models in helping you steer your path?

Sandra Day O'Connor
Well, whether you're a young man or a young woman, I hope every such young person will consider some form of public service. I don't think there is a more important thing that a person can do at some time during their lifetime, if not their entire life, than engage in some form of public service. Now, whether it's as a volunteer at a local level or a school level, or whether as a full-time occupation for a time or for a lifetime, this is what we need in this country today. Our country was built on the basis of people who were willing to contribute their time and their talent to making this a better place. And we absolutely need every effort today, from every person we can get, to engage in public service.

[...]

There was no space for me. So that was the kind of compromise I made to get started. And I did my job alright, and pretty soon there was a real vacancy in a real office, and I was paid in a real office. And I went from there. And when I first went to work, I'd been--John and I moved back to Arizona in 1957. He had been in the service in Germany. And we got back, and none of the law firms would hire a woman. So I met a young man from the east when I was studying for the Arizona bar exam, and he wanted--

[...]

So we opened this little neighborhood law office, and it was in a shopping center. And the only business we got was drop-in business from people who wanted a contract written or a will prepared, or they had some domestic relations dispute, or something like that. We took criminal appointments, that was before the days of public defenders. And so we learned from very humble beginnings, things about life, and they weren't the issues that usually came before the United States Supreme Court. And I was a volunteer all my life. I volunteered in a variety of public efforts. I was on the Planning and Zoning Commission, I was a volunteer referee for the juvenile court. I took bankruptcy appointments. Whatever it was, I was willing to do.

[...]

I'm the first cowgirl to serve on the Court. I had as role models a bunch of crusty old cowboys and my parents. And a grandmother who was very kind, she let me live with her in El Paso, Texas to go to school because there wasn't a school near the Lazy B Ranch. And she was youthful and vigorous as a grandmother, I think she had married at age 16 so she was still pretty young and had some energy. And they were the people I knew. Of course my grandmother didn't have a business or a profession and neither did my mother. And I didn't know any lawyers. So that just kind of happened, I think.

Host
Ladies and gentlemen, Sandra Day O'Connor.