RISA GOLUBOFF: Thank
you all for coming.
Good afternoon and welcome.
We are so delighted--
I am personally so
delighted, and I
know I speak on behalf
of the whole institution
to say we are so
delighted to celebrate
this eminent jurist, this
leading voice for justice,
the 2019 recipient of the
Thomas Jefferson Medal
in Law Judge Carlton Reeves.
[APPLAUSE]
So you may not know that
the University of Virginia
does not confer
honorary degrees.
And so the Thomas
Jefferson medals in law
are the highest external honors
that the university offers
to recognize the
achievements of individuals
who excel in the fields that
Thomas Jefferson represented,
law, civic leadership,
architecture,
and global innovation.
And here we are at the law
school, we have Judge Reeves,
this is the law medal.
It is customary
for the recipient
to deliver a talk
to mark the occasion
and to share his or her insight
with us about their life's
work.
That is what we
are here for today.
Before I invite Judge Reeves
to deliver his remarks,
defending the judiciary,
a call for justice, truth,
and diversity on the
bench, let me tell you
why he was selected as this
year's Jefferson Foundation
Medalist in Law.
Judge Reeves grew up in
Yazoo City, Mississippi
where he was among the state's
first cohort of students
to attend integrated
public schools.
He was a first generation
college student
who graduated magna cum
laude from Jackson State
University in 1986.
He then came straight to the
University of Virginia Law
School and graduated
here in 1989,
in the process winning the
Mary Claiborne and Roy H Ritter
prize for honor, character,
and integrity, words
he has clearly lived by.
He returned to
Mississippi to clerk
for justice Reuben Anderson of
the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Reuben Anderson was the first
African-American justice
on that court.
Judge Reeves then stayed
on for additional year
as a staff attorney before
joining, as a litigation
associate, the firm.
Of Phelps Dunbar.
While in private
practice, Judge Reeves
also taught as an
adjunct faculty member
at Jackson State and the
Mississippi College of Law.
Proving himself an
adroit litigator,
Judge Reeves was tapped
at an unusually young age
to serve as Chief of
the Civil Division
as the assistant US
attorney in 1995,
where he oversaw all civil
trial and appellate litigation.
He handled civil and
constitutional torts,
medical malpractice, employment
discrimination, FOIA claims,
administrative law, and more.
He was also the district
election officer,
ensuring fair
access to the polls
and safeguarding the
electoral process.
And he served on the
National Civil Chiefs Working
Group of the Executive
Office of US Attorneys
where he received
commendation and accolades
for his many and
substantial contributions.
In 2001, Judge Reeves left
the Department of Justice
to become a founding partner
in the integrated Jackson law
firm of Pigott Reeves
& Johnson, where
he handled state and federal
trial and appellate matters
on behalf of a wide
variety of clients.
In 2010, judge Reeves responded
to President Obama's call
to serve on the US district
court for the Southern
District of
Mississippi, becoming
the second African-American
federal judge
in Mississippi history.
All the while
throughout his career,
Judge Reeves' commitment
to opportunity, equality,
and justice motivated him
to serve and lead and enjoy
recognition from a dazzling
array of professional
and public service
organizations.
I have not even listed
them all, but they go on
for more than a page.
I won't mention all
of them, but they
range from serving a special
master for the Hinds County
Chancery Court, to
serving on the Mississippi
Board of Bar Commissioners.
He served as president
and on the board
of directors of the
Magnolia Bar Association.
He worked with the ACLU of
Mississippi, the Jackson Urban
League, the Mississippi Workers
Center for Human Rights,
and on and on.
He was also, and
continues to be,
a pillar of his
community and his state.
He is a brother
of Kappa Alpha Psi
fraternity, a predominantly
black organization
with a history of
social service.
He is a trustee at College
Hill Missionary Baptist Church,
a member of the Jackson
State University management
investment committee, and a
member of the college savings
plan of Mississippi.
The awards are
equally overwhelming.
Just to name a few--
Mississippi Association of
Justice's Distinguished Jurists
of the Year, the highest honor
given by the Magnolia Bar
Association, among others,
the R Jess Brown award.
He was named a top 40 under
40 lawyer in the Mississippi
Business Journal, a
mid-south super lawyer,
and honored by the Jackson
branch of the NAACP.
This necessarily abridged
recitation of Judge Reeves
accomplishments
hardly does justice,
no pun intended,
to his true impact
on the law and the world.
It is not the what, but
the how of Judge Reeves'
life in the law that
is truly extraordinary.
From early in his
life, Judge Reeves
exhibited a moral
core and commitment
to his community, his state, his
nation, and his fellow citizens
that set him apart.
He joined local
organizations, supported
voting rights efforts, and in
an inspiring twist of fate,
worked purposefully
in the courthouse
chambers of the Honorable
William Barber Junior,
so that he could be close
to the law in the courtroom.
And that is the seat that he
now holds as a federal judge.
To Judge Reeves, quote,
"The practice of law
is about changing
people's lives."
And from every personal
and professional perch,
as a lawyer, leader of the
bar, engaged participant
in the democratic process, and
unstintingly generous servant
to the public and
the profession,
Judge Reeves has used his moral
core, his trenchant voice,
and his formidable
intelligence to do just that.
That has been nowhere more true
than during his almost 10 years
as a federal judge.
Judge Reeves remarked,
quote, "I knew being a judge
would be the best thing
to create a greater
good in Mississippi.
It's not about
creating new rights.
It's about breathing new
life into the Constitution
that we have sworn to uphold."
Over the past
decade, Judge Reeves
has offered a unique
judicial perspective
on the most challenging
legal issues of our time,
with jurisprudential impact
that has been profound.
He struck down his state's
ban on same sex marriage,
he ordered the gerrymandered
districts be redrawn,
and he, inadvertently,
I think, spoke,
to the heart of the nation
when he sentenced hate crime
defendants who had reopened
old wounds of racist violence.
This last case
took place in 2011,
when a group of 10 white
teenagers brutally beat
and murdered a 48-year-old
African-American man
named James Anderson in
Jackson, Mississippi.
Three of them would later be
convicted of a federal hate
crime.
And as Judge Reeves issued his
opinion and sentenced them,
he gave what has been called
a speech that is breathtaking
in both the moral
force of its arguments
and the palpable sadness with
which they are delivered.
Judge Reeves stated
the following.
"Today we take another step
away from Mississippi's
tortured past.
We move farther
away from the abyss.
Indeed Mississippi is a
place and a state of mind,
and those who think they
know about her people
and her past will also
understand that her story has
not been completely written.
Mississippi has a
present and a future.
That present and
future has promise.
As demonstrated by the work of
the officers within these state
and federal agencies, black
and white, male and female,
in this Mississippi,
they work together
to advance the rule of law.
Having learned from
Mississippi's inglorious past,
these officials know that in
advancing the rule of law,
the criminal justice system
must operate without regard
to race, creed, or color.
This is the strongest
way Mississippi
can reject those notions,
those ideas which
brought us here today."
Judge Reeves, in his
speech there and elsewhere,
has revealed an
unflinching ability
to look directly at human
cruelty and suffering,
to judge its legal dimensions,
to think about it historically,
and to call upon those in
his courtroom, his state,
and his nation to do
justice with humanity.
Judge Reeves, you
represent the best
of our profession
and our law school,
and you inspire us each to
live our best lives in the law.
It is my unmatched
privilege to welcome you
back to Charlottesville as
the recipient of the Thomas
Jefferson Medal in Law.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
CARLTON REEVES:
Professor Armacost, you
can take that seat that
you were about to go to.
[LAUGHING]
That's one of my co-recipients
of this Ritter award
that we got in 1989.
It is my delight to be here
and to support Dean Goluboff.
As I told a group
of students earlier,
she and her administration is
the best thing for this law
school at this point.
[APPLAUSE]
I've come to know her
and talk with her,
and I am just so
proud of what she's
doing for this law school in
these years in these times.
This great honor that the
university bestowed upon me
is obviously great, but
I come to you today--
I cannot-- I share this with
you, today is my birthday.
[APPLAUSE]
And so 30 years ago when I
was graduating from here,
whoever thought--
I didn't think that I'd be
here standing before students,
but this is the second
birthday of my life since 1984
that I had to spend
without my wife.
She's here with me
every day, though.
My daughter's here
with me though,
who's spent 24
birthdays with me.
And my youngest
sister is also here.
But there are other special
people here as well.
Elizabeth Lowe, who was one of
the associate deans of the law
school during the
time that I was here,
has graced me with the
presence that she's here,
and I certainly appreciate that.
And there are so many others.
I see people from
Mississippi here.
And I appreciate my
senator for coming
and my former person
who I practices
with in the US attorney's
office, his son, is here.
And there are others,
Judge Abdul Kallon
has decided to take a time
away to be here today.
And I appreciate that.
What UVA did for me, it has
done for so many others.
Those three years
when I was here I
had an opportunity to
create friendships,
endearing, long
term friendships,
people who I know and
love and talk to often.
They're very instrumental
and part of my life,
people with whom I've practiced,
Brad Pigott, for example,
preceded by about nine
or 10 years here at UVA,
but we didn't meet until
I got back to Jackson.
And we decided to open
up what we thought
was a law firm that
would be committed
to do what Mississippi should
have been doing all along.
During those three years here,
I had a chance to meet giants.
A. Leon Higginbotham, for
example, former judge,
spoke on the
undergraduate campus.
And I had opportunity to go hear
him speak and shake his hand.
Julius Chambers came
to the law school,
had a chance to have
lunch in North Grounds
cafeteria with him and to
sit down and talk to him.
Robert Carter, contemporary
of Thurgood Marshall.
Oliver Hill, who you
people in Virginia know,
he was the Thurgood
Marshall of Virginia.
I had a chance to be with him.
I was taught by Judge James
Spencer, you all know him.
He's now a colleague,
or former colleague
because he's retired from
the federal bench now.
And then I had the
pleasure of meeting
the greatest, Muhammad Ali,
came to Steven Salzberg's
class, the criminal procedure
class, and spoke to us.
So yeah, that's what UVA does.
So I'm deeply honored
to receive this award.
Again, when I was a student
here over 30 years ago,
Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor received the Medal
in Law, and to be
named alongside of her
and Marian Wright
Edelman and Elaine
Jones, who I love dearly,
is one of the greatest
honors of my life.
Of course, it is complicated
because Thomas Jefferson
is complicated.
There is so much to admire about
him, his genius, his curiosity,
and his industry.
I was pleased to quote
from Mr. Jefferson's notes
on the State of Virginia and
the decision a few years ago.
It captured something
true about the case,
despite being more
than 200 years old.
One of the things I appreciate
about universities though,
is that we can engage in
difficult conversations
in more than 280 characters.
So I should add
that truth requires
us to recognize the complication
of Mr Jefferson, the slave
holder, because it notes
on the State of Virginia,
he also wrote that
black people were much
inferior among other things.
To him, people
like me, were best
fit to give our labor,
blood, and sweat
to build this great university.
We certainly though were not
fit to attend it, let alone
be honored by it.
Now Jefferson would truly
question what you all
have done on this day if
he knew I was not just
a black man, but a black
federal judge, for he believed
that federal judges were sappers
and miners, steadily working
to undermine the
independent rights of states
and assault the Constitution.
Jefferson led his
party to attack
the judiciary's independence.
So I'm here today, not just as
a black man, but a black judge.
My friend Judge
Reggie Walton once
said that when black
judges see injustice,
we have an obligation
to stand up and speak.
So as a black judge, accepting
an award named for a man whose
views on race cannot be
untethered from an assault
on the judiciary, I must stand
up and speak about that parent.
How corrosive it has been since
the days of Jefferson, who
we all agree was
a man of his time.
How often that pairing has been
embraced throughout our history
by men of their times.
And how we must defend
against it's poison
when spewed today
by men of our time.
Because there is another
vision of what the judiciary is
and should always
be, a vision of the
courts as the
defender of justice.
First, let me
explain to you what
I mean by the word justice.
People go to church
to find peace,
to the hospital to be healed.
To be educated,
they go to school.
And yes, they go to
Minneapolis to bring back
a national championship.
[APPLAUSE]
But they go to courts
to get justice.
Now the Constitution
says, we the people,
we're united to form
a more perfect union.
But that great document
has another purpose,
as you think about
it, more perfect union
to establish justice.
And hard justice is a search
for the truth, deciding
what is fair, what is
reasonable, what is owed.
These questions are
too important to be
decided by position,
power, or tradition.
Only truth can resolve them,
thus as Justice John Marshall
Harlan II wrote, quote,
"The job of courts
is not merely one of an umpire,
in disputes between litigants.
Their job is to
search out the truth,
both as to the
facts and the law."
Finding truth is hard.
It takes time.
That's why courts have carefully
crafted rules of evidence,
rules of procedure,
and why injustice
happens when courts place
expediency and finality ahead
of truth.
Finding truth
takes independence,
that's why courts must be
shielded from partisanship
and undue influence.
Most of all, though, finding
truth takes experience.
Experience is famously the
life of the law, where people
come from, what they
have lived through,
what they do with
their time, and who
they spend their time with.
It all matters because we don't
see the beauty of Monticello
by looking at it from one angle,
nor the horror of the slave
quarters by observing
them from a distance.
To find truth, we need all
the angles, all distances,
all perspectives, what
Judge A. Leon Higginbotham
called a multitude of different
experiences to find the truth.
That is what justice requires.
Justices demand for
diverse experiences
is best seen in the heart of
our court system, the jury.
The Constitution requires
trials by an impartial jury.
The Supreme Court
says we should try
to draw juries that reflect a
representative cross-section
of the community.
Excluding classes of people
from the juries, like women
and black folk, results
in decision making that
according to the Supreme Court
is exposed to the risk of bias.
Reams of scientific evidence
support this conclusion, along
with the idea that diversity
is essential to all kinds
of courtroom decision making.
As justice Thurgood
Marshall said,
"If we deprive the legal process
of the benefit of differing
viewpoints and perspectives
on a given problem,
then we are left with
one-sided justice."
Mississippians know what
one-sided justice looks like.
We've seen it, we've felt
it, we've been hurt by it.
Sometimes, we've even
been killed by it.
One-sided justice was when
Mississippi courts declared
that black folk were inferior,
that we were personal property,
that beating and whipping
us was not cruel or unusual.
One-sided justice enabled
the exclusion, the torture,
and sale of black people,
enabled the system of slavery
that shapes my state's dismal
social economic statistics
to this day.
This one-sided justice was
not exclusive to Mississippi,
Virginians had it too, as
did the rest of the country.
The law of the land
was Dred Scott,
which said black people were
beings of an inferior order,
with no rights which the white
man was bound to respect.
What these decisions
reflected was a lack
of experience, the
black experience,
a lack of acknowledgment that
black folk also have souls.
Without that black experience,
courts were led to falsehood.
As Abraham Lincoln
said, Dred Scott
was wrong for a
simple reason, it
was based on assumed
historical facts,
which were not really true.
Reversing the
untruths of Dred Scott
took a war and a
new constitution
rewritten to reflect the
truth of black equality
through the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments.
It also took a
revitalized federal court
with expanded jurisdiction,
more judgeships,
and new causes of action
to protect civil rights.
Mississippi courts
saw black plaintiffs,
black juries black lawyers,
black judges, black witnesses.
For the first time ever,
Mississippi's judiciary
was equipped with the
experience of black folk.
But then came push-back.
In Mississippi and
across the South,
the Klan responded to the
threat of democratic justice
by trying to assassinate black
judges, shooting black jurors,
and murdering federal
court officers.
In Congress, advocates
of white power
smeared federal judges as
unresponsive to the will
of the people, pushed to
roll back the jurisdiction
and autonomy of federal
courts, and field judgeships
with former confederates who
had sworn to uphold slavery.
One judge, a former
lawyer, to the Klan,
LQC Lamar is the
only Mississippi
to have served on
the US Supreme Court.
The great assault on
the judiciary succeeded.
Black perspectives were again
banished from our courts,
especially in my Mississippi.
But baring of the
experience of a majority
of a citizen, our courts saw
only a disfigured growth,
like a tree raised with
water, but not light.
That tree bore strange fruit,
like Pules vs. Ferguson, which
assumed in ignorance of
all the relevant evidence,
that segregation
stamps the colored
race with a badge
of inferiority,
the court said, solely because,
solely because the colored race
chooses to put that
construction upon it.
If you want to know what that
kind of all white justice
looks like, what it feels
like, what it hurts like,
ask the people in Mississippi
who lived through it.
Ask those whose lynchings were
sanctioned by a judiciary that
was, quote, "the Klan in black
robes instead of white sheets"
as described by former
Mississippi Supreme Court
Justice Fred banks.
Ask Ed Brown, Henry
Shields, and Hank Ellington,
three black men arrested for
the murder of a white man.
They were beaten,
indicted, tried,
and sentenced to death,
all within five days
after the jury deliberated
for just 30 minutes.
Their prosecutor, John Stennis,
graduated from this institution
61 years before me.
How badly were these
defendants tortured?
Quote, "not too
much for a Negro.
Not as much as I would have
done it if it was left to me",
a deputy testified.
Ask Emmett Till, that
child was kidnapped,
that child was beaten,
had an eye gouged out,
that child was shot, that child
was killed, his body mutilated,
undressed and thrown into
the Tallahatchie River tied
to a 100 pound gin so that his
desecrated body would never
be discovered.
A child, a child whose killers
were served Mississippi
justice, justice who servants
called black folk niggers
in open court, justice that
ignored black eyewitness
testimony, justice that
delivered a unanimous not
guilty verdict from an all
white, all-male jury that
deliberated for of an
hour and seven minutes.
Why that long?
Because they took a pop break.
Mississippi justice
show the world
what courts look
like when twisted
by the falsehood
of hate, deprived
of the experiences
of those they serve.
That revelation helped fuel
a struggle for real justice
to push experiences
of black folk
back into the
places they had been
excluded from for generations.
Ordinary folk like Fannie Lou
Hamer, Vernon Dame, and Medgar
Evers and George Lee
led a freedom movement
of blood, sweat, and tears.
Judges, like William
Henry Hastie,
integrated our
article three courts,
ended 160 years of
judicial segregation.
Lawyers like Thurgood Marshall
revived civil rights statutes,
prying open the doors of
the antebellum courthouses
where white supremacy ruled.
With black folks oppression once
again on the scales of justice,
our courts tipped
again towards truth.
The result, of course, was
Brown vs. Board of Education
with the Supreme Court
embracing a few simple facts
that the doctrine of
separate but equal
has no place in a free society,
that black people are indeed
created equal, that we, we are
included in, we the people.
Brown showed that our
courts were once again
willing to incorporate the
experiences of the many
rather than the few into
their searches for truth.
And lo and behold, then came
the second great pushback
against the
judiciary, white power
returned to the
playbook of the pads,
smearing judges,
shrinking judicial power,
and scrubbing diversity
from the courtrooms.
Through the Southern
Manifesto, segregation
is launch a massive resistance
against the judiciary.
The signatories included
Mississippi's moderate,
Senator John Stennis,
attack courts
as dangerous, guilty
of judicial usurpation,
filled with judges
who encouraged
agitators and troublemakers
invading our states.
It's signatories pushed to strip
federal courts of jurisdiction
over civil rights claims
and impeach judges
as receptive to those claims.
South Carolina's
Strom Thurmond decried
the tyranny of the judiciary.
Alabama's George
Wallace lamented
what he called the
sorriest federal court
system in the world.
And Mississippi's other
more strident Senator,
James Eastland attacked judicial
nominees whose experiences
affirmed black truths,
asking Thurgood
Marshall during his confirmation
hearing if he was, quote,
"prejudiced against white
people", how ridiculous.
To counter these experiences
of Marshall and those like him,
segregationist senators
wielded their seniority,
seniority built on
the disenfranchisement
of black people.
Men like Senator Eastland,
who saw his voter suppression
efforts in Mississippi, rewarded
by being given the chairmanship
of the Judiciary Committee.
He then in turn
demand the appointment
of men who would
enforce white supremacy,
men like Harold Cox,
a man who called
black people in his court
baboons, chimpanzees, niggers.
His behavior was
repugnant to anyone
with a sense of fairness.
Cox was far from the only
threat to the rule of law
during those times.
I can think of your
Senator, Harry Byrd,
vowing to fight Brown
with every ounce of energy
and capacity of his.
Set forth what
would later happen
in Prince Edward's County,
Virginia where they decided
to close all their public
schools just so black students
couldn't get an education.
We saw it in Mississippi, too.
I know it.
I know what they did.
I saw them.
How will I know them?
I know their children.
See, because after
Brown vs. Board
in my hometown of Yazoo City,
a group of 1,500 white citizens
formed the citizens council
to protect white supremacy.
When 53 black parents signed the
petition, asking the Yazoo City
school board to
desegregate, the council
listed their names in
full page newspaper ads
and posted those
signs around town.
Almost immediately, the
signatories lost their jobs,
their businesses lost
customers and shut down.
Even those known to be the
help were no longer needed.
Soon, nearly every signatory
had removed their names
from the petition.
The two names left, well
they had already fled.
The story of my Yazoo
City though is not unique.
Black folk across
the country who
had the gall to ask for justice
were interrogated, trapped,
beaten, jailed,
bombed, and murdered,
sometimes about offices of
justice themselves, the police.
Judges who sought
to deliver justice
faced an onslaught of death
threats and hate mail.
Their pets were poisoned.
Their children grades
were desecrated.
White powers tried to sniff
out the light of freedom.
But the brave leaders,
judges, plaintiffs,
who saw the truth that we,
again, we are we the people,
they prevailed.
And in Alexander vs. Holmes
County decided 50 years ago
this year, the Supreme Court
ruled that all deliberate speed
was no longer a
strategy for keeping
Mississippi schools segregated.
With the independence, power,
and fortitude to do justice,
our court's search for
truth bore freedom's fruit.
I count myself
among that harvest.
Alexander came down when I
was just in kindergarten.
So I was among the
first full class
to go into Amy Ellis
Elementary in the first grade
in an integrated school.
I spent the next 12
years of public education
with black and white children,
Maxine and Melody and Don
and Thomas, Fizz and Charles,
and every other member
of my class of 1982, whose
graduation song-- for you
old folk in here, whose
graduation song that yeah was
Stevie Wonder's and Paul
McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory".
We live in perfect harmony.
Across Mississippi,
thousands of children
like me learned from
white and black teachers,
played for black
and white coaches,
sang for black and
white choir directors.
We were in harmony, learning
that white and black kids could
be hungry to learn,
could be brave,
could be curious and
silly, especially silly
if you had some
of my old friends.
We learned the truth
that our courts
had affirmed that
black people are
equal with white folk, deserving
of every opportunity given
to the form.
I got many of these
opportunities,
including an education
at this fine institution.
This institution, which
put me on the path
to one of the greatest
opportunities of my life,
serving as a federal judge.
That opportunity, just like the
opportunity of an integrated
education, came from an effort
to defend and strengthen
our courts.
For eight years at the
beginning of this century,
building on the legacy of the
president elected the year
of America's
bicentennial, our nation
witnessed a revolution, one
that dramatically expanded
and improved the body of
expertise federal courts
depend on to find the truth.
We saw the addition
of more black judges,
more women judges,
more Latina and Latino
judges, more
Asian-American judges,
more Native American judges,
more Pacific Islander judges,
more LGBTQ judges
than ever before.
We saw that.
For a brief moment, there
were so many firsts,
each one making our
judiciary better
reflect the best of America.
I know because I was there.
On the day of my confirmation
hearing, five of us,
all people of color, appeared
before the Senate Judiciary
Committee.
There was Mary Madea, a first
generation Mexican-American
headed to the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals.
Denise Casper, the first
African-American female federal
judge in Massachusetts.
Edmund Chang, the first
Asian-American federal judge
in Illinois.
And Leslie Kobayashi, the
first Japanese-American
confirmed during the
Obama administration.
Finally, there I was, the second
black judge, federal judge,
in Mississippi's history, ready
to claim the seat once held
by Harold Cox.
The only white men in the room
that day were the two senators.
I could not list the endless
array of useful experiences
the revolution in
judicial appointments
allow our courts
to draw on, but I
do think about Abdul
Kallon who sits in Alabama.
Judge Kallon, born in
Freetown, Sierra Leone
and raised by his mother,
shows us what immigrants
and how they can
get the job done.
Think of Nitza
Quinones Alejandro,
who serves as the first
openly lesbian Article III
judge in Pennsylvania.
Think of my friend,
Luis Restrepo,
who took his oath
of office 20 years
after taking his
oath of citizenship,
strengthening the Third
Circuit with the insights
only a former public--
only a form of federal
public defender can know.
It was during these
years that Mississippi
got its first
African-American female judge.
And for the first time, the
5th circuit court of appeals
had two African-American judges
to serve with each other.
Appointments like these
wove the essence of America
into the tapestry
of our judiciary,
making our courts of, by,
and for, we the people.
That effort to
make our judiciary
reflect America was as
brief as it was remarkable,
because now we are eye witnesses
to the third great assault
on our judiciary.
If you've never
relied on a court,
you may not see the
assault. If you've never
seen a friend, a loved
one, wrongly imprisoned,
you may not feel it.
If you have never been stopped
for driving while black,
like my friend Judge Robert
Wilkins, you might not fear it.
But if you know the words of
Mississippi's darkest moment,
you can hear.
When politicians attack the
courts as dangerous, political,
and guilty of
egregious overreach,
you can hear the Klan's
lawyers assailing officers
of the court across the South.
When leaders chastise people
for merely using the courts,
you can hear the citizen
council hammering up
those names of those
black petitioners
there in Yazoo City.
When the powerful accuse
the courts of opening up
our country to
potential terrorists,
you can hear the southern
manifestos authors
smearing the judiciary
for simply upholding
the rights of black folk.
When lawmakers say, we
should get rid of our judges,
you can hear segregationist
senators writing bills
to strip our courts
of their power.
And when the executive branch
calls our courts and their work
stupid, horrible, ridiculous,
incompetent, a laughingstock,
and a complete and
total disgrace,
you can hear the slurs
and threats of executives
like George Wallace
echoing into the present.
I know what I heard
when a federal judge was
called very biased
and unfair because he
is of Mexican heritage.
When that judge's ethnicity
was said to prevent his issuing
fair rulings, when that judge
was called a hater simply
because he is Latino,
I heard the words
of James Eastland, a race
baiting politician, empowered
by the falsehood
of white supremacy
questioning the judicial
temperament of a man solely
because of the
color of his skin.
I heard those
words, and I did not
know if I was in 1967 or 2017.
This false seed is being
sown across this country,
from Mississippi to Virginia.
I know because I'm here.
The proof is in my mailbox, in
countless letters of hatred.
I've been called a
piece of garbage,
and arrogant, pompous piece of--
sh-- you fill in the rest.
This may not be
appropriate for children.
[LAUGHTER]
A disgrace.
An asshole who will burn
in hell, and the embodiment
of Satan himself.
One person has even
told me that he
has prayed that God will
give me complete discomfort.
The deliverers of hate
who send these messages
aim to bully and
scare judges who look
like me from the judiciary.
And so they share an aim
with those who used whips,
and robes, and trees
against my ancestors,
scrubbing the black experience
from our nation's courts.
Of course-- of course--
courts can and
should be criticized.
Judges get it wrong
all the time--
that includes me.
Scrutiny of our reasoning is
not, on it's own, troubling.
Indeed, debating
judicial decisions
improves, rather than impedes,
our court's search for truth.
But the slander and falsehoods
thrown at courts today
are not those of
a critic seeking
to improve the judiciaries
search for truth.
They are the words
of an attacker
seeking to distort and twist
that search toward falsehood.
This attack is heard loudest
in the slander of Judge Curiel
But it will be felt through
this administration's
judicial nominations, especially
those confirmed with the advice
and consent of the Senate.
Of article three
judges confirmed
under this current
administration,
90% have been white.
Just one of those
judges is black.
Just two are Hispanic.
But it's not just
about racial diversity.
Barely 25% of this
administration's
confirmed judges are women,
none have been black or Latina.
Achieving complete gender
equality on the federal bench
would require us to confirm
only 23 women a year.
How hard could that be?
I suspect Deans
Goluboff and Kendrick
would say, not very hard.
She does not have
to agree with me.
And think about it.
In a country where they make
up 30% of the population,
non-Hispanic white
men make up nearly 70%
of this administration's
confirmed judges.
That's not what
America looks like.
That's not even what the
legal profession looks like.
Some say our judicial
nomination process
is hampered by a campaign of
systematic and comprehensive
obstruction.
They may be right.
But what others see is
a systematic campaign
to deprive America of
a bench that reflects
the richness of the nation.
There is no excuse for
this exclusion of minority
experiences from our courts.
Minority populations
are not monolithic.
We contain multitudes.
Presidents from Nixon,
to Reagan, to Bush one,
have proven that Republican
administrations have
no trouble finding women
and people of color
with suitable
judicial philosophies.
Justice Sotomayor, for example,
was originally a George HW Bush
appointee.
And the last Republican
administration
confirmed 24 black judges.
This administration
has confirmed one.
This administration, and a
bare majority of the Senate,
walking arm-in-arm
are not stumbling
unaware towards a
homogeneous judiciary.
Think of the slurs
against Judge Curiel.
Think of the
nominations to the bench
of those who call diversity
code for relaxed standards.
Who call transgender children
part of Satan's plan.
Who defend the KKK in
online message boards.
Who led voter
suppression efforts
for segregationists
like Jesse Helms.
Think of the pattern of
judicial nominees refusing
to admit, like every generation
of nominees before them,
that Brown vs. Board
was correctly decided.
That same Brown which led to
Alexander vs. Holmes, which
breathes justice into
my segregated streets
there in Yazoo city.
As if equality was a
mere political position.
Friends, friends,
students-- let it
be said that equal
protection of the law
is not a political
position, it is
enshrined in our constitution.
As Alexander Hamilton
said of the judiciary,
"all possible care is requisite
to enable it to defend itself
against their attacks."
To fulfill the Constitution's
promise, to establish justice,
we the people need to
defend the judiciary.
Defending the
judiciary means more
than demanding that more
women and people of color
be appointed to the bench.
With no Muslims on the
bench, will our judiciary
understand the many facets
of religious freedom?
How can it defend
economic opportunity
with so few judges who know the
taste of a free lunch program,
or the weight of poverty?
How can our judiciary understand
the depth of mass incarceration
when so few judges have
stood with the accused
or know them as neighbors,
as Sunday school students,
as loved ones?
Filled only with the experiences
of prosecutors and state court
judges, of big law partners
and corporate counsel,
of a single religion
or sexual orientation,
our courts will fail to find the
many truths justice must see.
We need a judiciary as
diverse as our country.
As diverse as we the people.
And that brings me to
the US Supreme Court.
It is no doubt
overflowing with wisdom--
infinite wisdom.
But its wisdom.
We know, is drawn
from a shallow pool.
For our current
justices, collectively,
have 21 degrees, none of which
were from a public university,
unless you consider
Oxford public.
[LAUGHTER]
Every current justice
went to Harvard or Yale.
Nobody went to UVA.
Almost every justice served
on a federal appellate court,
just one has served
as a trial judge.
None served in a
legislature as a governor
or as attorney general.
None worked as a public
defender or legal aid attorney.
Justices O'Connor, Kennedy,
Warren, and Douglas,
brought to the court
a unique perspective
from the American West.
Today, that perspective is
represented by Justice Gorsuch,
a graduate of Georgetown Prep.
We have as many justices who
have graduated from Georgetown
Prep as we have
justices who have
lived as a non-white person.
When our Supreme Court
captures such a narrow set
of perspectives, what
truths will it overlook?
When Oliver Wendell Holmes
said that experience
was the life of the law, he
noted that these experiences
included the
prejudices which judges
share with their fellow man.
The prejudices that they
share with their fellow man,
with the experiences of some of
the people, not we the people.
What prejudices,
misperceptions, and stereotypes
will be left unchallenged and
forge into the next president?
What Dred Scotts or Plessys
will be handed down?
James Madison cautioned that it
was, "essential a democracy's
officials be derived from the
great body of the society,
not from an inconsiderate--"
inconsiderable, excuse me--
"proportion or of a
favorite class of it."
We ignore, today, this
warning, at our peril.
But a diverse bench--
be it at the Supreme Court
or elsewhere-- is not
enough to democratize
the judiciary.
Article III judges represent
only a tiny fraction
of the people involved in our
judiciary's decision making
process.
They are the bankruptcy
and magistrate judges,
the powerful prosecutors
and public defenders.
The many law clerks and
court staff we hire.
The lead counsel, receivers,
and steering committees
that our judges
appoint to serve.
The marshals and police who
structure our criminal justice
system.
All of these positions are
critical parts of our courts
truth-seeking function.
We cannot overlook how these
positions fail to reflect
the experiences and diversity
of the public they serve.
When people of every race,
ethnicity, religion, gender,
and sexual orientation can see
their own experiences reflected
in our highest
interest institutions,
they receive hope and
inspiration beyond measure.
When courts look like the
country they represent,
they, more than any claim
to pedigree or prestige,
is what instills public
confidence in the courts.
Again, my mailbox proves it.
For every piece of
hate mail I get,
I receive 10 letters telling
a different story of America.
Letters like one that
reads, "thank you
from the bottom of my
heart for standing up
for the LGBT community
of Mississippi."
Signed, a closeted
gay Mississippi teen.
I'm sending you positive
energy, good thoughts,
and loving prayers,
your way, said another.
And one person simply
said, thank god for you
and our system of justice.
Another fellow
American said, "I am
grateful for our strong
and independent judiciary."
So each of us has a role to
play in defending our judiciary.
Judges, politicians,
and citizens alike,
must denounce attacks
that undermine our ability
to do justice.
It is not enough for judges,
seeing race-based attacks
on their brethren, to say that
they are merely disheartened
or to simply affirm their
non-partisan status.
We must do more to
defend our bench.
Those who control the
judicial confirmation process,
and those who elect them, must
demand that diverse experiences
be seen as a necessary
qualification for office,
rather than a box
happily left unchecked.
Moreover, they must realize
that democratizing our judiciary
will take more than a
return to past practices.
For example, even
if future presidents
appoint female judges at
the same unprecedented rate
as the Obama administration,
we will never
have women experiences truly
reflected in our courts,
as they would forever
be stuck at 42%.
Judges must recognize
their own power
to orient the judiciary
toward inclusiveness.
We judges must ensure
the communities
we serve are represented on
our court staff, especially
amongst our law clerks.
Judge Chhabria in
California is challenging
us to do better by advocating
for using the NFL's Rooney
Rule in our law clerk hiring.
We must push for the appointment
of diverse bankruptcy
and magistrate judges.
We judges-- we--
we must do that.
Many federal judges, including
my friend Kathryn Vratil,
have taken important steps
to diversify the judiciary.
We judges must follow
their footsteps.
Courts must do more than
denounce and diversify,
for the attack on the judiciary
aims to close the courthouse
doors to those who
most need justice,
by shrinking the size, the
resources, and jurisdiction
of our courts.
Over the last 30 years,
while the US population
has increased by
over 30%, Congress
has increased the number of
Article III judges by just 3%.
Meanwhile, there are
continued attempts
to close the doors
to our courtrooms.
I think of the heightened
pleading standards,
the rise of mandatory
arbitration,
and judges who proclaim
that prisoners civil rights
cases should be eliminated from
the federal dockets altogether.
Defending the judiciary requires
judges to demand, not diminish,
the resources they
need to find truth.
We must expand the reach
and the power of our courts,
offering justice to all who
claim the promise of America.
This speech began
with Thomas Jefferson,
and I know you want to
see me end with him.
Because of all of his
failings, Mr. Jefferson--
again, we will agree,
a man of his times--
also framed our
country's greatest truth
that all men are created equal.
Searching for his truth,
interpreting its meaning,
and applying its
mandates, are the tasks
that make our judiciary
a bastion of democracy.
What makes we, we the people.
We do Jefferson justice,
we do the martyrs
of Mississippi justice,
we do our country justice,
by defending our judiciary
now more than ever.
Thank you so very
much for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
RISA GOLUBOFF: Judge Reeves is
open to taking some questions
and there are
microphones set up.
So if you want to come up to
the microphones, ask a question.
CARLTON REEVES: I'd like
to thank the interpreters
because I know I had you going.
[LAUGHTER]
And I know I said
that my daughter had
celebrated 24 birthdays with me,
but she's here with me today.
And I'm so happy that she is,
along with my baby sister.
I don't know if I mentioned
that-- but I did mention?
I don't know.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
Oh, OK.
You just wanted-- OK.
All right.
You're all right?
All right.
Yes?
ZANE CLARK: Hi, Judge.
Zane Clark, thank you
for being here today.
I've had the chance
to ask a few judges,
as they've come throughout
the past semester,
for advice and insight on
how young law students should
start to try and shape our
own judicial philosophy.
I'm fortunate I have Dean
Goluboff for Constitutional
Law, and she's done a great job.
But any extra insight that
might help me ace my exam
would be much appreciated.
[LAUGHTER]
RISA GOLUBOFF: Did
you say unfortunately?
[LAUGHTER]
CARLTON REEVES: Listen
to what she says.
No.
I mean, you know who you are,
you know why you came here.
You know why you
want to be a lawyer.
Just stay committed
to that, whatever
that is, why you want to do it.
Just stay committed to that.
Don't let anybody sidetrack
you from where you want to go.
You're going to stray away from
time to time, you're going to.
But if you keep
your focus on what
it is, where you want to be.
I don't know how to tell you to
shape your judicial philosophy,
other than, I do believe
that part of your philosophy
has already been shaped for you.
You've grown up wherever
you did, however you did.
The experiences
that you have, what
do you see as the role of the
courts, role of the justice
system?
I assume it's being shaped
now, and has been for years.
So just stay focused on that.
ZANE CLARK: Thank you.
CARLTON REEVES: Hope that helps.
[LAUGHTER]
ZANE CLARK: Me too.
RISA GOLUBOFF:
We'll see, won't we.
STUDENT: I was wondering--
you mentioned in your speech
a couple of times the
idea that Jefferson
is sort of a product
of his times--
and I was wondering
if you thought
about our generation,
what we might
be blind to if some later
generation were to look back
at us and say that, oh, they
were a product of their times?
They didn't fight for
this particular justice
that they didn't see.
CARLTON REEVES: I think how
we're treating immigrants.
I mean, you know, I think how
we're treating the people who
we consider the less of these.
How we restrict the
definition of we the people,
and who does that include.
Who is part of that
collective we the people.
And if we are doing things
to restrict that notion of we
the people, or restrict
the expansive embrace
of the 14th Amendment, I
think then, in the future--
just like a generation,
just like 15 years ago
it was lesbian,
gays, and all that.
And we've seen, lesbian
and gays have been here
since this earth was formed.
[APPLAUSE]
They have lived.
They have loved.
They have broken the law,
they have done great things.
They are us.
We live with them, we know
them, we know who we are.
We are them.
So when the country looks back,
when this generation looks back
and say that, oh, they wanted
to still not treat them
like the 14th Amendment
doesn't apply to them,
I think the generations to
come will say, mom, dad,
how did you all let that happen?
Just like I cannot believe--
just like I can't believe--
how black kids and white kids
can not go to school together.
I can't believe the
notion of a system
of government deciding to close
all of its public schools.
I cannot believe that,
but we know it happened.
I can not believe
the stuff that I read
about in the 1950s, 40s, '60s.
And we say, how did that happen?
And part of it happened,
I think, because--
Elie Wiesel I think I'm
pronouncing his name right.
When I went to the Civil
Rights Museum in Memphis,
they take you through
there and then they
end up with a video
presentation of how
King's words have inspired
so many people globally--
Tiananmen Square
and other things.
But they showed this
clip of Elie Wiesel
And he says, "the opposite
of hate--" no, no--
"the opposite of love is not
hate, it's indifference."
And I think that the stuff
that happens, and happened
in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s--
lynchings and killings-- how
did a boy like Emmett Till
get killed, for example?
It's because people decided
that they would not say anything
when they knew that their
best friend, their neighbors,
their loved ones, the person
with whom they were sleeping
with at night, who was
helping raise their children,
was involved in a
dastardly act like that.
So they share the
blame, the people who,
who are just middle of the road.
You know, Dr. King
talked about them
in the letters at
Birmingham jail.
If it's not, you
know-- come on, now.
So it's that type of thing.
Because your children
will ask you, mom, dad,
where were you when
this was going on?
I don't know if I answered
your question, but that's it.
[LAUGHTER]
RISA GOLUBOFF: Please join me in
thanking Judge Carlton Reeves.
[APPLAUSE]
