The text appears substantially as it was delivered on May 23, 2008. The Catholic University of America bestowed the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws upon Justice Alito before his remarks

Alito, Samuel A., Jr.

English

The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law

Catholic University Law Review Volume 58 Issue 1 Fall 2008 Article 2 2008 Remarks of Justice Alito: The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law Commencement Samuel A. Alito Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview Recommended Citation Samuel A. Alito Jr., Remarks of Justice Alito: The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law Commencement, 58 Cath. U. L. Rev. 1 (2009). Available at: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol58/iss1/2 This Address is brought to you for free and open access by CUA Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Catholic University Law Review by an authorized editor of CUA Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact edinger@law.edu. ADDRESSREMARKS OF JUSTICE ALITO: THE CATHOLICUNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, COLUMBUS SCHOOLOF LAW COMMENCEMENT +The Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr.++It is a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to speak with you allhere, and to share in a small way with you what is, I am sure, a very specialday in your lives. Certainly it is a special day in the lives of the graduates. It'sbeen a long time since I went to law school, but I still remember how muchhard work it took to get to where you are today, and I congratulate you forthose efforts. That is a great accomplishment. And I would be remiss if Ididn't say that a lot of congratulations are also due to all of the other peoplewho are here to see you graduate. If your lives have been like mine, then weall owe a big debt of gratitude to many other people-people who are here tosee this event, and I am sure some people who are not here to see this event butwhom you are thinking about-and in a figurative sense, they should bewearing a cap and gown today, too, and should be receiving some of thecongratulations that you are receiving.I have been thinking for some time about what I should say on this occasion,and I had some remarks planned out. But then about a week ago somethinghappened to me that gave me pause. I was speaking to a woman whosehusband had a long and distinguished career as a university professor and as auniversity dean. And I said, "I'm going to be giving a commencement addressnext week at Catholic University Law School." She said, "You know, I can'ttell you how many commencement addresses I have heard over the years, and Ican't remember a single thing that was said by any commencement speaker onany of those occasions, with just one exception." I said, "Oh, well what is theexception?" because I thought maybe I could take some pointers for thisaddress. She said, "This was a commencement that was outside, and it was avery hot day-blistering hot. The program ran on past the scheduled time. Itwas far behind schedule and by the time the speaker got up to give thecommencement address, the graduates and the other people in the audiencewere wilting and dropping. And this speaker looked around, and he surveyed+ The text appears substantially as it was delivered on May 23, 2008. The Catholic University ofAmerica bestowed the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws upon Justice Alito before his remarks.+ Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court.Catholic University Law Reviewthe situation, and this is what he said: 'Remember the turtle. If you don't stickyour neck out, you won't get anywhere.' And with that, he sat down."So now I've gotten your hopes up, right? But I can't promise that I will giveyou a two-sentence address. In fact, I have already far exceeded that limit. Ittakes a lot of courage-it takes a lot of self-confidence-to give an addressthat is that brief. So I do have the lesson from what she said, but I'm not goingto quite honor it literally.So what am I going to talk about? Well, it is probably not a surprise to youthat I am going to talk a little bit about our Constitution and about our legalsystem, but I hope I am going to do it from a different perspective. Let mestart with the Constitution. Perhaps I am biased (I am sure that I am), but Ithink that our Constitution is the best that the world has ever seen. And I feelconfident that our Constitution could not have endured and provided theframework for our country's growth if it was not based on a deepunderstanding of human nature and human behavior.So what are these insights? One of the most basic is the importance ofidentifying the things that are really important. One of the most strikingfeatures of our Constitution is its brevity. Our Constitution contains about4,600 words. You can compare that to the proposed constitution of Europe,which has over 160,000 words, or about thirty-five times as many words as ourConstitution.Our Constitution is brief because it separates the matters that are essentialand permanent from the things that are merely important. It sets out theessential structure of our government. It protects basic rights, but then itbasically leaves everything else to be decided by the people, through theirelected representatives, as the needs of the time demand. If our Framers hadtaken a different approach-if they had tried to nail everything down-then Idon't think that the basic constitutional structure that was established in 1787would still be in force today. The Framers' strategy-a disciplinedidentification of what is most important-has served our country well. And Ithink that the same strategy is a good one for all of us to follow in our personallives.Now I don't suggest that we each print up little personal constitutions andcarry them around in our pockets. But I think that it is useful to go through themental process that the Framers used in drafting the Constitution, and that is toidentify what is essential and permanent in our lives, and to keep those thingsin mind. This is important because the things that call out most loudly for ourattention on a daily basis are not necessarily the things that are most important,the things that matter the most in the long run.Most of you, I am sure, have been working very hard during your years inlaw school and unfortunately, I must tell you, you are probably going to haveto continue to work very hard in your careers once you leave here. There willbe many things that will be demanding your attention on a daily basis, thingsthat are important in many ways-important to you, important to the law firm[Vol. 58:1Commencement Addressor government office or other entity for which you are working, important foryour clients. But it is critical that you do not confuse the things that are merelyimportant with the things that are essential.Another instructive feature of our Constitution is its insistence. Now whatdo I mean by that? I mean that our Constitution is hard to forget, and it is hardto change. It won't easily leave us alone when we would prefer to ignore itsprecepts and do what seems most convenient, most expedient, most modem,most up-to-date. In this connection, I want to note two features-two obviousfeatures---of our Constitution in particular.First, it is written. Now we tend to take this for granted, but this feature wascertainly not inevitable. The country from which the United States brokeaway, Great Britain, had and still has a venerable constitution, but it is notmemorialized in a single, easily consulted document. The Framers of ourConstitution took a different approach. Our Constitution is written, and it iseasily accessible to anyone who cares to read it. You can carry around a littlepocket Constitution if you're so inclined. This makes our Constitution hard toforget and hard to bend.The second feature that I want to note is that our Constitution is exceedinglydifficult to change. Indeed, the amendment process is so difficult that theConstitution has only been amended twenty-seven times in more than two-hundred-twenty years, despite the fact that during that period of time more thanten thousand amendments to the Constitution have been proposed in Congress.The Framers deliberately made the amendment process difficult, and it isinstructive to consider why they did so. Part of the explanation, I think, restswith their understanding of the nature of the fundamental rights that theConstitution protects. I am sure that we all remember the famous words of theDeclaration of Independence: "all men are created equal [and] are endowed bytheir Creator with certain unalienable Rights."'This short and famous statement speaks volumes, and one of the mostimportant things that it says is that there are certain moral principles that aretrue and immutable. These principles of right and wrong, in the view of theFounders, are not relative or circumstantial. Having this conception of rights,and having confidence that through their study of the political institutions ofthe past they had identified the principles of government structure that wouldbest promote the aims of the American experiment, the Framers fortified theirwork against ill-considered change. They knew that times would inevitablycome when people would be tempted to make fundamental changes. Theprecipitating event might be a crisis of some sort or another; it might be thelatest intellectual fad. But whatever the precipitating event, they knew thatsuch times would come, and they knew that in the long run, the well-being ofthe country depended on the ability to resist these temptations.1. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE para. 2 (U.S. 1776).20081Catholic University Law ReviewThe same idea-that there are certain principles that we should not be sofoolish to think that we can set aside without paying a fearsome price-appliesto our personal lives just as much as it applies to our Constitution. For almostall of us, there will be times when we will be tempted in our professional lives,and when these times come, if we have fixed and clear principles-principlesthat are written in bold letters in our conscience-then we may be able to findour way through. If we don't have fixed and clear principles then it is veryeasy for us to go astray. I am sure that you know that many lawyers have goneastray in this way. In a sense, our legal training makes us particularlyvulnerable in this regard because we know certain secrets. We know theweaknesses that are inherent in all rules. We have been trained to spot theambiguities in language and to capitalize on the ambiguities in language. Thismakes us particularly susceptible to the belief that we can make any rule meanwhatever we want it to mean to suit ourselves or to suit our clients, and that wecan exempt ourselves and our clients from the operation of the rule. So welawyers need to be especially vigilant that we do not succumb to thistemptation because the rules that matter most are the rules that really cannot bebent.So far I have spoken about the way in which our Constitution guards againstrash and unwise change, but this is only half the picture. Our Constitution hassurvived and flourished because it was designed to accommodate change,because America is and always has been a nation of change. Our Constitutionwould not be an authentic expression of what we are as a people if it did notrecognize this feature of our national character.In one of the most important decisions that the Supreme Court ever issued,Chief Justice Marshall famously proclaimed that our Constitution was"intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to thevarious crises of human affairs."2 The Constitution did not, he said, "attemptto provide, by immutable rules for exigencies which, if foreseen at all, musthave been seen dimly, and which can be best provided for as they occur."3In other words, the Constitution, while providing a basic structure ofgovernment and a few fixed principles and rules of operation, otherwiseentrusts the future to the decency and to the good sense of the Americanpeople. And in this way, the Constitution is a very optimistic document. Ifthe Framers had lacked confidence in the Americans of the future, then theywould have tried to nail everything down. They would have written aconstitution that has hundreds of thousands of words, but they didn't think thatthat would work. And what is more important, they did not think that it wasnecessary. They had confidence in the American people, and they welcomedthe changes that they knew would be inevitable.2. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 415 (1819).3. Id.[Vol. 58:1Commencement AddressAs you graduates leave here today, I hope that you have this optimism andthis openness to change, because we live in a time of great change, whether welike it or not-a time of change for our country, for our world, for the way inwhich we live our lives on a daily basis, and surely for the legal profession.And the only prediction that I would make with any confidence about theworld that you will see twenty-five years from now, thirty-five years fromnow, fifty years from now, is that it will be in many very important ways, inmany important respects, quite different from the world that I have known.But each new generation of Americans has accomplished the task ofreconciling what is indispensable about our heritage with the changes that wehave accepted and welcomed. And that is your challenge: to continue thateffort. I am sure that I speak for everyone who is here today to congratulateyou on your achievements when I say that we are counting on you, and wehave faith in you to rise to the challenges that lie ahead.In meeting those challenges I hope you will take two more lessons from ourlegal system. The first of these is respect for calm reason. Our legal system isbuilt on the premise that it is possible for fair and open-minded people to solvetheir problems by reasoning together, by a process of rational and respectfulargumentation. This process begins with a disposition to question everythingand to demand a reason for everything. The aim of this questioning is notskepticism, but knowledge, and I hope that none of you ever lose faith inreason as a path to truth, or in our ability to reason with each other calmly andtolerantly and courteously, and to work together in good faith to solve ourproblems and our differences.Our legal system is fueled by rational argumentation. That is something thatI am sure has been a focus of your entire time at law school. But our legalsystem does not exalt reason above everything else. As I am sure you know, ifyou have read any opinion issued by any court in this country, the text is full ofcitations to past court decisions.You graduates are familiar with the doctrine of stare decisis, but on the off-chance that there are any non-lawyers in the room-and in Washington, D.C.,you don't expect to encounter anybody who isn't a lawyer (possibly some havesneaked in here today)-stare decisis means to stand by things decided. Insimple terms, the doctrine means that the court will generally follow a priordecision, even if the court would not reach the same decision today. Staredecisis is a doctrine that respects the judgment-the wisdom--of the past andthat reflects a certain degree of humility about our ability to make sounddecisions based on reason alone. This principle of respect for what has gonebefore has applications in life as well as in law. We here in the twenty-firstcentury know much more than our ancestors did about many things, but notnecessarily about the things that are most fundamental. And so there should bea sort of presumption in favor of a venerable wisdom. We should not be rashabout discarding this invaluable asset.2008]Catholic University Law ReviewI began my remarks by invoking the image of the turtle, and I am going toend with the same image in the hope that maybe twenty years from now youwill say: "Justice Alito spoke at that commencement address, and I don'tremember anything that he said, but he said something about turtles." So I'mending with turtles as well.Turtles figure prominently in the ornamentation of the Supreme Courtbuilding. If you look closely at the east pediment of the Supreme Courtbuilding, you will see on one of the sides a sculpted turtle. There are also fourturtles supporting each of the lampposts in the plaza of the Court, and also inall of the interior courtyards in the Court building. Now when I asked what thesymbolism is for the turtles-"Why are there turtles all over the place?"-Ireceived some conflicting explanations. I was told that the turtle on the eastpediment represents the slow and steady pace of justice. A lot of lawyers thinkthat the slow part, at least, is correct. As for the turtles that are supporting thelampposts, I received several different explanations. One was that they arebased on a myth that turtles support the world-that turtles are supporting theentire weight of the world. The other explanation was that turtles simplysignify longevity; they signify tranquility and stability, endurance, and thepermanence of the most important things. I like that explanation much betterthan the other ones. So with that in mind, I wish all of you here today thoseattributes of the turtle. I wish you long, productive, and satisfying careers inwhat is still a wonderful and honorable profession.Congratulations to all the graduates and to everyone else who is here to helpme congratulate them. And thank you very much for this opportunity to sharethe day with you.[Vol. 58:1

Remarks of Justice Alito: The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law Commencement

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Remarks of Justice Alito: The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law Commencement

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The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law