by David F. Levi, Thomas B. Griffith, Paul W. Grimm, Nathan Hecht, Bridget Mary McCormack and Suzanne Spaulding
Vol. 108 No. 2 (2024) | Judges Under Siege? | Download PDF Version of Article
From threats to physical violence, attacks on judges and courts are surging, and corrosive partisan rhetoric and misinformation are spreading through social media like wildfire. While criticism of judicial decisions is a core aspect of democracy, dismissing judges and the courts as corrupt or illegitimate can degrade the rule of law. At a time of declining public trust in the courts, the growth of violence and unfair attacks against judges is raising alarm bells across the profession.
In June, David F. Levi, president of the American Law Institute and director emeritus of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School, convened a group of judicial and legal leaders to discuss the sources of this growing crisis and to share ideas for how judges and lawyers can respond. In a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges ahead, one sentiment was shared by all: The time to act is now, and the cause is urgent.
Joining the discussion were Thomas B. Griffith, a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and special counsel at Hunton Andrews Kurth; Paul W. Grimm, the David F. Levi Professor of the Practice of Law and Director of the Bolch Judicial Institute; Nathan L. Hecht, the 27th chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court; Bridget Mary McCormack, president and CEO of the American Arbitration AssociationāInternational Centre for Dispute Resolution and a retired chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court; and Suzanne Spaulding, senior adviser for homeland security and director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of the discussion, which was produced as a joint episode of the Bolch Judicial Instituteās Judgment Calls podcast and the American Law Instituteās Reasonably Speaking podcast. Hear the full discussion atĀ judicialstudies.duke.edu/judgmentcalls.
David F. Levi: We are experiencing an unprecedented level of attacks on judges and courts, coming from all parts of the political spectrum, the academy, and the media. How do you see this troubling trend?
Nathan L. Hecht: I feel more vulnerable. Iām in my 43rd year on the bench in Texas, and the concern about threats against the judiciary just continues to grow.
In Austin, about five years ago, a state district trial judge was shot going home from a high school football game. She spent 40 days in the hospital and is still on the bench. The fellow who shot her was a litigant in her court. There are similarly horrible stories all over the country, from Judge Andrew Wilkinson in Maryland to Judge John Roemer in Wisconsin to Judge Esther Salas in New Jersey. There have been alarming threats against the justices on the Supreme Court.
Another big concern these days is cyber threats. We had a cyberattack on the appellate courts in Texas several years ago, and one against the trial courts in Dallas a couple of years ago. Then we also worry about the security of personal information from family court dockets, from criminal court dockets.
Iāve been president of the Conference of Chief Justices, and so I hear all these things from my colleagues, and this increase in threats is quite alarming and disruptive. This is a whole new world we live in.
In addition to these physical and cyber attacks, we also see threats against the judiciaryās legitimacy. For example, President Trump referred to a ruling that he didnāt like as being from an āObama judge.ā Then Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who I think considers himself the opposite of President Trump, said, āas much as I dislike the president, heās right about this. Judges all take sides.ā Chief Justice John Roberts responded by saying, thereās no such thing ā weāre all trying to do the right thing according to our oaths.
But when thatās all the public hears in this polarized, political environment, it affects us at a basic level. You really want to go into divorce court and worry that the judge is not on your or your lawyerās side? Itās one thing to think that about decisions from the highest court in the land, but it gets very real to people when it undermines their confidence in the judiciary. So all of these things contribute to a very difficult environment.
Levi: Bridget, how do you see it?
Bridget McCormack: The ongoing threats to confidence in what courts do are deeply troubling. I sat on a state court like Chief Justice Hecht, and we run in statewide elections. Even though we run on a nonpartisan ballot, parties nominate us, so they take an oversized role in telling people what they think weāre going to be about. It may never match with what, in fact, weāre about, but thatās how the elections are discussed and advertised on TV, where most people get their information.
When the public starts to lose faith in courts and what they do, we donāt have an army or money to back us up, so itās deeply concerning. I do think that polarization has seeped into peopleās views of the judiciary ā and certainly how the media talks about the judiciary. I canāt remember ever reading an editorial about a decision made by my former court that didnāt describe which party nominated us, even if we very rarely had opinions that lined up along party lines.
In the last few years, this has intensified, in large part because weāre hurtling into this future where information travels so quickly. Courts and judges donāt have the tools, or often even the freedom, to defend what they do and why they do it. Thatās another complicating part of this story.
Levi: Two things that you just said really strike me: One is that the ecology of judging in a divided society is really difficult. I think itās on all of our minds that the worst thing that could happen would be for this divisiveness to seep into the judicial culture itself. I donāt think it has, at least not to any significant degree, but itās something we want to watch out for.
The second thing is that people get their information in so many different ways now. And judges, letās face it, arenāt experts in communications, certainly not in modern communication. Theyāre pretty good when they have a quill in their hand, but how do they do with social media? I think we know the answer to that. Tom, what are your thoughts?
Thomas B. Griffith: I donāt want to be a Chicken Little, but I can think of nothing thatās more serious in our country today than this sustained attack on the judiciary.
Like many of you, I was one of those who went to Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were all involved in these rule-of-law building projects with reformers in former communist countries, and that was invigorating, exciting work. So now, in 2024, to see that the work of building confidence in the judiciary needs to be taking place right here is something I would never have predicted and is quite disturbing.
We all know the examples, but Iām going to mention a couple of them. When the Democratic leader of the United States Senate goes on the steps of the Supreme Court and threatens Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh because of what was coming down on the Dobbs decision, thatās just remarkable. He wasnāt just criticizing the decision ā hopefully, weāll always live in a country where we can criticize decisions ā but threatening them: āThe whirlwind that will come, you wonāt know what hits you.ā Maybe thatās a rhetorical device, but itās a rhetorical device that shouldnāt be used by responsible Americans. Sure enough ā though Iām not tying a direct link between the two ā not long thereafter, an assassination attempt was made on Justice Kavanaugh.
We all know this is awful. I checked in on my former colleagues on the D.C. Circuit. There have recently been mailings of fake anthrax to two judges on the district court and swattings of two others [swatting is when a fake emergency is reported to 911 in an attempt to send a large number of armed officers to a targetās home], plus repeated threatening calls and letters, some of which require investigation. Several of the judges have full-time marshal protection. I went to visit one a couple of months ago and could only get to this judgeās chambers after making my way past two fully armed marshals.
Now, I think we know some of the root causes here. Iāll pick one that David and I countered repeatedly in the time of our service on President Bidenās Commission on the Supreme Court ā which was a great experience, by the way, with 35 or so of us studying the history of the debate over the Supreme Court in our nationās history. Yet the battle that I was fighting most often was when my colleagues would say, āThe Roberts Court is illegitimate.ā This is language coming from professors and responsible public thought leaders.
My response was typically, āWell, as far as I remember, each of them was nominated by a president, confirmed by the Senate, and took the oath of office. You can disagree vehemently with their rulings, but letās get rid of the language of illegitimacy.ā Because when public intellectuals and thought leaders call into question the legitimacy of the court, that creates the type of environment that leads to irresponsible people making threats.
Levi: Paul, youāve been one of the leaders in trying to deal with this issue.
Paul Grimm: On the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courtsā website, thereās a policy statement approved by the judicial conference in 2020 acknowledging that for the rule of law to survive, there must be public trust and confidence in the judiciary.1
Combine that with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans donāt really have any contact with the judicial system ā the National Center for State Courts has done some polling on this ā maybe they had a traffic ticket, a domestic relations issue, or a juvenile court matter, and a very small number of them serve on juries.2Ā And we know that civic education has declined in terms of a priority in education. So where do people get their information?
Theyāre getting it increasingly from social media, where the sources are not judicial scholars, may not be well-
intentioned, and may have an ulterior motive. But these are the people who have an audience.
This is a troubling phenomenon, and itās coming from both sides of the political spectrum. You have Democratic public figures and elected officials and Republican public figures and elected officials saying, āItās an illegitimate court, itās a corrupt judge, itās a kangaroo court.ā Those phrases then get amplified through social media.
As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. When the message available in the medium where most people get their news is consistently negative, with talk about illegitimacy, that point is very important. As Justice McCormack and Judge Griffith said, when a judge is criticized for their specific performance in a particular case, they canāt go on TV or write a letter to the editor saying, āThis is why I ruled that way.ā So you get more and more frequent criticisms from people who are elected officials and who are using these divisive, rhetorical flourishes to vilify the institution. And that has a corroding effect within the public.
On top of that, when you use language that is highly charged emotionally, you get an increasing number of threats made against the judiciary. In terms of threats that the U.S. Marshals Service has found credible enough to investigate, there were 179 in 2019. In 2023, that number had almost tripled to 457.3
Furthermore, attacks on the motives and impartiality of state and federal judges are in the thousands. As more public figures attack the legitimacy of the judicial system and the motivation of judges, it degrades public confidence in the ability of the judiciary to be fair and impartial. People then believe that judges are politicians in robes, which they manifestly are not.
If we donāt take measures to address this trend, it may become a death spiral. We all know from the famous Cherokee Nationās case when the Supreme Court ruled that dispossession of the Cherokee Nation from the state of Georgia was a violation of the Constitution.4Ā Andrew Jackson said, āJohn Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.ā When you start to delegitimize the validity of an institution, then people do not believe that the rulings of those institutions are determinative of the issues before them.
Thatās why in 60 of the 61 cases that challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 election, you had state and federal judges, appointed by Republicans and Democrats, unanimously rule that there was no fraud in the election ā and yet a third of the nation still believes there was fraud.
When the public no longer accepts as determinative the outcome of a case that they may disagree with, the fundamental protection of the rule of law is in serious jeopardy.
Levi: Suzanne, youāve been way ahead of the curve in seeing this as a national security issue.
Suzanne Spaulding: Our adversaries believe that one of the most effective ways to weaken us as a nation is to undermine the publicās trust and confidence in our justice system. And they have been doing just that.
In my time at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I have focused primarily on Russian information operations designed to undermine the publicās trust in democracy and in democratic institutions. The evidence we compiled is presented in a report that you can find at CSIS.org called Beyond the Ballot: How the Kremlin Works to Undermine the U.S. Justice System.5Ā It details instances of these trolls and bots in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Internet Research Agency, for example, getting involved in undermining trust all across the country.
One of the cases we highlight is in Twin Falls, Idaho, where they pushed lies designed to provoke outrage against the justice system. We see this repeated over and over. Again, you can disagree about the impact that this might have. But the billions of dollars we see politicians putting into advertising is a pretty good indication of how incredibly powerful that medium can be in affecting the political discourse and opinion in our country.
I always start with three important points. One is that while Russia is the most active in this information war to undermine our democracy, other countries, including China, are taking a page from the Kremlinās playbook.
The second is that these adversaries take advantage of legitimate grievances with our justice system. My friends who are judicial reform advocates are patriots. They are using criticism to try to make the courts better, to make our country stronger ā but that is not Putinās goal. Nor, sadly, is it the goal of some of the voices we hear domestically.
One of the things that I am most concerned about right now ā and that I know is on Putinās radar ā is how undermining the publicās trust will impact the courtsā ability to assist in the peaceful transition of power after the 2024 election. We know itās going to be a close election and cases are already coming through our courts. The inevitable collision of the election in our courts is going to be a huge challenge. Losing sides on the left and the right are going to be tempted to conclude that the courtās decision against them was purely political.
This discussion about whether the court is legitimate raises serious concerns about whether the courtsā decisions will be viewed as determinative. These direct attacks on the courts are incredibly troubling, but there are also indirect attacks that can lead to violence. Itās not well understood that the individual who went after Judge Salas, murdering her son and injuring her husband, was part of an anti-women, incel community online [incel communities are typically groups of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women and are hostile toward women]. Russia is a big promoter of these communities.
These kinds of messages can lead and have led to violence against women, with a particular focus on women judges. It may not be a direct attack on the justice system, but these attacks on women, and particularly women judges, can lead to violence. As Judge Grimm said, weāve seen how attacks on the publicās confidence in the courts can play out in violence in the real world. We saw the death threats against Judge James Robart, who ruled first on what was called the Muslim ban. We saw it on January 6th in the attacks on the Capitol in the face of those 60 cases. Yes, I think this is a very serious concern and a national security issue.
Levi: We seem to be in a state of emergency. How long do you think this has been building? Justice Sandra Day OāConnor was very concerned about the low level of civic understanding of what the courts do in our system. She once told me that she and some of the other justices had met with then-Speaker of the House Tom DeLay. At some point during lunch, DeLay leaned over and said to her, āJustice OāConnor, what you donāt understand is that you and I are enemies.ā
She said to me, āCan you imagine that the speaker of the House considers that a Supreme Court justice is his enemy?ā
It reminds me of what Lincoln said: āWe must not be enemies, we must be friends.ā So this isnāt brand new, but it is worse.
Griffith: When people believe that judges are politicians in robes, it gives them cause to attack the legitimacy of the courts. So, at one level, judges need to be careful not to do that, right? They need to be careful to keep their oath. I interviewed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett at the 2024 National Governors Association.6Ā For an hour, they talked about the way the Supreme Court works, the collegiality, and the transparency. The theme they sounded again and again was, āweāre not politicians, weāre struggling with law.ā They got a standing ovation from the nationās governors ā who are very political ā that was exuberant.
I believe itās incumbent upon the judiciary to be proactive in getting out there to tell people how we do our jobs. If the people could see how the judiciary really operates, their confidence in it would increase. Obviously, you canāt talk about individual cases, but just to let the public know how the judiciary goes about its work. I think itās incumbent upon state bar associations and lawyers everywhere to stand up for the judiciary and to insist that no, theyāre not politicians.
This is what Justice Breyer was talking about for the last couple of years before he stepped down. He wrote a lot of dissents, and yet he insisted that what you were seeing at the Supreme Court was not partisan politics, it was wrangling over difficult issues of law. That message needs to be pressed by the judiciary.
Grimm: Part of this issue goes back to the fact that confirmation hearings have become so rancorous. The questions being asked of candidates donāt seem to have much to do with their qualifications or their ability to be impartial and follow the law, but rather with aspects of their lives that have never been pried into before.
Weāre also a very highly divided nation, so everything seems to line up with half the country going one way and half going another way. All this has been developing for a long time, and that means itās not going to change overnight. So we need to be both reactive and proactive. Reactively, Rule 8.2 of the American Bar Associationās Model Rules for Professional Conduct, Comment 3 says that lawyers are obligated ethically to defend the judiciary and judges who have been unfairly attacked.7Ā I stress unfairly attacked because no one here is saying you canāt criticize a decision or a court. Itās just that you donāt vilify.
So we have to respond. The problem is that there are 1,300 bar associations in the United States and no coordination. One of the things that weāre doing at the Bolch Judicial Institute is convening the Defending the Judiciary project.8Ā Many of the major bar associations in the United States have agreed to participate. Our goal is to get the bar involved to respond quickly in a neutral, nonpartisan, factually accurate way when there are individual attacks against the judiciary.
The other thing is exactly what Judge Griffith said: Weāve got to be proactive. The judges have got to get out there and engage with the public. The state court judges do that; because 30 or so states elect their judges, they are already interacting with the public, and thatās so important.
Weāve got to engage with the public in a way that does not deal with individual courts but that opens the windows and the shutters to see how judges actually operate. Then, of course, we as judges have to behave. We have to make sure that as we express our opinions, we do so in the most neutral and respectful fashion. That we show our work. That we engage with the public in appropriate ways to help them understand what the judiciary does.
All of that, if done on a sustained, continuous basis, will help us repair these things. But we canāt just do this in a half-hearted way.
Levi: Nathan, youāve been working on this for a long time. What can we do?
Hecht: We canāt talk about our cases. We canāt talk about our decisions. We probably canāt counter-engage in the political dialogue. But what we can do is make the place run better. We can improve the court system. As Chief Justice Roberts said, federal judges need to engage in civics courses in the community.9Ā Just get out there and talk about the importance of these things ā and be seen as not talking about a case but talking about the importance of the institution.
On the state side, we have so many initiatives that we use to try to show the integrity of the justice system: improving mental health in the justice system, addressing the opioid crisis, bail reform, juvenile justice reform, fixing guardianships. Otherwise, all these things get under peopleās skin. They give them a cause to say, āand besides that, I donāt like what the court is deciding.ā It just adds to that. Legal aid to the poor, again, is something that we can point to and say, āSee there, the justice system is really trying to promote justice.ā
Chief Justice McCormack wrote the bible on this in her Yale Law Journal article several years ago, Staying Off the Sidelines: Judges as Agents for Justice System Reform.10Ā It lays out not only that we really need to do this but how we can do it, and why itās ethical to do it, in very productive, positive steps. So, thatās what the 30,000 state judges in the country are trying to do ā to counter both the propaganda that Suzanne refers to and the political dialogue at home.
Levi:Ā Bridget, Nathan gave you an opening there. Whatās your view?
McCormack: I think it was just Nathan and my dad who read it, so maybe publishing in The Yale Law Journal was not the right place. I should have done ten short snippets for TikTok, and then maybe weād get somewhere.
It is imperative for judges to engage in their communities, whether thatās their local community or their legal community. Thereās no reason why judges canāt engage that way to build public confidence. I also wrote a piece a couple of years ago about why judges should be on social media. Iāve studied all of the ethical rules carefully, and thereās no reason why judges canāt engage that way. Again, I published it in a law review, so probably nobody ever read it. But I do think that if we can help courts do the business that they do ā and here, I mean state courts (no offense to my federal judicial colleagues) ā but 95 to 96 percent of criminal and civil cases happen in state courts. And state courts have been underwater for a couple of decades and reliant on the political branches of government to fund them to get their heads above water, and thatās complicated in this highly partisan moment.
But we should all care about it, because if state courts can deliver clearer, better justice and resources to the people in their communities who need them, thatās the single best thing we can do to grow the publicās confidence in courts and their work.
There are just unlimited ideas for how to do that, and I do think there is an awful lot of room to do some good in that particular way. So I, for one, would focus on that ā for example, figuring out how to respond to the eviction docket crisis and debt-collection docket crisis in a way that everybody thinks is fair and understandable.
Then, through social media, people could understand why the court does what it does, because the court could explain it in a way that makes sense. If courts worked as well as everything else works on their iPhones, say, we could do an awful lot to move the publicās view of courts from a not-great place to much higher esteem.
Levi:Ā Why donāt you expand on that a little bit? COVID was kind of a wake-up moment, or at least an opportunity to make the transition to a more accessible court system. To their credit, courts all around the country embraced the opportunity to get people justice during a pandemic. The courthouses were closed, but employees and judges were working from home. People who never wouldāve showed up in the past could suddenly get onto a speakerphone or Zoom. They didnāt want to be evicted, and they wanted to be heard. How can we build on this?
McCormack: The pandemic gave us an opportunity to figure out how to do things that served our communities better than before. People who might not have shown up if their hearing were in a courthouse ā because they had transportation trouble, childcare issues, or were at a job from which they had no time off ā could go to a breakroom and appear through their phone. Our default rates in self-represented dockets went down significantly.
At the same time, because we were doing business online, most state courts made it so people could watch those hearings on a YouTube channel or on Facebook Live. That, too, grew public confidence, because then people besides my dad could watch what was happening in our courts. I have sent a letter every time that Congress has asked about cameras in federal courts. I know some federal courts allow it, but the U.S. Supreme Court doesnāt, and I think it would help if people could see the way the Court does business.
I will say, to my disappointment, you would have thought that the lessons we learned would have impacted how courts charted their paths forward. But very few state courts have made remote participation the norm in those dockets where weāve learned that it made a difference. Again, I think it takes more time. Sometimes it takes new skills and more money, so that puts state courts, in particular, in a tough position.
But I would hope that we would take those lessons and move forward with them.
Levi:Ā Suzanne, what do you recommend?
Spaulding: I think the emphasis on transparency is critically important. Too many Americans really just donāt understand how the justice system works. If you take the most recent example of the conviction of the former president and the discussions online around the jury and how that whole thing was ārigged,ā thereās a lack of understanding about the jury selection process and how that works.
Thereās a lot of emphasis out there now on getting people to understand the jury process and to encourage people to serve on juries. I think thatās an important way of enhancing Americansā understanding. We developed a playbook for judges looking for advice and guidance on how to respond to disinformation that undermines public trust in our judiciary, and that is available through the National Center for State Courts.11Ā Itās really important to be ready in advance, because if you wait until the disinformation is underway, youāre never going to catch up.
Civics education is really important, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies launched Civics at Work to increase the knowledge and skills of adults by reaching them through the workplace. I think understanding our aspirations for our justice system and our judiciary, and the ways in which it can be held accountable, is really important.
I often cite Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.12 He wrote: āItās institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of āour institutionsā unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other, unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about. . . .ā13Ā All of us, as Americans, must understand how much we depend on the rule of law and take the courtās side to preserve the social compact.
So I think there is a lot that we need to do over the long term to improve the institutions, but also over the short term to improve American understanding about how important this is.
Levi: Nathan, judges and judiciaries often donāt have the most sophisticated communications capabilities. If you think about corporate America or the universities, they have people who are tremendously well-trained in dealing with mass media, whereas courts tend not to have funding for this sort of thing. Even Supreme Court justices seem to be acting on their own when theyāre dealing with a crisis. Crisis management is something that institutions need to be able to do, because we live in that kind of a world where thereās a crisis it seems every other day. How can we up our game here?
Hecht: The National Center for State Courts is convinced that we need to brag more. When we do accomplish some of these things or make important changes, then there needs to be some public awareness of that. During COVID, we wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times about how we are trying to handle the eviction crisis during the pandemic14Ā and got lots and lots of calls about that saying, āthank goodness youāre doing that.ā When we developed a program with Chief Justice Loretta Rush in Indiana to deal with the opioid crisis, we took it on tour. We got the surgeon general involved. We had press conferences. We tried to show people this is what weāre doing.
Then there is legal aid for the poor ā thatās just a constant PR message in lots of states, focusing on how the justice system actually helped this veteran, this domestic violence victim, these eviction cases. We are not good communicators, but judges are famously great conveners. So we can get the help we need. The National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Chief Justices are very committed to that.
Levi: What about on judicial misconduct? Sometimes, it can be inadvertent, but then thereās real misconduct where judges simply are not behaving properly. Yet it seems most systems donāt have a very swift and sure way of dealing with these things.
Griffith: The American public has to be convinced that thereās not corruption in that sense. But Iād say my greatest concern is with the perception that judges are partisans in robes, and that is tougher to get at. But it has to start with judges not being partisans in robes. I think it also includes the need for people to have a better understanding of how the judiciary actually works. That, I think, has got to come from the judges ourselves, describing the process by which decisions are made.
In 15 years on the D.C. Circuit, I never once saw a colleague cast a vote that I thought was tainted by his or her partisan priors. We had plenty of disagreements about all sorts of issues, but I never thought that one of my colleagues was trying to stick it to Obama or win one for Bush.
Judges donāt think that way. Yet when I describe that, particularly to students who I teach, they donāt believe it. So, in my mind, our deepest problem is to show that weāre not just partisans in robes.
Levi:Ā Do you have any parting reflections?
Hecht: Iāll just say, weāve got to do better. Thereās nothing more critical than this. The rule of law is just essential to our democracy and our republic. I would mention one other thing on physical violence ā the U.S. Senate recently passed a bill to fund more training and protection for state court judges. Itās getting attention even in the halls of Congress that itās never had before.
McCormack: Again, public confidence is the whole ballgame. The rule of law is just a set of ideas that depends on that confidence. I think itās an all-hands-on-deck moment.
Griffith: To me, itās a call to all lawyers in America. I really think this is your primary obligation right now. Whoever you are as a lawyer, you need to stand up for the American judiciary, warts and all, against these sorts of attacks from politicians.
Grimm: I think that the one glimmer of hope now is a widespread recognition that this is the time that we have to act. But we have to accept as the basic premise that weāve waited too long, and we canāt wait any longer.
Spaulding: We are not calling for blind-faith trust in the justice system but for an appreciation for the critical importance of respect for the rule of law in our judiciary. We ask people to have confidence in democracy ā not because its current implementation is perfect, which it certainly is not ā but because of its capacity to change. That change and that reform of the justice system, to live up to our aspirations, will only come about if we are the informed, engaged agents of that change.
We must engage in this effort. I think that, frankly, is the challenge of āThe Star-Spangled Bannerā that we sing, that I sing, at so many baseball games as a big fan. Iām always struck, it starts with the question, āCan you see the flag?ā
It ends with that same question, the battleās over, but they donāt know who won. Theyāre asking, āDoes the flag still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?ā We are the ones who have to ensure that the answer to that question is yes.
Levi: I canāt thank all of you enough. This was certainly a sobering discussion. But it was also inspirational, because you are such great people, and you care so deeply about this topic, and all of you in your own way are working on it. And that is a source of comfort and hope for all of us. Thank you.
Thomas B. GriffithĀ is a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He is special counsel at Hunton Andrews Kurth and a fellow at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.
Paul W. GrimmĀ is the David F. Levi Professor of the Practice of Law and Director of the Bolch Judicial Institute. He is also a retired judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
Nathan L. HechtĀ is the 27th chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court and the longest-serving member of that court. He is a past president of the Conference of Chief Justices.
David F. LeviĀ is president of the American Law Institute, director emeritus of the Bolch Judicial Institute, former dean of Duke Law School, and the former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
Bridget Mary McCormackĀ is president and CEO of the American Arbitration AssociationāInternational Centre for Dispute Resolution and a retired chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.
Suzanne SpauldingĀ is senior adviser for homeland security and director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
