I served Supreme Court Justice Kennedy In-N-Out at my graduation

you can't see....but my hand is on his bum

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke at my graduation in mid June. As you can see, a group of us were lucky enough to get a picture with him. I spotted him as he stepped out of his secret service caravan and I got all worked up - I totally idolize the SC Justices. After some egging on from my friends, I walked over to him (it's amazing where adrenaline will take you) and abruptly asked for a photo. He welcomed the whole group of us into the frame, and after asking a secret service guy to take a photo for us (no way in hell) we finally got a passerby to take the pic. As we walked away, we all blurted out thank you ( I even snuck in a "good luck with your speech today" - I was getting bold and kiss-assy) and he replied, "God I miss California."

Chief Justice Earl Warren

Justice Kennedy grew up in Sacramento, CA, and as a young law clerk he ran into big time judges like Earl Warren ( Warren became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1953. His Warren Court is praised by liberals *that's me!* for their progressive work regarding the legal status of racial segregation, civil rights, separation of church and state, and police arrest procedure in the United States.) After attending Stanford, the London School of Economics and Harvard Law, Kennedy practiced privately and worked as a professor at U. of the Pacific before making his way to the nation's greatest court.

He was nominated to the position by the Conservative messiah, Liberal nitwit Ronald Reagan who anticipated Kennedy's rulings to be conservative leaning. In a delicious twist not unlike that of Earl Warren, Kennedy turned out to be quite liberal in his rulings, voting to uphold abortion, expand gay rights, restrict capital punishment and erase the legality of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. He is more conservative than I make him sound (hello gun control!), but generally I think he's a strong justice working from within the rule of law.


Anyway, back to me. Justice Kennedy's speech at Stanford came just in time for me to realize that the free sunglasses that had been handed out to all of us for free (*how nice!*) had been coated with ink on the inside that left us all looking like raccoons. Despite this tragedy, the speech went on.

Kennedy encouraged the expansion of law in relatively lawless areas of the world as it can be used as a tool for freedom. Great idea, but it was pretty poorly delivered and I think a lot of the student body (ie med school students, engineers) felt excluded by the message. There were some good parts, and the following is a particularly interesting anecdote about Legally Blonde and and the first Chinese law school students:

This last fall China opened its first law school on the American model, a three year graduate program. The problem was how to select the entering class of about one hundred students from thousands of applicants. For those one hundred or so places there were thousands of highly qualified applicants, scientists and engineers, artists and humanities majors. The list was trimmed again, and then the committee decided to have interviews. One of the questions was: what inspired you to go to law school? Any number of students answered that it was a movie. Chinese students like to build their language skills by watching movies from England and the United States. So I thought, well, the movie that inspired them was "12 Angry Men," or "To Kill a Mockingbird," or "Witness for the Prosecution." Wrong answer. The movie was: "Legally Blonde."

After watching the movie and then talking to the students at the new school, we found an explanation. The movie, after graduating from a college in California, depicts a young woman who decides to go to a famed, rigorous law school in the East. She is, or so it seems at first, the very caricature of some one so frivolous and naïve that the audience cannot take her seriously. So when she goes to the law school she takes a serious risk. She must enter a new, unfamiliar, unfriendly, threatening, small universe, one formerly closed to her. These Chinese students were taking a risk like that.