In a Commencement Day speech to Harvard\u2019s graduates, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter said Thursday (May 27) that judges have no choice but to interpret the U.S. Constitution beyond its plain language, and he criticized those who argue that its meaning \u201clies there \u2026 waiting for a judge to read it fairly.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that though specific parts of the Constitution may be plainly and clearly written, judges are charged with interpreting the entire governing document. Its multiple guarantees are often conflicting and must be settled from the bench. Further, Souter said, the judicial interpretation of facts can change over time, so judges have to \u201cunderstand their \u2026 meaning for the living.\u201d<\/p>\n
Souter said a black-and-white interpretation \u201cfails to account for what the Constitution actually says, and fails just as badly to understand what judges have no choice but to do.\u201d Souter took aim at what he termed the \u201cfair reading\u201d model of constitutional analysis as simplistic and prone to \u201cdiscourage our tenacity \u2026 to keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways,\u201d Souter said. \u201cWe want order and security, and we also want liberty. We want not only liberty, but equality as well. These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do, a court is forced to choose between them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Souter, who stepped down from the court last June after 19 years, was the main speaker at Commencement Exercises, and received an honorary doctor of laws degree earlier in the day. In his 30-minute speech, delivered outdoors at Tercentenary Theatre during the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association<\/a>, Souter said there are some cases where a simple reading of the Constitution\u2019s language suffices to settle the outcome, but those are not the cases that make it all the way to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n Some cases that do, he said, stem from open-ended guarantees made in the Constitution, such as due process and equal protection. But justices have work to do, he said, even in cases involving the Constitution\u2019s clearest language. Souter drew from two famous cases \u2014 the Pentagon Papers and Brown v. Board of Education \u2014 to explain his position.<\/p>\n The Pentagon Papers case pitted the U.S. government against The New York Times<\/a> and The Washington Post<\/a>, which had gained classified documents relating to the Vietnam War. The government sought to suppress their publication on national security grounds. Though First Amendment language is clear that \u201cCongress shall make no law \u2026 abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,\u201d and though the court ultimately did decide for the newspapers, the court also recognized that even freedom of the press \u2014 constitutionally guaranteed in clear language \u2014 was not absolute. That\u2019s because, Souter said, justices are charged with interpreting the entire Constitution, not a lonely amendment. Beyond freedom of the press, the Constitution also grants the government authority to provide national security and gives the president power to manage foreign policy and the military. In this case, the balancing of rights came out on the newspapers\u2019 side, but the decision, Souter said, left the door open to swing differently in the future.<\/p>\n Not only is apparently clear language sometimes not so clear, but apparently simple facts in a legal case are sometimes not so simple, Souter said. Facts can have meanings that change with time and circumstances, and it\u2019s up to judges to interpret them for those living now.<\/p>\n Souter used the example of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that abolished segregated schools to illustrate his point.<\/p>\n He said the facts in the Brown case were analogous to the trend-setting 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, in which the court ruled that separate but equal railroad cars for black and white passengers were acceptable under the Constitution. Souter argued that the main difference in the two cases was not the facts, but rather the passage of time, which affected the justices\u2019 interpretation of the facts.<\/p>\n In 1896, when Plessy was decided, slavery and the Civil War were still relatively recent events. It was against that backdrop that the justices decided that separate but equal rail cars were acceptable. Fifty-eight years later, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the situation had changed, and the horrors of slavery and war had receded.<\/p>\n \u201cThe judges in 1954 found a meaning in segregation that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see. That meaning is not captured by descriptions of physically identical schools or physically identical railroad cars,\u201d Souter said. \u201cThe meaning of facts arises elsewhere, and its judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own. \u2026 When the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation, it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race.\u201d<\/p>\n The Alumni Association\u2019s annual meeting takes place during the afternoon on Commencement Day. In addition to Souter\u2019s remarks, this year\u2019s event featured a welcome by outgoing Alumni Association President Teresita Alvarez-Bjelland \u201976, M.B.A. \u201979, remarks by Harvard Treasurer James Rothenberg \u201968, M.B.A. \u201970, and the annual report to the alumni by Harvard President Drew Faust.<\/p>\n Faust joked during her talk that she was honored to \u201cserve as Justice Souter\u2019s warm-up act.\u201d In her yearly speech to the gathered alumni, Faust highlighted Harvard\u2019s long history of pubic service \u2014 embodied by Souter and his work as a judge \u2014 and the University\u2019s expanding efforts in that area.<\/p>\n Faust highlighted the enormous effort that Harvard students put into public service activities \u2014 donating nearly a million hours to area communities this year alone \u2014 and said the proportion of seniors taking jobs in public service was up dramatically in the past two years, from 17 to 26 percent.<\/p>\n She also highlighted faculty work that seeks to help others and society, from Paul Farmer\u2019s work providing health care to the poor in Haiti, to Kit Parker\u2019s service as a major in the U.S. Army, to Max Essex\u2019s work with those infected by HIV in Botswana.\u00a0 Faculty are laboring on a host of international problems, including fighting climate change, addressing the financial collapse, examining the factors that drive personal financial decisions, improving teacher effectiveness, creating building designs to house Haitian earthquake victims, and improving airflow in Rwandan hospitals.<\/p>\n Faust announced the creation of a group of Presidential Public Service Fellowships, which will fund 10 students across the University in summer volunteer activities. Faust also said that the upcoming Harvard fundraising campaign would explicitly strive to double funding for undergraduate summer service opportunities and increase it for similar activities involving graduate students.<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately more important than students\u2019 brief years at Harvard is what these graduates will do with their diplomas and their lives,\u201d Faust said. \u201cI would like to imagine that whatever career our graduates pursue, whether in the private or the public realm, they will choose to make service an ongoing commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a Commencement Day speech to Harvard\u2019s graduates, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter said Thursday (May 27) that judges have no choice but to interpret the U.S. Constitution beyond its plain language, and he criticized those who argue that its meaning \u201clies there \u2026 waiting for a judge to read it fairly.\u201d He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-582130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}