 "Photo: Trent Barnes")
The Texas Tech School of Law hosted former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as the first guest speaker in a new lecture series bearing her name Friday in the United Spirit Arena.
Speaking at the law school's first Sandra Day O'Connor Distinguished Lecture Series, Lubbock Mayor David Miller declared it Sandra Day O'Connor Day in Lubbock in honor of the U.S. Supreme Court's first female justice, who served on the court from her appointment in 1981 to her retirement in 2006.
"If I had known this was Sandra Day O'Connor Day when I got up today, there's no telling what I might have done," O'Connor said.
In her approximately half-hour lecture to an audience largely composed of Tech law students and faculty members, O'Connor discussed the global role of a judiciary in democracy and law in the 21st century, citing examples of Jim Crow laws and government internment for Japanese Americans during World War II as examples of how democratically elected governments can repress minorities.
"Nearly every democracy has faced the challenge of unfair rules applied by majority groups to minorities," she said. "That's why a second component of the rule of law - a fair, impartial and independent judiciary - is so important."
Opening the lecture was Walter Huffman, dean of Tech's law school, who thanked Mark Lanier, a Tech law school alum and founder of the Lanier Law Firm in Houston, for founding the lecture series and for his $6 million donation for the creation of the Mark and Becky Lanier Professional Development Center at Tech.
Huffman said Lanier also made the justice's visit to Tech possible, crediting him with inviting O'Connor and Arthur Miller, a university professor at the New York University School of Law, to speak at Tech while sitting with them on a panel for a PBS television show.
Lanier, a 1984 graduate of Tech's law school, complimented Arthur Miller as one of his good friends and asked him to introduce O'Connor.
"(Arthur Miller's office) is as you would imagine a Harvard office to be, it had all of the books and the Harvard ambiance, and I kept thinking, 'Bless your heart, with your brains you could have worked at Tech,'" he said. "He's taught law school today at Texas Tech, he has gone to the Llano Estacado Winery and ... spit, and then he's joined us on this stage to give an introduction like no one else could."
In introducing O'Connor, Arthur Miller explained that although she received her law degree from Stanford University Law School, "the Texas Tech of the West," and then practiced law in the private sector and served as a state judge in Arizona, she had many obstacles on her road to becoming a Supreme Court justice.
"Being a product of West Texas did not seem to make the grade, and the fact that she was a ranch girl, a cowgirl, did not make the grade," he said, describing O"Connor's obstacles. "She graduated law school, but she couldn't get a job. It's hard to remember how difficult it was for women in the legal profession when she graduated from law school."
Though O'Connor began her academic life at schools in El Paso, she said she believes growing up on a cattle ranch in New Mexico helped shape her into the person she was in the nation's highest court.
"We didn't have a yellow pages; we couldn't call anybody up if the truck broke or the windmill stopped working or the tank started leaking," she said. "We had to fix it ourselves, and it didn't have to be beautiful, but it had to work - and maybe, just maybe, that's a little bit of what I brought to the court. I'm not sure that solutions I devised are always necessarily beautiful in the Arthur Miller sense, but I wanted them to work, I wanted them to work in this diverse country of ours."
During a question-and-answer session after O'Connor's lecture, Arthur Miller asked her, "How do we protect our judges whenever their independence is challenged?'"
O'Connor said to maintain an independent judiciary, citizens must be educated and understand the need to have an independent judiciary.
"It doesn't mean freedom of the judge to do any crazy thing they might like to do," she said. "It means the assurance that if the judge does the job and applies the law and the Constitution as the oath of office requires the judge to do, that there will not be retaliation against that judge or judges in general simply because the executive or legislative branch doesn't happen to like the result."
Humanity's challenge, O'Connor said she believes, is to make sure people deserve the promise that the rule of law gives them.
"The components of the rule of law - a democratically elected government promulgating rules that apply to majority and minority groups and enforced by a fair, impartial and independent judiciary - are of vital importance today, as they have been in the past," she said. "It is these ideals that I think we have to follow and to build upon in the coming years. If we do that, I think we can see the promise of peace inherent in the rule of law come to fruition."
Be the first to comment on this article!