Behind the Scenes at the Supreme Court
The week after spring break, my learning community here at Ohio State, The John Glenn Civic Leadership Community, took a trip to Washington D.C. While we were there, we met congressmen and congresswomen, saw the National Public Radio home office, and took tours of a few different government buildings. But the jewel of the trip came on the third day there.
A friend of a friend is a Yale law graduate and is now a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the US Supreme Court. He agreed to give four of us a tour of the back rooms of the court. The clerk, JJ, showed us offices, a hidden upper-level workout facility with a full basketball court jokingly called “The Highest Court in the Land,” and a back entrance to the court’s chamber. As we walked through the marble, Greek-revival building that looked so similar to all of the other buildings we had gone into thus far, the weight of where we were became so apparent to the four of us. I remembered two years ago, when my best friend called me in tears because the court had rendered a decision that “no longer would liberty be denied” to her and her girlfriend’s community. I remembered last year when the court decided that colleges could give historically marginalized people a more fair shot at getting out of their situation. I thought about the 1950s in America and the expansion of Civil Rights and of equality due to the activism of the Warren Court. This was where the rights and liberties of the American people were preserved. This was where the American Democracy shone. This was where the greatest legal minds of our lifetimes battled it out to preserve, protect, and defend the marginalized, the meek, and the powerless.
And all at once there was a fire lit deep inside me and I had a vision of my future so vivid and clear that I would do anything to attain it. I had a vision of myself thirty, forty years from now at my hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm me as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And from that day dream I knew what I needed to do. Work. And when I think I’ve worked enough, work a little more. I knew that from then on, I would have the motivation and resolve to work myself through college to earn admission to a prestigious law school, earn a judicial clerkship, and work my way through the ranks of the private and then public sectors until I got the call one day that my name had been put forward as the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Even now, the fire has not waned with time, like so many interests have in the past. There is a certain feeling that comes with knowledge that you have found your own true calling, that you know why someone or something put you on this Earth and why you’ve been blessed with intelligence and a caring and loving heart. It’s a feeling of hope and of determination. It’s a feeling of consternation but also a feeling of strength to overcome obstacles. And it is a feeling that will persist. The fire will not go out. Not even when, decades down the road, I am doing my life’s work: protecting and defending the rights and liberties of the marginalized, of the meek, and of the powerless.