Advisory Opinions - The Hallway Interviews

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Sarah Isgur and David French chased down a handful of authors over the weekend at the National Constitution Center for hallway interviews about life, liberty, and ... witches. The Agenda: —Jeff Rosen teaches us about happiness —Virtue vs. pleasure —Salem witch trials! —Nobody burns, they hang —What does it mean to be a lawyer? —Living beyond the billable hour Advisory Opinions is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Imagine how it looks. Is there more? Yeah, big time. Nova Kane, forming theaters March 14th. You ready? I was born ready. Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isgur, that's David French, and have we got a special episode for you today. We're going to talk about what the founders were reading, witches, and

lawyer mental health as well. Yep, you're going to hear from Jeff Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Stacey Schiff, author of The Witches, and Judge Sherrilyn Krauss of the Third Circuit. Let's go. David and I are here at the National Constitution Center, President's Council retreat. And we are sitting here with Jeff Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. And before we get into your book, which I'm so eager to talk about, I feel like a lot of people listening may not really know what the National Constitution Center does and all about this

venerable Philadelphia institution. Well, I would love to tell you. And as I say at the beginning of all of our programs and podcasts, the National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the U.S. Constitution among the American people on a nonpartisan basis. It is such a privilege to be part of this great institution. It's an inspiring museum in Philadelphia

on Independence Mall with the best view of Independence Hall in America. And it's this incredible educational platform and convening space that brings together liberals and conservatives on all platforms to discuss the constitutional issues at the heart of American life. And for those who have visited Washington, D.C. in the past,

maybe drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, they would have seen a five-story tall engraving of the First Amendment. And that has moved to the National Constitution Center. It has to the grand atrium overlooking Independence Hall. It's now the most inspiring constitutional space in America to sit there with the words of the First Amendment, 50 feet high, 70 tons of marble, and then to gaze out on Independence Hall, the room where it happened, is just electric. And then you see

life-size statues of the framers in Signers Hall, a new exhibit on the First Amendment, exhibits on Reconstruction and the 19th Amendmentth Amendment. Next year we're opening our new founding principles gallery with a rare copy of the Constitution, biographies of the founders telling the founding story. It is just the most inspiring place. Imagine. By the way, I very much remember the unveiling and dedication of the First Amendment there in the building because on the drive home from Philadelphia back to DC, I stopped for a Philly cheesesteak at Tony Luke's. And as I was sitting there enjoying my Philly cheesesteak,

we got the leak of the Alito Dobbs draft. And so going 95 on 95 on the phone with everyone I could think of trying to see if we could confirm whether it was real. So it was a very dramatic and very constitutional day in many ways. Every visitor to the National Constitution Center has the same experience. Okay, we're here to talk about your book, The Pursuit of Happiness,

how classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America. Let's start at the very beginning. What does The Pursuit of Happiness mean? Well, it was an unusual COVID era reading project that gave me the answer. I set out during COVID to read the classical works of ancient moral philosophy that inspired Jefferson

and the other founders when they put that phrase in the pursuit of happiness. What I learned from a year of reading this golden literature is that for the founders happiness meant not feeling good, but being good. Not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. And by virtue, they meant self-improvement,

character improvement, being your best self, using your powers of reason to moderate your unreasonable passions and emotions so you could achieve the calm tranquility that defined happiness. So I have been loving this book. I've probably written about it more than anybody. I've written about it a couple of times and columns at the Times.

And I'll tell you what I love about it is it really completes the story of the founding in this sense that it really does articulate the kind of a social compact that existed, which was the government is created in part to protect your liberty, but how do you exercise your liberty? And that's what I found so powerful about the book was, here you have the founders who are busy securing liberty, but also training themselves in self-restraint.

So it's liberty, not libertinism. And there's a big difference. And so talk a bit about how would the founders actually do this? This was one of the more interesting parts of the book, that they would actually engage in a kind of a self-examination process. Well, first of all, David, I have to thank you so much for your support of the book and for your enthusiasm. It's made all the difference.

And it's just great to talk to you about it. Before doing this reading, I hadn't seen or felt on a deep level the connection between personal self-government and political self-government. We read all the time that Washington said, without virtue, the republic will fall. But I had to really understand that this was a psychological quest for self-mastery to understand what that meant in practice. And in practice, it means that you have to spend every moment of the day focusing on achieving that calm tranquility that allows you to focus deeply on

others rather than your ego-based emotions, so that you can serve the public interest rather than the interests of a particular self-interested faction. How do they do it? Ben Franklin offers this project of 13 virtues, and he says every day you should focus on a different one of the classical virtues like prudence or temperance or tranquility or resolution and put an X mark in the box where you fell short. I've tried this. It's incredibly depressing because there's so many X marks. I wouldn't be very depressing for me to do that. But it turns out the founders tried it too. And you have John and Abigail Adams. It comes

from Pythagoras, who is the founder of Greek moral philosophy who distinguished between reason, passion, and desire. Reason in the head, passion in the heart, and desire in the stomach. And says that every night before we go to bed, we have to see how we've done in avoiding unproductive emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear so we can achieve the golden mean. There's that chart at the end of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics of the golden mean of emotions for every passion or emotion. There's an excess or a deficiency, so you seek not exuberance or despondency, but moderation. This seemed like philosophical abstractions to me until I understood that it's a project of hourly mindfulness

and self-accounting and an attempt to become more perfect. Today we might think about it in a spiritual context as they did. And the wisdom traditions of the East and the West focus on tempering your thoughts. We are what we think. Life is shaped by the mind, says the Dhammapada. The Bhagavad Gita says, renounce and enjoy. Renounce attachment to external events or

controlling the thoughts or emotions of others and enjoy eternal salvation. And for the founders of this tradition, which many of them practiced as Christians, be perfect, says Jesus in Matthew. They saw this as a personal as well as a political imperative. So when you see it that way and realize that the goal is just this feeling of calm tranquility, then it becomes not only a right but a responsibility to try to practice this. When I turned to the last page of this book, I then picked up my phone and deleted Twitter and Instagram off my phone as its own kind of temperance and emotional regulation. I then went to dinner and was really enjoying what I was eating. And I was thinking to myself,

the proper way based on Jeff Rosen's book to approach this is to say I am satiated. And even though I would enjoy an additional bite of this, I should not have the additional bite. I was unable to do that. I did not. I was not able to attain that level of restraint. You're so right. It's the marshmallow test. That Stanford test from the 70s, the kids who demanded one marshmallow right away would get one. If they could wait for 15 minutes, they'd get two. Impulse control, delayed gratification. That's John Locke's definition of virtue in the book of the essay concerning human understanding that is Jefferson quotes in the Declaration of Independence. It's reason over passion. For me, it was all

about habits. To write this book, I just engaged in the completely unusual, weird project, which I got from Jefferson's reading list of getting up every morning before dawn, reading moral philosophy for two hours, watching the sunrise, and then writing these sonnets to sum up the wisdom. I don't know where this whole thing came from. But the project led to a big change of habit. So for me, the takeaway was now, I'm not writing sonnets in the morning and not always catching the sunrise, but I have to read for an hour before I can browse or surf. And that life hack has totally changed my life. And I've gotten so much more done.

I've written another book which is about to come out. And it just is a way of practicing the path. And pursuing happiness. As in, I think sometimes we think the word virtue doesn't mean happiness as we define it today. I actually think it does mean happiness as we define it and that what we pursue as pleasure is actually not happiness. Even as we define that, it is not happy.

The people on social media are not happy people. The people who are sort of like doom scrolling Instagram reels and watching funny videos and 30 second things might have fleeting humor or whatever else, but it's not happiness, like the true life satisfaction and happiness that anyone would define it as. Absolutely not. It's not human flourishing. You're not being your best self and stretching yourself and using your talents and capacities to their fullest.

I think of how I feel after a binge of Instagram scrolling or tweeting and you just feel like you've wasted a huge amount of time and are full of self-approach and self-loathing. It's an immediate sugar high because you get gratification from the reaction of tweeting your angriest thoughts or whatever, but then you just feel gross afterward. Whereas you spend an hour reading books. That was the habit I got back into. I'd gotten out of the habit of actually reading books that weren't related to my immediate deadlines. It's incredibly stretching and fulfilling to read books, but it's a practice and a habit. I have to resist the temptation to scroll right to the email instead of left to the book. And I also have to resist the temptation to put it down.

You've got to stay with a book to actually learn from it. But just the habit of reading books every day is the best new habit I've ever picked up. And in the long term, you feel better. You know, I wanted to return back to this personal and political union. So you have, you know, without virtue, the Republic will fall. You have Adams saying, our constitution was made for a moral and religious people, holy and adequate to the governance of any other.

And I feel as if we have, if you're going to sum up in very blunt language, a kind of founding philosophy, it would be saying to the king or to royal authorities, you can't tell me what to do. And then it turns around and says, I't tell me what to do. And then it turns around and says, I will tell me what to do. And in a, but in a very, in a, in a very responsible kind of way. But now the modern zeitgeist seems to be,

you can't tell me what to do and I will do what I want. And those are two different, very different formulations. One is, one is, as you've identified, something that can be immensely morally, emotionally fulfilling and also happens to make our system work. The other one is empty, ultimately. It's the constant sugar highs and it makes our system break. It is such a good way of distinguishing a focus on immediate gratification and autonomy and a focus on self mastery and self improvement.

I will do what I want. I'm going to have that marshmallow now. I'm going to just own the libs or own the conservatives because it feels good in the moment. And I will tell me what to do requires thinking for myself. And remember that line from Tacitus, which Jefferson and Louis Brandeis and John Locke and everyone liked to quote,

for the right to think as we will and speak as we think, that requires taking the time to read the text yourself and to make up your own mind. You can't make up your own mind unless you take the time to educate yourself so that you don't just associate yourself with one faction or one label or one party. It requires work, it requires self-discipline,

and it requires a recognition that we, the quest for perfection is incredibly demanding, and none of us will become perfect. Franklin has that great line to illustrate the virtue of humility, imitate Jesus and Socrates, and it's a very high bar. So I want you to tell a story that you just told us because I think it's very powerful and it reaches to is there a hunger for this?

The question is there a hunger for virtue ethics? You and I have something in common. We both, I think, in recent months have spoken to BYU, which is a wonderful experience. If you ever get a chance to speak at BYU, the hospitality is off the charts, the folks there are kind. But you told the story about your time there where you asked the students to do something, and I thought that was very powerful. So could you share that? Absolutely. It is an incredible honor to talk to 5,000 BYU students in their weekly convocation. And I was talking about the pursuit of happiness.

And at the invitation of the dean, I invited all the students to rise and recite together the oath that they take as part of their mission joining the LDS church. And they recite 10 virtues that are quite similar to Franklin's and pledge to uphold them. So I asked them to stand and recite it from memory, and in about 20 languages, they recited

these 10 virtues. And people were weeping because it's so powerful. BYU folks said that they'd never had so many people recite it together. And the LDS Church is devoted to a virtue-driven life of purpose with a strong focus on the Constitution as well. And as part of their history, they live that connection between personal and political self-government, and it was incredibly moving and an incredible honor to have that experience. So in many ways, this book is Jeff Rosen's Reflections on the Founders, Reflections on the Stoics.

So can we go back to the beginning of that chain? Because I feel like the word stoic, first of all, is part of our language in a way that doesn't exactly track the Stoics to be stoic. It does imply a certain amount of emotional regulation, but I think in our language, it also entails a certain distance from something, which is not necessarily what the Stoics were actually doing, and why the founders picked the Stoics and why they picked certain Stoics and what books. You have a great list in the back of your book of what the main books that the founders

were all reading and trading around, and maybe you could provide some reading wrecks, light reading. Absolutely. Mild entertainment. Well, that was what started me on this whole project. I saw that both Franklin and Jefferson had come up with lists of 12 or 13 virtues, and both of them chose as the motto for their projects, a passage from this book by Cicero that I'd never heard of, The Tusculine Disputations. This is Cicero's manual on overcoming grief. It's amazing that that was the standard manual for happiness in the founding era. Franklin's quotation was,

without virtue, happiness cannot be, and Jefferson's was longer. It was, he who's achieved tranquility of soul, who's neither unduly despondent or exuberant. He is the calm and self mastered man of whom we are in quest. He's the happy man. I saw that I figured I've got to read the Cicero book because it was so important to Franklin and Jefferson. What else to read? Then I came across this amazing reading list, which your listeners have got to

check out. It's Jefferson's letter to Robert Skipwith recommendations for a private library his friend Skipwith was constructing a library and Jefferson would send this list to kids who were going to law school or anyone who asked him how to be educated. It's an amazing list. It has novels and ancient philosophy and history and law and science. But what really struck me was the section on moral philosophy. At the top of the list was Cicero's Tusculent Disputations, then Cicero's On Duties, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Epictetus, Seneca's Letters, some Enlightenment philosophers, Locke, Hutchison, Bolingbroke, and Hume. I read that list because I was struck that I

hadn't read any of the books on it, despite my incredible liberal arts education, which I'm so grateful for. These books had just fallen out of the curriculum by the time I was in college in the 80s, yearning for guidance about how to lead a good life. I was not satisfied by the materialism and hedonism celebrated by popular culture, at least not satisfied in the long term. And I was looking for some guidance about how to lead a good life. And these were the core books that Jefferson recommended. Now, they're not all Stoics. If you're going to be strict about it, some were Epicureans.

And at the end of his life, Jefferson pronounced himself to be an Epicurean rather than a Stoic and so forth. But Cicero, who was not formally a Stoic, kind of summed up the essence of it in these books, which were the most widely read in the founding era. And what's the really striking thing is it's the same lesson as all of the wisdom traditions. And John Adams noted the similarity between the Stoic dichotomy of control, which says don't focus on controlling the thoughts or emotions of others, focus on the only thing you can control, which is your own thoughts and emotions, and the lesson of the Bhagavad Gita, which says renounce

and enjoy, renounce attachment to external results and enjoy eternal bliss. So, because of their deep reading, the founders understood the essential similarities between the wisdom traditions of the East and the West. But stoicism was basically the best practical philosophy, how to live then as many are finding it now. That's why the founders cited Cicero so much. Will you speak a little bit about Washington? The chapter on Washington, I think, is a standout to me in the whole book.

I've reread it. It's got all these dog-eared pages and stuff. I don't know why. The chapter on Washington, I think, just is a standout to me in the whole book. I've reread it, it's got all these dog-eared pages and stuff. And I don't know why, Washington, to me, is a far more distant figure than the other founders because of perhaps his attainment of quite a bit of stoicism and emotional regulation. But you bring him to life a little bit more than I'm accustomed to through this journey.

And what was his philosophy about his own pursuit of happiness and how well he was attaining it as he is the apotheosis of Washington, both in the Capitol and in our hearts, of him becoming Cincinnati's? It's so moving to see him copying in his youthful commonplace books, injunctions about self-mastery. One of his favorite authors is Seneca on time. He becomes obsessed with clocks and he keeps a really rigorous schedule at all times as so many of the founders do. Ron Chernow, his great biographer, thinks it may have come from the fact that his mom was always nagging him and he was trying to control his temper. He had a volcanic temper and so that he didn't kind

of lash out at her or others, he developed this granite imperturbability and that becomes the source of his greatness. And suddenly, Henry Adams in Democracy has a debate, the characters are right outside of Mount Vernon wondering, is he a paper saint, basically an empty suit, or was he really great? And then when I saw him at Newburgh in the context of his youthful readings, his greatness becomes apparent. That's the most vulnerable moment of the revolution. The soldiers are going to rebel because they can't be paid.

Washington does two things. He has performed his favorite play, Addison's Cato, praising the calming virtues of mild philosophy. And then he theatrically mounts the Temple of Virtue, which is this wooden platform. And he appeals for calm and patience for the classical virtues and says, just hold on a little bit and I'll assure that you're paid. And then he famously struggles to read a letter that a friend has written. He takes out his reading glasses, says, forgive me, gentlemen, I've grown old in your service.

Now I've grown almost blind. And the soldiers weep because they've never seen him confess weakness before. And that combination of sincerity and self-control makes him the greatest man of his age. And then, of course, as you say, the fact that he both didn't turn himself into a dictator, the rebels wanted him to be Caesar and he turned that aside. And then he turns the presidency aside in the model of Cincinnati's, makes him the greatest American of his age. I'm so glad you went to Washington. So I'm going to actually introduce, if you permit me,

I'm going to introduce another book into the conversation because what you said reminds me of a book, Valiant Ambition. I don't know if you've read this by Nathaniel Philbrick. And he charts out the course of the early American Revolution through two men, Benedict Arnold and George Washington. And it was not inevitable in the revolution that George Washington was going to end the war as he began it, commanding the Continental armies, that there were factions who wanted other leaders.

And Benedict Arnold had this moment of real... He was a shooting star. He was the best tactical commander that the colonists had early in the war. And it just strikes me how different our country would be. And you see this in this book, how different the country would be had this internal colonial dispute worked out differently, where Washington recedes and say Arnold advances. And when you think about it in that concept, it really does in a very brass tacks way, I think, illustrate to people that the arguments we have now over whether how does

character matter are silly, are just silly, because it so obviously does matter. It so obviously does. I'm so glad you brought up Arnold. My new book, which will be out in October, is The Pursuit of Liberty, How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America. It's an attempt to follow the oldest thesis in all of American history, how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson over national power and states' rights and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution and executive power over congressional power defines

all of American history. And I just trace invocations of Hamilton and Jefferson by name and all the crucial turning points from 1776 to today. Hamilton and Jefferson both have one demagogue that they fear, and that is Aaron Burr. And it's amazing that at the end of their clashes, Burr, of course, sides with Jefferson, his archrival over Burr, because he thinks that Burr is an embryo Caesar. He says, if we have an embryo Caesar, tis Burr. And every Republican history has fallen to demagogues and to Caesar-like characters who promising, you know, convinced the crowd to exchange their liberty for cheap

luxury and install themselves as dictators. And Burr, Hamilton rightly fears, was conspiring to lead an insurrection in Spanish Louisiana and install himself as an emperor. And that included killing Jefferson in Washington and encouraging a breakup of the Union. The great question throughout the rest of American history is, are the demagogues who periodically rise up, would be Burrs? Are they conspiring to consolidate power in their own hands and subvert the republic? It completely reinforces the point that character matters and the difference between Washington and Burr

is the difference between the success and failure of the Republic. And this book moves beyond just the founders as we would traditionally understand them. We go to John Quincy Adams, we go to Lincoln and even Frederick Douglass. So it's not as if this pursuit of happiness, as you're defining it in this book and as

the founders would have defined it, somehow disappeared by 1830 or something. It was continuing for quite some time. But there's the line in the John Quincy Adams chapter and the motto of the Adams crest that he continues that I sort of want to end on. And that is from the Tusculent Disputations from Cicero, who's actually quoting another guy before him. But it's, he plants trees for the benefit of another century. I'm so glad you found Adam's great quotation from the Tusculine Disputations.

And if I have a hero in the whole book, it's Quincy Adams. He lives the quest more mindfully than anyone else. Just, can I quickly tell the story? So, you know, I thought having a Jewish mom could be challenging. It turns out having a Puritan mom is even tougher. And Abigail Adams is always on his case master your unreasonable passions. He who is slow to anger is greater than he who taketh a village. This creates in the young John Quincy this constant sense that he's making a hash of things and not fulfilling his potential. He's something like 32. He's just turned down a US Supreme Court

appointment and he writes in his diary, you know, I'm squandering my evenings in indolence. If only I had more self-discipline, I might have ended war and slavery. He sets a very high bar for himself. But as it is, I'm just spending too many nights in front of the fire drinking Madura and I'm just making a hash of things. But then he has two great testing nights of the soul. He loses a reelection for president in 1828 and his oldest son, George Washington Adams, commits suicide because he cannot take the pressure of a dad who's constantly exhorting him to be perfect. And he jumps off his team ship and Adams doesn't know if he can continue. He finds strength by spending a year re-reading Cicero, in particular, the

Tusculent Disputations and the Bible. He writes sonnets based on his reading and based on that year of self-reflection, he turns himself into the greatest abolitionist of his age. And he denounces the gag rule and he introduces the constitutional amendment to end slavery. He dies on the floor of the house after voting against the war in Mexico. His last whispered words are, I am content or I am composed. Both of those phrases come from Cicero, from the Tusculent Disputations.

The perfectly self-composed man is he who is tranquil and happy. Back to that Jefferson quotation, the symmetry and power and incredible self mastery of his virtuous life are incredibly moving and inspiring. He, in that passage that you picked, had that sense of delayed gratification. It's the marshmallow test for America. I plan for the benefit of future generations by, as he did

in his opposition to slavery, which didn't bear fruit in his lifetime, but did a generation. I thought I'd end reading just this piece from his diary, which he plants trees, says Statius, for the benefit of another century. For what purpose if the next century were something to him? The diligent husbandman then shall plant trees upon which his own eyes shall never see a berry and shall not a great man plant laws, institutions, a commonwealth." And in many ways that is what the National Constitution Center is doing. That is so beautiful. Can I end with one more Quincy Adams quotation? It's the 50th anniversary of Washington's inauguration,

1830, and it's the Jububilee of the constitution and he's not sure that the republic will survive because civil war is on the horizon he says the only thing that will save us is learning the principles of the declaration and the constitution and he says this is so important that he quotes the book of deuteronomy and says take these principles the declaration on the constitution and place them as frontlets between your eyes. Put them above your doorpost. Bind them to your hands and arms. Whisper them to your children before you sleep. Make them the principles of your political salvation. That is how urgently important it is for us to study and debate and embrace these principles. David and Sarah, I'm so grateful to both of you for your

heroic service here at the National Constitution Center. Retreat your moderation and your thoughtful interventions have just been so inspiring. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Thanks for being here. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With audio erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your

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their best selling Carver Mat Frame with code advisory. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code advisory. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Well, that was a treat. And now we're gonna talk to another guest here at the National Constitution Center retreat, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Stacey Schiff,

and her book, The Witches, Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem. That's right. We're talking the rule of law in the Salem witch trials. And we've got Stacy Schiff now author of so many books that I love. Most recently, I've interviewed you for the Dispatch Book Club about your fantastic book, The Revolutionary about Samuel Adams. But today we are here about

something different. When we think about the Salem witch trials, we think of it being lawless and superstitious. That basically they believe in witches, they see witches everywhere, so they burn witches. And so my first question to you is, are we thinking about this from a rule of law perspective, correctly or incorrectly? Well, I guess there are two answers to that question. There are so many misconceptions about Salem. I mean, first of all, it isn't just Salem, it's 25 communities. Nobody burns, they hang. Not that that's a really tremendously delicate distinction to make.

The rule of law is followed to the best possible, really to the eye-dotting, T-crossing, punctilious extent insofar as one could in Massachusetts in 1692. So, with one little exception, which I'll mention in a second, the nine justices who are seated on the court for the witch trials are none of them judges. So, they are the best in the brightest. They are the best red men in the colonies. They are really the establishment. They are really the establishment. They are men who are—and this is a problem when it comes to anyone diverting from the course—they are men who are in business together, whose families are intermarried, who sit in the same pews in the same churches.

So we're really talking about the establishment embodied. None of them has been to law school. There is no lawyer in the colonies in 1692. There is no law school in the colonies in 1692. There is no law school in the colonies in 1692. But they have read everything there is to be read on the subject insofar as the ministers of New England have allowed books on witchcraft and on law process to be entered into the colonies. So for example, you could read a lot about witchcraft. You couldn't read a lot that was skeptical about witchcraft. There's a certain lock on the system in that case. They follow every procedure that is known to them, but in

17th century courtroom does not resemble a modern courtroom. For example, beyond a reasonable doubt was still years in the future. There was no voir dire. A justice could instruct a jury to re-deliberate and change their minds. There was no defense counsel. It was understood that the judge, insofar as anybody stood up for the defendant, would do so himself. You could be convicted for a different crime from the one for which you entered into the court in the first place. So the standards by which we would understand a trial to be fair were not there, but these men are extremely meticulous in researching how they could possibly rule over

these incidents. The other big thing lingering in the distance is they all believe in witchcraft. It is not a superstitious belief to them. It is dogma. That is true of every single person involved in the trials. And they enter into – they're very unclear about what to do about what is called spectral evidence which is to say – and it sounds ludicrous to us, evidence that only the accuser can see. And spectral evidence is for them the sticking point.

They appeal to all the great authorities, what do we do about spectral evidence? Do we take it seriously? Do we discard it? And essentially they are assured that they should subscribe to it. And that's where the trials go haywire. Let me drill down a little bit on this spectral evidence point. So when you're talking about spectral evidence, you're talking about someone who's accusing an alleged witch and they're saying that they have seen things in the spirit realm.

Is that what spectral evidence means or that they have unique insight into the mind or the heart of the person? So that's my evidentiary question about spec, because that phrase raises so many additional questions. But then the other sort of bigger picture is what you're describing here with a prosecution for witchcraft looks and sounds an awful lot like essentially a theocracy. For people to think about

what is now the state of Massachusetts in that terms, it seems fantastical. So it kind of set a little bit of the stage of what was the nature of the Massachusetts colony at that point. So let me take your theocracy question first just because that helps us to set the stage. When the justices reach out for help and how to adjudicate, they reach out to the ministry. So that's already a definition of theocracy right there. And it is Cotton Mather, who is the great white hope of the New England ministry, who's

at this point a young great white hope, a young very educated minister with the best library in Boston, who essentially volleys answers questions and answers back with them, who reads deeply in all the literature, and who always essentially comes up with an answer that has a nevertheless in it. So his answers are usually things like, I urge exquisite caution in this case, but I do hope for a speedy and robust prosecution. But there's always the but or the nevertheless.

Every one of his pronouncements has that, but he's urging the trials on. So the fact that the ministry is the ultimate authority here would indeed speak to that. The other problem, of course, is because this is a completely religious society, the idea that one shall not allow a witch to live is biblical stricture and there's no going beyond that. So this is not Margaret Hamilton and the Wizard of Oz we're talking about. There is still this completely universal belief that these inexplicables happened because of witchcraft.

And I don't know about your house, if your house is like my house, but my scissors are always missing. So it's not hard to figure out, like everyone has a grudge against a neighbor, everyone has an inexplicable moment. And when the trials really take off, when they really snowball,

every one of those inexplicables is ascribed to witchcraft. So that's a little bit getting towards your point about the spectral evidence. So if I am at home on a Sunday and I'm not at meeting as I should be and I happen to see a yellow bird perched in the tree and the yellow bird begins to claw at me, I might assume that that was the neighbor down the road with whom I have the feud and I might be feeling maybe a little bit susceptible to guilt because I'm not in meeting and I might say that that is my neighbor Sarah Good embodied by this yellow bird and that the next day when my horse falls ill she has done ill to me. I mean it's that kind of connecting these sort of ridiculously disconnected as we would today see them events but the girls

who are in the courtroom doing the accusing and these are girls who are some of them truly afflicted with something, and some girls who are probably counterfeiting those symptoms, are generally calling upon those kinds of – that kind of evidence. They will say they see the accused on the rafters in the meeting house in the course of the trial. No one else can see them. It's the Emperor's No Clothes. No one else can see the accused on the rafters, but people begin to doubt their vision. And then they leave the depositions or they leave the trials and they think they see monstrous creatures by the side of the road. I mean, there is

this contagion of whatever you want to call that, seeing things. We use the Salem witch trials, I mean, witch trials, right? That's a term we now use all the time. Everyone knows what it means to call something a witch trial. And when we talk about the Salem witch trials, we treat them, the people in that time in 1692 in Salem and the other communities, as a joke, as stupid, as superstitious. And when I read this book, one of the biggest takeaways is how they're not, I guess. To put another word on it, they think they are abiding by the rule of law. They think they're doing the best that they have available.

So who's the bad guy in the Salem witch trials? They do think they're doing the best. I mean, they have enlisted the best and the brightest. They feel they are adjudicating this absolutely as planned. There had been a, three years earlier, there had been a woman who has hanged on Boston Common for witchcraft. Probably that case, in fact, had some bearing on what's going to happen in 1692.

It had been rare to prosecute for witchcraft to this extent. There had been witchcraft accusations in Massachusetts. It's only about a quarter of them ended up in convictions. This was an unusual urging forward of a system of justice to which everyone subscribed. I guess I would finger cotton mather it probably, who was the person, who was the ultimate authority in the sense that he's the person to everyone goes. And I say that not because he sits on the court. The chief justice of the court, William Stoughton, is equally clearly guilty of pushing this

thing forward. But it's Cotton Mather who afterwards, who after people realize there has been a miscarriage of justice, who after people have to go home to families who have accused them of witchcraft, writes very privately that he thinks nothing really has been lost in this tragedy, that he feels that this has filled the pews and it has reinvigorated a younger generation and that no real lives were lost in the process. So to my mind, his is an inexplicable blunder, an inexcusable blunder, I mean. There's a building in Harvard still named for Stoughton. We've certainly all come to forget William Stoughton's role in this. So when I hear about the Salem witch trials,

like Sarah, you have this initial tendency to say, what the heck is going on with those folks? But I'm also old enough to have lived through the satanic panic trials that are very reminiscent of the Salem witch trials, but instead of spectral evidence, you had this recovered memory evidence that was engineered out of young children. What is going on with us that we are continually susceptible, continually susceptible to this kind of hysteria. I think that's the closest parallel and I thought about it a lot writing the book, especially because you have children's, clearly children have great imaginations, right, and all of that really rich material is being used in court.

We're very suggestible creatures. And I mean, I think that interestingly, the adolescent mind, like the ministerial mind, like the judicial mind, wants to make sense of the world. You can make sense of the world in many, as we know, many different ways, only some of which are true. This is really just an attempt to kind of somehow put the puzzle together in a way that satisfies. If you're putting the puzzle together in a situation where the Bible is your only book

or your guiding book and you've got so many pressures on you from so many directions as these people did and someone suggests an explanation to you that may actually be an impartial or a very imperfect explanation, you're going to lunge for it. How quickly did people know that there had been a miscarriage of justice? And did they think of it as a miscarriage of justice? Correct me if I'm wrong. I think we have, I mean, hundreds of people accused. 19 are killed by the state as it was at that point.

One guy was pressed to death. I mean, some of this was pretty bad. They weren't all women. And it seems we now, again, use witch trials to mean an unjust frenzy. How quickly did that become known that they had done something horribly wrong? Yes, in terms of victims, it's 14 women, five men, two dogs. People always get very upset about the dogs. And then Giles Corey, who was pressed to death because he will not enter a plea in court

and for not entering a plea in court, this was the prescribed punishment. It's an interesting question. There is enormous shame and regret afterwards. So there's a sense that something has miscarried, but there's not a great deal of discussion. Silence immediately descends, partly because everyone is implicated. So it's very hard to discuss responsibility when everyone essentially bears responsibility. Every member of the community has played some kind of role in what happened. And anyone who actually spoke up was immediately rewarded with an accusation of witchcraft.

So already you've done away with the skeptics. So what happens afterward, first of all, is that the record is obliterated. So the church record book for the village is rewritten. Diaries from that year will skip from January to the following year. Samuel Willard, who's one of the most prominent Boston ministers, complete book of divinity as it's called, which is a completely completely on a bridge selection of his sermons, has no sermons from 1692, only lacuna in the entire volume. So essentially there's this erasure of what has just happened. Now I would read that as an admission of some kind of guilt. No one clearly was willing to discuss it immediately.

And so much so that by the early 18th century, when people began to submit requests for recompense for the relatives they had lost, you see this very strange kind of elliptical wording in the request, nobody will mention the word witchcraft. It's still too powerful a word for anybody to employ. So they'll say things like basically, and the reason to unpleasantness I lost my mother could please be compensated. The word is still too powerful. They'll say things like basically, in the recent unpleasantness I lost my mother, could we please be compensated. The word is still too powerful.

I should say that while it is clear to people that innocents have lost their lives, not everyone has yet given up on the idea of witchcraft. The idea of witchcraft outlives the trials. So again, we're talking about a fundamental religious belief that doesn't lose its grip instantly. The courts are compromised. Ultimately, the trials will, I think, unsettle the church a little bit. But the courts are compromised, the ministry is seriously compromised because the experts

have been so much discredited. And later, the South will use this as we know during the entire abolition battle against the North. You benighted people, you hanged witches. How dare you try to interfere with our affairs?" So it's used as a very potent weapon much later on. Anthony Comegna So did we have any of the main drivers of this ever sort of come forward in an actual act of public repentance and apology?

And the reason why I ask that is it feels like there is a common phenomenon in history, I'm sure beyond American history as well, where people move past very dark moments and it's almost as if they never happened. In other words, they move past and they don't talk about it. So I, you know, I grew up, I'm born in 69, I grew up, born in Alabama, grew up in post-civil rights movement south. I never encountered somebody who said, I was a segregationist and I'm sorry. I just never encountered anybody who ever talked about that era at all.

It was as if it never happened. I do wonder, is this just how we move on or were there examples of people who came forward and said, no, I was part of this and I was completely wrong? So that blanket silence afterwards is broken a few times. Very gently and discreetly, one of the girls who enters the greatest number of accusations will deliver a kind of mealy-mouthed apology one day in church. Some of the jurors will clearly—they're cribbing from each other's homework.

The apologies there are very similar and they're a little formulaic. The one hero on that count is Samuel Sewell, who's one of the justices on the court, at whom this will gnaw away for years. So to your question, do people know there was a miscarriage? Sewell, people point to Sewell in the street at a certain point and say to him, you have some atoning to do. And he will in a meeting stand up and actually deliver a statement. It's a really sort of searing statement of apology, after which other members of the court no

longer speak to him. That's the price of having had to come clean on that one. There's so much of a shroud around it that often you have victims, you have families of victims, you have people who marry who had suffered equal losses in the trials. I think because there was a taint around some of the families who were involved. So you took that taint and you knew there was a new pool of people, only a small pool of people with whom you could possibly form a future association. But I think there was such an effort to kind of run away from it that these people had to bond together.

There's so much to learn from these witch trials. Your book is called The Witches. I just want to tease, like, if we could possibly have you on again to do this type of little vignette deep dive into the trial after the Boston Massacre and the involvement of John Adams, I feel like we need to do the exact same thing at a future date. In the meantime, I feel like we should all just sit with some of the modernity I feel about the Salem witch trials.

Thank you, Stacy Schiff. Thank you, it's such a pleasure. Wealthsimple's Big Winter Bundle is our best match offer yet. Get a 2% match when you transfer over an eligible RRSP. For a $50,000 transfer, that's a $1,000 cash bonus. Enough to buy a fancy parka. A ticket to somewhere you don't need a fancy parka. Or just be responsible and top up your retirement fund. Plus, move any other eligible

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With Quest Trades Managed Portfolios, you'll get an investment portfolio made and managed for you. Invest for a fraction of the cost and become wealthier with Quest Wealth Portfolios. Get yours, Questrade. Okay, last but not least, our last guest here at the National Constitution Center retreat will be Judge Cheryl Ann Krause. She was nominated to the Third Circuit by President Obama in 2014. And we're going to talk about mental health and wellness in the legal profession. We have very special guest Judge Cheryl Ann Krause from the Third Circuit joining us. And Judge, I don't know if you know this, but we are kind of in-laws because my husband also clerked not only for your circuit

judge that you clerked for, Judge Kozinski, but also you clerked for Justice Kennedy at the Supreme Court, who he also clerked for. So y'all are like clerk twins. And since I'm married to him, I think that makes us in-laws. Well, you know, Justice Kennedy through the years with his You know, Justice Kennedy, through the years with his reunions and the culture that he fostered in chambers, made it feel very much like a family. So I heartily agree. Judge, we have seen you many years over this conference and have tried to convince you to record this exact podcast segment with us. So we are extra, extra thrilled the anticipation was worth it. And in particular, we want to

talk about your Law Review article from 2019 on lawyer well-being as a crisis of the profession. This was published in the South Carolina Law Review. We'll put it in the show notes so that everyone can read it. But can you give us sing a few bars on what made you write this in 2019? This is pre-COVID. What was the crisis you saw and your biggest takeaways? Sure.

It was really a confluence of a few different things. One was seeing in the headlines so many instances of lawyers who were talking about depression, about attempted suicide, substance abuse, things along those lines. Another was incivility in legal practice and experiencing that as a practicing lawyer and recognizing the ways that that affected my own and colleagues' sense of enjoyment and fulfillment in the practice of law. A third was that once I took the bench, I thought it was really interesting the way judges thought about their role in serving the law. That is, they talked about, we judges often talk about our position as being an emissary

of the law, of carrying the torch for the rule of law forward. And coming out of private practice and hearing colleagues talk about their role that way, it occurred to me that that's such a tiny portion of the responsibility for the rule of law. It really belongs with the legal profession itself. And thinking about what it meant to be a lawyer and the role of a lawyer and the self-respect that lawyers should feel in a noble profession, but after coming into law school with the best of intentions and years into practice, often lose sight of that sense of nobility.

What finally galvanized this article was the suicide of a very dear friend of mine who had been a colleague at the US Attorney's Office, who was a co-chair of his department at a large firm, a wonderful family. By all accounts, all external appearances was the picture of success. And behind that was a long-term depression that got to a point where he jumped off the roof of his office building with symbolism to me and the hundreds of colleagues from the U.S. Attorney's Office that turned up at his funeral. It made me think that there was an intersection of what we were seeing in terms of wellness in those things I mentioned at the outset, things like alcohol, substance abuse, suicide, but tying that to identity in the legal profession and what it means to be a lawyer.

So that's what got this article penned to paper. I am so glad you wrote this article, Judge. This is something, and I'm also really glad we're talking about this subject because this is actually something I think we've meant to talk about more and haven't talked about as much. And it's something I wrote about years and years ago as well. And I think if you've practiced law long enough, that story you just told about this shocking suicide is something that an awful lot of lawyers can relate to. They will know of friends or colleagues that have similar stories.

And one thing that I was looking at when I started to dive into this was how the legal profession has a lot of intensity. It has a lot of anxiety, but not as much for an awful lot of attorneys, not as much meaning or purpose as they thought they were getting when they signed up. This is a profession that people make movies about, right?

They, you, the heroic lawyer is a profession that people make movies about, right? The heroic lawyer is a type in fiction and in reality. So many people go into law with this sense that I'm going to be doing something truly significant. They come through it feeling like I'm doing something truly difficult and hard, but I've lost the sense of significance. Do you see that as you were, do you see that sort of loss of significance

as you were looking at this issue? I think that's a real concern and I very much do. It, in thinking about ways to address this issue, I latched onto and I should give full credit to my former law clerk, Jane Chung, who worked on this article with me, and he was an absolutely wonderful co-author. But what we looked at was a paradigm from psychology of how to feel happiness and fulfillment for that very reason. Many of the things that had been done previously around issues in mental health for the profession were really focusing on the sort of back end, how to make resources available and individual treatment and resources

at the firm, things like that. But not tying it more broadly to systemic issues in the way we practice law and the way we think about being lawyers. Think about, we go to law school, we learn evidence and contracts and constitutional law and property. There's no course on what it means to be a lawyer, on the intellectual history of the legal profession. It is a profession that dates back in our ownth century in England, these inns of court that arose where there became a civil practice and these guilds that were providing a service but also developed this camaraderie and sense of purpose that has carried them into today that Chief Justice Berger ended up bringing to the United States with his support for the American Inns of Court and his attempt

to replicate that and bring many of those values that the American Inns of Court does to the US. But the paradigm we looked at, which is called self-determination theory, and had been applied into psychology more generally to workplace happiness, but two psychologists, Ken and Sheldon and Lawrence Krieger, started doing studies applying this paradigm to the legal profession. And the factors that they were looking at as what makes for happiness were one, competence, the sense of either I'm good at what I do or I can become good at what I do. Another of autonomy, of the sense of self-determination and decisional autonomy, and a third of relatedness, of feeling connected to other people.

This is, I think, related to autonomy as well, related to something larger than yourself, related to something you feel like is important and where you are making that sort of contribution. When we think about developments in the profession over a period of decades in each of those areas, it's not hard to see how we've ended up feeling years into practice a sense of unhappiness, of lack of fulfillment, and even lack of what does it mean to be a lawyer other than billable hours and the prestige of whatever firm someone is at. One of the results of their study was recognizing that there was a greater sense of competence among those who were in the public sector than in the most prestigious

law firms. Maybe that's because in the public sector, you're able to do work that you feel is meaningful. I think that's a piece of it. But the sense of competence was lower with the high prestige firms. When we think about that, competence for lawyers, right? That's the model rules of professional conduct. That's 1.1. That's where we begin. Competence. If lawyers are not competent, they're not fulfilling their most basic function and certainly can't be great advocates for clients. There can be a sense of perceived lack of competence, but there is also and increasingly a sense of actual lack of competence. Why? Because the opportunity is to practice law in the ways that people think about when they

come into the profession are less and less available. Criminal trials, 2% of cases. Civil trials, 1% of cases that are actually going to trial. So where do you get trial experience? And of course, it's going to be the most senior attorneys who take that experience. And so how do young people, new lawyers coming into the profession, gain that experience? Same problem with oral argument, where despite greater numbers of cases on the docket, the oral argument rates across the courts of appeals are far lower now than they were two

decades ago. They range about an average of 20%, but they range in the 10% range upward in terms of the numbers of cases, the percentage of cases that the courts of appeals in various circuits are hearing. Those opportunities to actually argue a case in front of a panel of real judges is invaluable to young lawyers. There are issues there on competence, there are issues on autonomy, whether it's in the billable hour or the ability of lawyers to follow causes they believe in. While you need to be loyal to clients in the work that you're doing for them outside of that workplace, lawyers can and should be able to participate in all sorts of civic

engagement politics if they choose to. But firms, many firms are wary of that and what the reaction will be of clients. Of course, the billable hour makes for a limited sense of autonomy and decision making, and also affects the sense of relatedness and ability to spend time outside of the workplace, connecting to others in the bar, or connecting to causes that people believe in. So I was thinking to myself, how different is this going to be then,

for instance, the medical profession? Another degree that is a professional degree that requires incredibly long hours where people go into it for a sense of purpose and then maybe several years later, maybe you're not feeling quite the same sense of purpose that you thought from watching ER or scrubs or whatever. And so I looked up on the NIH and it said 29% of doctors

have experienced depressive symptoms. I was like, wow, that sounds just incredibly high for a profession. And then I went back to your law review article and the number for lawyers is 46%. Half, half of lawyers attorneys surveyed, it was 12,825 attorneys surveyed by the ABA and the Betty Ford Foundation and the Journal of Addictive Medicine. 46% of attorneys surveyed reported suffering depression at some point in their legal careers. In just the past year, 19% said they'd struggled with anxiety, 23% with stress. Again, just in the past year from when they took this survey, between 21 and 36% of respondents reported drinking at a level consistent with an alcohol problem, a rate

roughly three to five times higher than the general population and significantly higher than rates indicated by previous research. Young attorneys in their first 10 years of their practice reported the highest rates of problematic substance abuse. And of course, to cap it off with where you started, the CDC found between 1999 and 2007, lawyers were 54% more likely to commit suicide than people in other professions.

Why is the law different than other quasi-similarly situated professions like medicine, for instance. What are we supposed to be telling people thinking about going to law school? Because this is a debate David and I have a lot. Should you go to law school? David is categorically yes, and mine is categorically probably not. Probably meaning like if you really know what the practice of law is, and you get into a great school or a school that will directly lead to the legal profession that you know about and want.

So for instance, you want to stay in your hometown, and you're going to your state law school. That would be an example of someone who knows what they want and is going to the right school for that thing. But so many undergrads, for instance, are like, I want to practice constitutional law. I'll go to a random law school I get into. And then 10 years later, they have to practice law because they have to pay off their loans. They're not practicing constitutional law because only Paul Clement does that. And so of course, that'd be a real bait and switch

if they followed David's advice. So what should we be telling people who are thinking about going into the practice of law about how to avoid some of these pitfalls and why it's different? Let me break down some of those excellent questions and points. One is that medicine falls fairly closely behind in terms of looking at other professions and what's happened to them. And if you think about the commercialization of both of those professions, it's not surprising that those two are where you were seeing this sense of lack of fulfillment and depression and acting out on it in these different ways that we've talked about. Because

in both, as you said, people go into it to serve. They go into it thinking that they're going to have close relationships and build relationships and rapport, whether it's in the small town practice of medicine, within the office, or it's what people think about ideally from what they see on TV or elsewhere about what the practice of law is or should be. In these past decades, as we've seen the advent of managed care, there's been increasing pressure that's very much like the billable hour for physicians, and has focused physicians like lawyers on how much time they're spending on each project and on their profit margins and various financial ratios that are being worked up about them.

It fundamentally changes the nature of the experience. But when it comes to what can you do with the law, as with medicine, there's such important public service that can be done. And both professions are so powerful in what they bring to the fore. So I have to agree with David when it comes to- Judge, you are a wise and learned jurist. I just want that on the record. This is outrageous. But there is so much that can be done with the power of a law degree. But

people who are going into that profession need to know and understand the dynamics of the profession. One of the problems that we've seen that I think contributes so much to the unhappiness years into the profession is that people are measuring themselves according to these external standards that are put upon them. When they go into law school, they are going by as an internal yardstick of what matters, what are their values, what do they want to do with this law degree? What do they envision contributing when they get out? But as you come out, and particularly in the world of big law, people are often carrying loans, need to pay them off, start taking on a different kind of lifestyle that requires that sort of income. You can get caught up

in a spiral that ends up in a mental health crisis as there's this increasing divergence between what you thought you would be and would be doing and what you're doing in reality, in day-to-day practice. Another though is our own measurements of success in the profession. And we have succumbed in law practice largely to doing that with billable hours. And that and business generation is how someone's success

is measured. If lawyers begin thinking about what they're doing in the profession and talking about it the way judges are doing, that we are all contributing to the rule of law and playing essential roles in the legal profession, perhaps more than in the judiciary, because it's every facet of life where lawyers are bringing the rule of law to the table. Literally, whether you're negotiating a corporate deal on one side or the other. That's contracts. That's what keeps free markets. That's what keeps our economy and capitalism functional. If it's prosecutor in defense and putting the government to its burden and ensuring that we're protecting individual rights and our civil rights, both sides have such an important role to play. In the plaintiffs' bar and defense bar, similarly, as they take on different sides of the issues,

that's what we've come up with as the best system of justice to shine a light on things and to try to put before neutral triers of fact what can be ascertained about different things that happened, to understand the meeting of the minds or what happened in a tort, and to ensure the justice is done. Lawyers are doing that. And if lawyers start thinking about their role that way, not only could it change the respect that we show each other and civility, particularly in civil litigation, where it shouldn't be that civil litigation is an oxymoron, but in many ways it is, especially

when it comes to discovery disputes that can become such petty yet personal sorts of attacks. If lawyers are thinking about that kind of investment in the profession, that what they're doing in working with younger lawyers is making an investment in our future as a profession, an investment in our future as stewards of the rule of law. Then the kinds of accolades that we can and should be giving, including in big firms, in the private sector, could be very different. It brings renown to firms when there is pro bono work that people have taken on and done successfully. That goes into marketing and

can not only be lucrative for the firm, but give the lawyers participating in it a great sense of fulfillment because they are actually getting hands-on experience. Often in private practice, it's only through that sort of pro bono work, that early in your profession, you get to take on the challenges of opening and closing arguments, of cross-examination of witnesses, of dealing with experts, and building the sense of competence and confidence that is so essential to happiness, ultimately, in the practice of law. You know, yes. Yeah, that's great.

Judge, you've been so generous with your time. I really appreciate it. And reading your Law Review article, you talk about solutions of fostering competence, cultivating autonomy, maintaining civility or rebuilding civility. And it's interesting, as I reflect on those factors in my own career, it totally resonates. One of the great advantages I had early on was I had a senior partner who would throw off small cases to me, where I was able to do small cases to start and build confidence. My very first one, I was a client's son had bought a used Pontiac Fiero. Do we remember the Pontiac Fiero, the two-seater? He bought

it from somebody who defrauded him, and it was my job to get a rescission of the car. By God's grace and a great miracle, I went into Tennessee, General Davidson County, General Sessions, small claims court, and won my Fiero case. It built my confidence. It really did. But the one part I wanted to drill down on was the civility point. I have a little different perspective on it joining journalism, which is a much less civil profession than the law, believe it or not. Very vicious, very vicious profession in many ways. But what are you seeing?

Are you seeing a degradation of civility currently? Have you seen, because I've heard a lot of judges talk about this civility point and are moving as a point of emphasis in their own courtrooms. What are you seeing on the ground right now? The Law Review article was a few years ago. Any better? Is it getting worse?

What is the state of civility that you're seeing? So I think we still have a lot of problems with civility in practice. More in the early stages of a case, I think by the time it's coming to the Court of Appeals, it's lawyers without the emotional input of clients who are there in the courtroom all the time. There have also been developments in the rules themselves where discovery, for example, is supposed to be focused on what is necessary at the time. That's now something that judges can point to and try to move things along and better police what is happening in those discovery disputes that can so easily devolve into incivility.

But I also think that lawyers and judges have a great responsibility to model that sort of professionalism and civility. Judges too in the courtrooms, in the way they treat litigants and in their appreciation for lawyers, the role they're playing and lawyers need to manage other aspects of life where there's an opposition to a request for an extension by opposing counsel. You have to wonder what's wrong here. Why isn't there the most basic civility for a short, reasonable extension? As I said, at the level of the Court of Appeals, we usually see lawyers before us acting quite professionally. But in my own experience in private practice, it was very different and particularly behind the scenes before

a judge gets involved. But those motions for sanctions on a dime, those sorts of things, they may come to not at the end of the day, but they take a real emotional toll on the lawyers who are involved. Okay, before we go, we have one more special guest, and that would be the judge's daughter, 12-year-old in sixth grade. And here is my question for you. Is your mom a good cook? Oh, she's making a face.

This is not good. Does she have a go-to dish that you like, that like when you think about coming home, what you really want for dinner, you're like, I really want mom's... Her cooking is good. During the pandemic, when everybody was like home, she really started like doing harder dishes because she had more time and we were all stuck at home. So it was gourmet meals during the pandemic. Now that she started working, it's good. I like her cooking. What's her best dish? I think her best dish, probably her salmon because I don't really like salmon, but she

makes it good. Wow. Okay. That's a high compliment, a food you don't even like. Does she annoy you with your history homework and make you read the Constitution or anything? She doesn't make me read the Constitution, but she does nag about homework a little bit. Any required reading to kill a mockingbird? Well, I required reading for school, but she's very like, read it now. But she hasn't made you read it.

Yeah. Okay. This sounds, this sounds pretty well hinged, I'd say. This is good. This is always important to get to know your judges as people. And I always think the most people part of our lives is probably our parenting. So this all sounds pretty normal. We'll check in with you when you're 15 maybe and see how things are going. Thank you for joining us.