 I'm going to go ahead and get us started by welcoming you all to this event, which is both an opportunity for a panel of experts to talk about the important legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recently passed away, and to speak more generally about the future of the court. We are currently on the precipice of undertaking a process for reviewing and confirming Amy Coney Barrett, who's been nominated by the president. And so we will give some time and attention to discussing that process and what it means for the future of the court and our nation. But we also wanted to take this time to remark on a life incredibly well lived, that of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As many of you will know from the numerous memorials and commentaries that have been published since her death, she was a trailblazer. She was, for lack of a better words, a warrior for justice as well. She's a person who graduated at the top of her class in law school, but found that there were systemic barriers to entry for her as a mother, as a woman. And she spent so much of her career tearing down those systemic barriers, not only for her own benefit, but for the benefit of generations of lawyers that followed her. Beyond her remarkable career as a lawyer, she was an amazing jurist, a longstanding and brilliant member of our Supreme Court. I had the great and fortunate pleasure to meet her when I was a 3L law student. And I was so just enthralled with the power of her intellect, how carefully she chose every word and how dedicated she was to the idea that law was a tool that could meaningfully change the lives of people who were systemically at the end of unfair arrangements. Actually, the thing I most remember was her talking about the sense of responsibility she had for her job because of the way in which law had such a huge impact on the lives of folks in the real world. And so it is a great loss for our court. It is a great loss for our country. It is a great loss for those committed to civil and social justice who understand that it takes great commitment from incredibly talented folks such as Justice Bader Ginsburg in order to protect rights and make equality a reality. So I thank our faculty in the panel for gathering to discuss these important topics. I thank Professor Nicholas, in particular, for organizing us and keeping us on time. So you should be giving me the signal because I'm about one minute over. So thank you all for joining us. And I will now turn this over to Dean Porter. Hi, I'm Liz Porter. For those of you who I haven't met before, I'm the Dean of Academic Administration at the Law School right now. And I did serve as a law clerk for the justice during the 2002-2003 Supreme Court term. As Dean Bard said, Justice Ginsburg is kind of an American icon. He described her as a warrior for justice and a trailblazer. And I totally agree with those characterizations. But I just want to note that outside of kind of her image and popular mainstream media, although she was a warrior for justice and she was a trailblazer, she was perhaps paradoxically an intensely moderate person. So I want to talk about the three values that I think she most brought to both her career and particularly to her job as a justice in the Supreme Court. The first, you're probably most familiar with, her belief in the equal dignity of all individuals. She called herself a feminist. She was known for her gender equality cases, but she often brought cases on behalf of men as she made those distinctions. And her argument was that structural inequalities, racism or sexism impact everyone. And she used male plaintiffs sometimes as a way to perhaps make her not revolutionary but new ideas more palatable to an all-male Supreme Court. They had not yet been a woman on the Supreme Court at the time when she was arguing those cases. And at the same time, I think she also really believed that men and women both were impacted by sexism. And I think the second and maybe most important contribution that she made as a justice was her belief in the power of restraint. And again, I think this is particularly important because she's sort of popular known as sort of a notorious rabble rouser. But in fact, she believed strongly in the rule of law virtues of consistency, clarity and stability. And those virtues seem particularly important at this time in our history. I actually didn't always agree with those virtues as she, in her judicial opinions, many of you might have been taking civil procedure one this year or taken it recently and her general personal jurisdiction cases make things clear, but I think at the expense of some justice, perhaps of plaintiffs who are limited in their ability to sue. So it's not that I always agreed with everything she did, but I think the values were important. She also really believed in moderation and incrementalism. Again, maybe she was a warrior, but she was a moderate incremental warrior. And she, for example, has been heavily critical of Rome versus Wade, which she believes got out ahead of where the law needed to be. And therefore sort of brought down the ire of the public on the Supreme Court in the way that her incremental fact-based cases on behalf of men and women suffering from discrimination did not. And finally, I just want to emphasize that she exercised that moderation and restraint in her professional and personal life as well, which is to say she had a very moderate writing style. She didn't believe that the court should decide more than they need to do. And she really believes in collegiality among the justices in the court, something that I think has been incredibly valuable to the court over the past 10 years and is a little bit unclear how that will be in the court going forward. Her friendship with Justice Scalia is quite famous because there was a picture of them writing an elephant together. But I think beyond that, she actually wrote a really moving tribute to Chief Justice Rehnquist when he passed away. I think she had very serious, warm relationships with people with whom she often disagreed. And that was a really important element of maintaining the legitimacy of the court. Finally, one more thing, I just like to note that Justice Ginsburg believed in the Constitution as a living document. She stated that in her confirmation hearings and she was affirmed 96 to three. We're in a time now where the concept of the Constitution as a growth mindset document rather than a fixed mindset document is in contest and she was a forthright believer in the idea of a document that could bring us to solving new problems that the framers had not yet imagined. Thank you. Thank you, Dean Porter. Appreciate that. So I wanna chime in and emphasize one of the points that Dean Porter made, and that is that Justice Ginsburg really fought against sex discrimination. She's often described as a warrior for women's rights and that's true. But she really was about making sure that the law treated men and women equally. And I think in particular, she took on the cases of men who were undertaking what we'll call non-traditional gender roles. And I think that's important. And as someone who has undertaken those roles myself, I appreciate some of the precedents that she and her clients set. Another area that she's often spoken about is an advocate for abortion. And there's another area where I wanna talk more broadly about her approach. Just like with her sex discrimination focus, it wasn't about abortion as a right per se. It was more about autonomy to make decisions about reproductive choices. And in fact, some of you may have read about one of the cases that she took early on, which was a case involving the military where a female was told that in order to continue her employment, she had to get an abortion or resign. And Justice Ginsburg took on her case. So again, it's not about abortion. It's about a woman being able to decide whether she's gonna continue with the pregnancy if she wants to or not continue if she wants to. Let's turn to the other panelists to reflect on the legacy of the late justice. Professor Mannheim? Yeah, one thing that Dean Porter brought up was this idea that she would work incrementally over time. And one way that that's reflected in her work is her focus on dissenting opinions and trying to persuade people through dissenting opinions. And by design, those opinions are not gonna affect the outcome of the court in the case before it, but rather they're looking ahead to a future court to future years when maybe they can make a difference. And to that end, I study voting rights. And one of her sort of the opinions that has resonated the most in that area is her dissenting opinion in a case from 2013, which invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act. And particularly now, seven years later, when any number of voting issues are starting to crop up, partially in response to that opinion, we are seeing quotes from her dissenting opinion appearing in, for example, media reports about what's going on, different commentaries, and certainly in judicial opinion. Thank you. Professor Mannheim, would you like an opportunity to reflect on her legacy? Because really not much, I think I could add to the comments about her legacy. I think this is all true. I worked for judges now on the Supreme Court, it had a very different approach to thinking about law and including thinking about law and constitutional law as a living document. But there was always the utmost respect for Justice Ginsburg as a legal thinker and as for somebody whose ideas would have to be taken enormously, seriously, and engaged with and made part of one's reasoning process. And I think that that's something that will be enormously missed even by people who disagree with me. If I could just add one more thing to something that Professor Nicholas said about the case of Susan Struck, who the Air Force captain. I just want to note that Susan Struck, actually, because of her religion, refused to get an abortion, and she was facing discharge from the Air Force for that. And the Air Force's determination was that she could either have the abortion procedure and keep her job or she could resign. But ultimately the Air Force changed its position before the Supreme Court could decide that case. So, and therefore it was mooted. And I think the Justice considered that to be a lost opportunity, right? Her belief in autonomy definitely supported the autonomy to be able to maintain and have a pregnancy. Thank you. Let's turn to Professor Mannheim to begin discussion of the candidate who is up next to replace her. Great. So about two weeks ago, President Trump nominated a judge, Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ginsburg in that seat on Supreme Court. And so in terms of the process going forward, it's actually in a sense pretty straightforward. At this point, majority of the Senate needs to vote to confirm Judge Barrett. And then the president has to sign that commission creating her lifetime appointment. And I know that at this point, there are about a million different hypotheticals circling around involving who's gonna show up when and what sort of moon suit is gonna be worn, et cetera. And I guess rather than sort of going down that hole, I'll just say that that's not really law. At that point, it's more politics. And the closest it gets to law would be sort of discussions of internal Senate procedure and the like to kind of cut through all of that. What I'll say, based on my knowledge of what's going on in the Senate procedures and the like, I would be pretty surprised if Judge Barrett is not confirmed by election day. And I would be very surprised if the judge is not confirmed by the end of the year. And so if this sort of prediction is more or less accurate, then that makes the question all the more important, who is Judge Barrett and what are her views of the law? So in the short amount of time that we have today, I'm not gonna focus on Judge Barrett's personal life. Instead, I'm gonna focus on her professional legal work. And the reason why is because her relevance, the judge's relevance nationally at this point, is relates to what she's likely to do as a justice if she is confirmed. And her, in my view, her professional legal work provides both a pretty good insight into that in a lot of ways and also sort of predictively probably provides the best insight. So to that end, so the judge graduated from law school a little over two decades ago. And then right after law school, she clerked for a judge on the DC Circuit and then she clerked for Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court. After just a couple of years at a law firm, she spent most of the remaining two decades as a professor at Notre Dame. And while she was there, her areas of expertise were span sort of constitutional law and federal courts, but where she really developed an expertise and where she really did a lot of her research and writing was in the area of statutory interpretation. And then just a few years ago in 2017, she was nominated by President Trump to become a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and that gets us to where we are now. So given this record, there's actually not a ton that we can look at in terms of what the judge has done as a judge, which that is kind of often the most helpful thing to look at in trying to predict how a justice is going to respond to the cases before her. But the judge, Judge Merritt does have quite a bit of academic writing that one can look at. And so if you look at that body of work, what you might think of sort of, and again, I don't have too much time here, so I'll kind of give you the punchline. You might think of Judge Merritt in terms, at least the way she's trying to portray herself as kind of like Justice Scalia, but ratchet up a bit. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So the judge has really made a concerted effort to sort of define herself as being consistent with Justice Scalia and Justice Scalia's understandings of the law. At her, what I should double check this, I believe it was the Rose Garden ceremony that currently is quite prevalent in the news headlines. She said that Justice Scalia's judicial philosophy is mine too, okay? So this is definitely something she said in the last few weeks. And what she means by that is that like Justice Scalia, she believes in originalist interpretation of the Constitution and she believes in a textualist approach to statutory interpretation. So we could spend some time if anybody wants to, discussing exactly what that means. One way of thinking about the importance of both of those philosophies, which overlap quite a bit, is that under both the meaning of the Constitution or the meaning of a statute is fixed in time. It is not the case that it evolves in the decades or longer that that statutory language is on the books. This is according to the philosophy of Justice Scalia and Judge Barrett. The place, I would say the place where, as far as I can tell, the two jurists differ the most is with respect to precedent and the role of stare decisis. So Justice Scalia sort of famously described himself as a faint-hearted originalist by which he meant to say that even though he believed that the original public understanding of the constitutional text was the correct one, he was also willing and he did in fact respect precedence over time that came out in a different direction. So for example, maybe Justice Scalia would not have agreed that the Bill of Rights, various aspects of the Bill of Rights apply to the state governments as well as the national government, but that precedent was decided a very long time ago and he's not inclined to reevaluate that now. He's moving forward. By contrast, Judge Barrett has suggested that she does not believe that stare decisis should play quite a strong of a role. And therefore, one, if one is trying to predict how she might respond to her work as a Supreme Court justice, one might imagine that she would sort of decide maybe that the case is the same way Justice Scalia would, but it seems to be the case that she would be more open to taking cases and having the court hear cases that maybe are challenging long settled precedent. Thank you. I wonder if Dean Porter, if you've got any thoughts on this topic or whether panelists reflect on it and might have other questions for Professor Mannheim. So turning it over to you first, Dean Porter. Hi, one big distinction between Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Ginsburg is that Justice Ginsburg did have quite a career as a litigator and it really permeated her opinions. She was very respectful of lower courts, of the factual findings of lower courts, as well as of state courts. And that was sort of an essential part of her fairly moderate approach. And speaking as someone who's wild, academics are not tethered to pragmatic reality in the way that litigators of necessity must be. And I do think that that can really inform our worldviews. It's what allows us to think maybe outside the box and to change our minds over time, but there is inherently to me a danger and not a danger. That's not the right word, a risk in bringing someone to the court who has not spent a significant time dealing with the real politic of real clients and working with the law in a structured way. There's a kind of theory pragmatism divide and I do think that Justice Coney Barrett may be heavier on theory whereas Justice Ginsburg was heavier on pragmatism. Well, and to that end, to the extent it's helpful to sort of, and we only have, you know, this conversation is short and we can be talking about these issues for hours and hours and rest assured as law professors, we will be surely, but one way of translating the sort of theoretical ideas that I was just talking about concerning originalism and textualism into something that feels a little bit more kind of grounded and just sort of what does this mean going forward and how it will affect people and how it will affect legislatures. One way of understanding the potential effect of originalism is if the original public meaning of the Constitution is fixed in time, that means that developments through the years sort of where the Supreme Court has recognized additional rights. So for example, the Supreme Court has recognized that the 14th Amendment protects different groups in different ways. The Supreme Court has recognized that there's this idea of a right to privacy that implicates things like contraception and reproductive rights and the like. The Supreme Court has recognized rights associated with people when they get married and et cetera. So there's all these different rights that have sort of been developed over time. That tracks, like Dean Porter said, more of a Ginsburg understanding of the Constitution, which is that it's a living document evolving over time. By contrast, Judge Barrett believes that it's fixed in time and coupled with what appears to be her willingness to consider long settled precedence, that starts to call into question whether she would be willing to decide cases in a way that would effectively roll back these rights that people at this point have sort of come to understand being part of sort of American law. And all of this is one reason why there's we lost your audio, I believe. Others as well. Well, we're about to transition over to Professor Nicholas, but I'll just note beforehand that Professor Mannheim, what you said has prompted a question in the Q&A. So take a look at that and keep it fresh for your memory while we come to the Q&A, we can come to that question. handing it over to you, Professor Nicholas. Great, thanks. And I guess just the one thing I wanna say by way of transition from that last topic is that Professor Mannheim is pretty much right. The procedure for the appointment is gonna go through. We've heard over the last few years all sorts of concocted rules about whether or not you can confirm a justice in an election year, one month before an election year, you can do whatever you want if you have the presidency and a majority of the Senate. And that's something to keep in mind as we move on in our discussion. I wanna focus on what the potential impact is of this appointment, assuming that it goes through. And it is significant. So many of the critical cases involving constitutional rights and in particular the individual rights-based cases have been decided by very narrow margins. And for a long period of time, we've had a pretty closely divided port with some moderate justices in the center. And the center is about to shift rather significantly. And the way to put that in perspective is none of us would have thought that Justice Roberts was a moderate or a swing justice several years ago. For the last several years, he's been sort of a moderating vote after Justice Kennedy left. So now our question is, assuming the court gets another conservative in place of Justice Ginsburg, are we now looking at Justice Gorsuch? Is that our next? I mean, just to think about how far in one side of the spectrum we've gone to thinking about what the center is. And it's not as though the so-called liberal side of the court is that liberal. Just like, you know, just Professor Porter, Dean Porter pointed out that Justice Ginsburg was somewhat moderate, right? We have a lot of fairly moderates. We have moderates, conservatives, and very strong conservatives, I would say, on the court. And some of the areas that, of course, we're looking at things like abortion rights that where the Chief Justice was just the deciding vote recently. Again, sort of surprising faith-based exceptions where LGBTQ rights are involved and there's anti-discrimination laws being enforced. Congressional power to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. And I'm particularly concerned about the enforcement of the 13th Amendment. A lot of people know that the court struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted pursuant to the 15th Amendment. If a similar line of reasoning goes over to the 13th Amendment, we potentially lose a number of very important federal civil rights laws that I think many people have counted on for many decades. Affirmative action is another area. And the thing I want to emphasize is that, well, two things. One, we're unlikely to get big dramatic necessarily, this case is overturned, that case is overturned. The way I often try to describe the case law involving the Reconstruction Amendments, I often say if you look at a snapshot of the cases right after the Reconstruction Amendments were enacted, you look at them in the late 60s, and you look at them today, you might think you're reading cases from three different countries because the interpretation has changed dramatically over time even though the court rarely overturns cases. But what they do is they subtly re-characterize, subtly shift the meaning of earlier precedents, and unfortunately because so many of the decisions that were closely decided are very murky, there's room in that mushiness of the decisions of actually shifting it one way or the other while not appearing to actually strike anything down. Finally, I do want to point out that I've been alive for a long time, and there's been many justices who have been described as the justice to overturn Roe versus Wade, and someone always chokes at the last minute. And I want to emphasize that part of why that is, is someone is always going to want to be a swing justice. Let's just be honest about it. There's a lot of power that you have as a justice when you are a swing. If you're kind of a clear vote on one end or the other, you're not that interesting, but you actually can make a substantial impact on the court's jurisprudence if you're that swing vote. So that's kind of my thinking on all of this, but I'd like to hear from some of the other panelists as well. May I just say that I guess somebody always chokes in overturning Roe versus Wade, but I think it's very possible that Roe versus Wade will be overturned. I guess the only, I don't know what you would think, Professor Nicholas, but I feel like these judicial nominations have been planned for many years with that particular item in mind, not only the nomination of Justice Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, but also many of the nominations to lower federal courts. That has been the primary, if not driving force behind sort of who has been suggested for positions in elevated positions. This is not a Trump administration-specific hope or goal that is being achieved here. And I feel like despite Juno Medical Services last term, despite recent wins by progressive litigants before the reproductive rights, I have concerns not only about abortion rights, but also about contraception. One student asked, is Obergefell at serious risk? What about bow stock? And I think what I would say personally, I'd love to hear what everyone else has to say about that. I think what I would say to that is counting heads. I'm not sure that either is going to be overturned anytime in the near future. That being said, if you take the bow stock opinion, and I don't have my notes on it in front of me, so forgive me if I get any details wrong, but essentially this opinion engaged in a form of statutory analysis that recognized that certain discrimination statutes and discrimination statutes reach discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And so is the logic of that opinion, is the holding of that opinion going to be overturned? Again, counting heads, I'm not sure it will be. However, there's, and this goes to, I believe Dean Porter said this, you can have a chipping away at precedence and a chipping away at what the law is doing without a formal overruling of a case. And so in the bow stock circumstance, up against this ruling about the anti-discrimination laws is a line of cases recognizing a first amendment, essentially a first amendment right of people to engage in discrimination, not withstanding an anti-discrimination law. So to the extent that that line of cases starts to be sort of decided in a way that recognizes broader and broader exceptions, it may be the case that the bow stock opinion recognizes a right that doesn't have that much effect in practice because these first amendment related exceptions chip away at it so profoundly. So that's one answer to that question. Yeah, and I would share that view that the both, I don't think either opinion is going to be overturned as such, the bow stock opinion, Justice Gorsuch and Roberts were in the majority. So even just counting heads, that's not gonna happen. Many people know that there was a recent separate opinion trying to, suggesting this maybe Obergerfell was a wrongly decided decision, but only two justices signed on to that specific opinion. But they will chip away, I think, in some of the ways that are suggested. A number of the student questions, oh, go ahead, I was gonna turn it over to you, actually Professor Lombardi. No, but I only to say one other thing in terms of the question of what can one do? This is chipping away. Another thing only for a member, and it reminds us all to keep Professor Spitzer in mind is that state constitutional law may become increasingly important in the protection of rights. That's the place in which certain types of litigation may take place in certain states where the constitution permits it and the judiciary permits it, may be in the area of state constitutional law. So for the students who are wondering, what should I do in this circumstance? One thing you might do is take Washington state constitutional law. Great, so a number of the student questions have been along the lines of like, what are we gonna do? What can we do? What will happen? So let's turn to Professor Lombardi for a sense of some of the counter moves or the kind of what's next. Yeah, in terms of what the, the question of what the counter moves can be is a fairly simple legal question, but it's a very tricky normative question. So the things that can be done under the current constitutional regime are fairly limited, although some of them are fairly dramatic. So there's a small set of possible things that could be done. The question of whether they should be done becomes a really, a really tricky political question. I may lead to an enormous amount of debate. One thing that I'd like to, I studied comparative constitutional law. So it's always interesting to me to look at developments in the US either in the legal field or in judicial politics and comparative context. And so one thing I think is interesting is that the anxiety that we're seeing and the potential for really significant judicial imposition on the democratic will leading to real concern. This is entirely predictable. One thing that Americans are not always aware of is that judicial review, people love when the US invented the constitution. The US constitution is the first written constitution in the world. When the US invented the constitution, everyone said that is a great idea. Almost every country in the world began to draft its own constitution and enact them. They just thought this was a really great tool. When Marvin versus Madison was decided and when the US federal court started to exercise judicial review, it did not get the same kind of enthusiastic hearing. Almost no country in the world picked up the institution of judicial review. And some of these may be surprising. Britain had never had judicial review, never formally recognized it. France after the French Revolution said that is something we will not do. When the Netherlands had a revolution and adopted its first constitution, it enshrined in written in a provision of the constitution, a provision that's still there, which bans judges from exercising judicial review. But judges are constitutionally prohibited from exercising judicial review in Holland. And the reason for it was that people understood that the judiciary is an institution that sits uneasily with democracy. And that there is something inherently political about constitutional law. And that the problems of judges imposing a minority view or at least their own view upon issues of enormous public moment. They realized that this was potentially very problematic and certainly potentially very divisive. So it was not until after the Second World War that most countries in the world adopted the institution of judicial review. And when they did, they created institutions that looked different. They created courts that looked different than the US Supreme Court that were structured differently, that selected their judges differently and almost all of which had either term limits or retirement ages. And they did so for the purpose of moderating the potential imposition of judicial politics upon the democratic political process. Now, with that, so people say, well, okay, so what are we going to do today? One thing that's interesting is the kind of solutions once the solutions, or at least the responses that a lot of people have seen come in two different flavors. One is to say, maybe we should actually change the institution of the Supreme Court. So Peter Buttigieg, for example, has suggested fundamental changes in the way that how many judges sit on the court, which could be done by law, but also how are judges selected and for how long do they serve? And that can't be done by law. That has to be done by constitutional amendment. But he's made a pretty strong case and it's backed up by the experience of other countries in the world that maybe we'd be better off with pretty significant structural changes in the court, ones that would be designed to make moments like this less divisive and less potentially explosive. Unfortunately, that really can't be done. The process of constitutional amendment, unless something absolutely extraordinary happens in the next election, this type of super majorities that one needs to amend the constitution are not in our future. So what could be done? The other proposition that we've seen made is a proposition that, one go back to an idea that had been floated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the new deal, which is why don't we just by law expand the number of judges who sit on the Supreme Court? If the Democrats take a majority in the Senate and keep their majority in the house, and if they have a president, then they would say, why don't we by law change the number of justices on the court? And then appoint justices that will vote the way we like, that will vote like Justice Ginsburg and probably not like Justice Coney Barrett. This is something that perhaps we could see, but just to remember, it would only make the politicization of the court more extreme and would make things difficult. So I don't know what people are gonna do, but it's gonna be an interesting and potentially troubling time for the next year or so. Go ahead. Thank you, Professor Nicholas. Yeah, so thanks, Professor Lombardi, that was very helpful and eye-opening. One point I wanna pick up on, yeah, it's getting political. And one of the things I want people to remember is the potential, it's always been political in some way, right? But there's been this set of niceties that have gone on for a long period of time, right? So for much of our history, the Senate has had these very sort of polite conversations and gentle person's agreement between the parties about how we're gonna deal with this very delicate thing. And over the last decade, we've seen the gloves come off, right? And so that's why we're kind of getting to this point, right? Where we're stripping it down to where ultimately the way the constitution was written, a president with a Senate majority can pack the court. Some people think you need a House majority as well. I suggested you don't. It doesn't really matter because I think that if the election goes in a clear way, the Democrats will have all three of those. So what can they do? Of course they can do court packing. They could just rewrite the statute, add justices. There are two ways short of that though that might send the message without going to the brink that I think Professor Lombardi is concerned about. One is jurisdiction stripping. I know my colleagues who have taught federal courts are very familiar with that, but Congress has the ability, not fully tested, to take certain things outside of the jurisdiction of the US Supreme Court. Maybe the Democrats decide that abortion cases are outside the purview of Supreme Court review. Maybe just the threat, just as with our historical discussion about FDR's court packing, I think to be honest, Chief Justice Roberts is a chess player. He's in it for the long haul. And part of why he's been moderating is because, look, he doesn't wanna be like the House of Representatives with 400-something justices. He likes being part of an elite small institution. So even just the talk of court packing may cause enough moderation on the court that we come back from the brink. In answer to the question, what could we do? I realized that this is a diverse audience, so I can't really answer it necessarily for everyone. But for those of you who are law students, some things that you could do, two things, two piece device. First, in an era when originalism and textualism are likely to have a lot of power in judicial interpretation. Learn those doctrines, study those doctrines, and particularly don't avoid them simply because you believe that you will not agree with them. Educate yourself in these important ways that the court makes decisions so that you understand on a deep level how they work. My second piece of advice is be who you are. Justice Ginsburg did not march in the streets. She brought litigation bit by bit. That was her way of doing it. As a person whose career came of age in the civil rights movement, she wasn't participating in necessarily a lot of what other people associated with the civil rights movement, but she was advancing civil rights. Some of you will prefer a moderate incremental change, and some of you will seek more radical change. And for those of you who seek that, pursue that. And frankly, as we've seen over the past several months, at some point, that may mean you need to march in the streets. I wonder if we could turn to some of the questions that just come in through the Q and A I'm aware that the panelists have started to take a look at them, and so maybe I'll just turn to the panelists and ask them which questions they would like to address. Professor Mannheim. So a lot of the questions in the chat are relate, basically they, the questions relate to things like, what about this proposal? Is that constitutional? What about that proposal? Is that constitutional? And basically we can't really answer for you if that's constitutional or not. Because when you hear somebody say something like, this is constitutional, that's unconstitutional, there's basically two things you're hearing. Either the person is predicting at whatever level of accuracy what a court will say about this, and is also assuming that society at large is then going to agree with the court and sort of accept that the court has reached a definitive answer. So either the person is basically sort of predicting what a court would say, or the person is essentially giving you their own views of what they think the law should say. When it comes to the first category, all these proposals, many of them, it's not clear whether or not they are quote constitutional because we can't predict what a court would do if a court would even be willing to sort of adjudicate some of these questions, number one. And number two, say that there was some sort of scheme that Congress bring up to try to stagger turns and strict jurisdiction from the court and expand the court, et cetera. And then the court's response to that was to say, we think this is illegitimate, we say that this is not legal. Would society as a whole accept that verdict by the Supreme Court? We don't know. This is sort of outside of the normal way we talk about whether something is constitutional or not. Then you get to the second category, which is should it be constitutional? Should a court decide that way? Should society accept it? Now to be clear, that second category is extraordinarily important and it warrants our attention and warrants our discussion. But here's the thing, if while you're reading your Twitter or your, I don't know, you guys reading the TikTok, I don't know what you mean. But if you're reading this stuff, hopefully you're reading some commentary that is longer form, but if you see people, if you hear people speak authoritarian, sort of in a definitive way about whether something is allowed or not, just be a little bit wary of that because you basically may have somebody packing in their own personal views of what the law should be into a package that makes it look like it's either right or either wrong. Great, so we've got two minutes left. Professor LaVarti, you want to jump in? I think that's very wise. I did see one student ask whether they thought as that constitutional amendment was as far off as, if everyone agreed that constitutional amendment is unlikely in the next year or two. And so I would be interested if other people do agree. I don't think it's impossible. And I'd go to a different point, which is, and I think this does fit on what Professor Mannheim and Professor Nicholas were driving it. If the situation becomes dire enough, or for that matter, if a temporary, a sort of fleeting supermajority in the Congress and in the presidency decides to threaten to do significant, make significant changes and significant changes in the number and personnel and the judges, maybe then more people would be willing to contemplate a compromise constitutional amendment. We're really in uncharted territory. And this is to go where Professor Mannheim is talking about. We haven't, the 19th century was a very, the Supreme Court was a very political institution, much more so than it has been over the last 50 years. But we're moving back into a period that no one who's alive today has seen in practice. And I don't think we really can predict either what is legally possible or what is politically realistic over the next couple of years, just because the situation is really so unusual. Well, with that, I regret, I know we have many more questions, but I suspect we've got to wrap up so people can teach. Dean Barnes, would you like to say any last things in our remaining one minute? First of all, thank you to the panelists for this wide ranging and I think very thoughtful and helpful discussion. I mean, the beauty of the American constitution and democracy is that every day we get to see it play out in front of our eyes in a way that is both contested at the level of the legislator and executive in the court and in ways in which citizens we ourselves can be involved in that process. So the most important thing is for our students and others to educate themselves on what's coming next and to be involved because these are not abstract to things that will affect them in some remote ways like Justice Ginsburg, I too understand and believe in the impact of law on the lives of real people. So hopefully our students will engage and find ways to involve themselves in responding to the things that concern them. Thank you.