 Thank you all for joining us at Thing Tech Hawaii. Time for responsible change. And we're fortunate to have with us retired judge Sandra Sims also author, working on your second book now right. I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm really really working on it. The stories are unfolding. Yes, and speaking of stories, a man who brings so many of them to the table. Ben Davis, a retired professor from the University of Toledo School of Law also recently, University of Illinois Chicago School of Law and now at Washington Lee School of Law, coming to us from Charlottesville, Virginia. Well, Ben Sandra we have a momentous day. Indeed, we do. Indeed, we do. Judge now justice. Jackson has been confirmed. So I would just like to say something. All right. My mother used to tell me that she slept well at night, knowing that Thurgood Marshall was on the Supreme Court. So when Thurgood Marshall retired and Justice Thomas was proposed. I would distinctly remember a conversation with a friend of mine, who was very concerned about justice Thomas is likely approach to the law once he was on the court. And I remember feeling at that time that it's just that I can't handle the idea of a Supreme Court of the United States without a black person on it was too many centuries of that. And so I was kind of like, I will live with that phenomenon, you know, and there was all the stuff about his confirmation, and I'm not getting into that part. But I would, you know, that there was at least a black person on the court was, it was too much for me to have a court that didn't have any black people on it. But today, there's going to be a court that's going to have two black people on something that my mother couldn't have imagined something that really I never imagined. And it's wonderful. And so part of what's fun with that is now I feel that I can really criticize justice Thomas, because he's not the only one anymore. You know, and I can go at him for all the nonsense. In particular, I mean I criticize them on things along the way. But I think this, this, there's a kind of beauty in this moment, where you have justice Thomas coming up and catching all this head about his wife's work to the election, and he and his eight one decision on the release of the documents, when he would have known about that. I thought that is, there's a kind of having her come into the being part of the Supreme Court, I'm going to love to imagine the discussions about refusal and all that that will be had. And he tries to play a race card. She's like nah brother, nah brother, no, no, no, no, no, no working brother, not working. She said the cheap land to refuse yourself for the things related to our, you know, she's already in there. She's already recognizing what the role of a judge really is in terms of making decisions she's already got that. Yeah, she's got it, because that's, that's, she sits on the board there so she obviously knows this is not something that I should be a part of. But I want to take away from her moment with him. You know, because this I mean I got up early to watch. When I heard that it was they were going to do the vote I generally don't watch Senate comp, you know those hearings on C span, but this one I just felt compelled to just, well for us it was early. Celebrity and and watch this and I was struck by how emotionally it hit me. It, I was sitting there thinking Oh this is like, woo, waiting for this raw raw feeling to come. And it was solid. Yes. It was so solid I sat there and I was like, this is moment to just sit and relish as a black woman, as a retired judge myself, to just sit there and relish in that moment and feel for her and be for her. It struck me in a way that I had just not expected. You know, I can have my black woman lawyer shirt on today. I was going to be in a cheering mode, but I was just like, this is so sound. This is so powerful. This is so important. This means so much to so many of us, particularly for black women. This just means so much. We are so, when I just say black, what I mean, I really mean black women lawyers and judges who have just sort of been the last group within the profession, so to speak, you know, in terms of, you know, where we are oftentimes with positions and status and all of that is sort of like the last, even though in her, in sense, her credentials, her credibility, her credentials are unassailable. Right. They're simply unassailable, even though, you know, they tried everything to make it look like she's some crazed person, but she's not. She's brilliant, she's competent, she's accomplished, she's done all the things that we want judges to do, to be able to do. She's represented clients. She's been to court. She's tried cases in the, in the district court, in the appeals court. She's done everything. She's seen it all. She's experienced it all. She's felt it on all those levels in a way that so many of some of the other ones have not, they've not even had that wealth of experience that comes with what she's accomplished. And in that moment, it just hit me like, whoa, I am so proud and happy for her and for what it does for black women lawyers, black women judges all across anyway. Yes. Well, I wanted to, I wanted to pick up on your comment that having been last, right? And I vaguely remember a line from the Bible that was something along the lines. The last shall be first, all right? And today, every single one of those black women who have thought of themselves as the last have a little part of feeling that I am first now. And I think that that's kind of a beautiful part of it. You know, the other thing I wanted to say is I have listened for a long time to Republicans referring to themselves as the party of Lincoln. And I just wanted to say, and I wrote this on a Facebook post, if you were the party of Lincoln, you vote for her. And if you aren't the party of Lincoln, then you don't. And so I just looked at the numbers that of numbers of Republicans have voted for, I said for the Democrats, too, because, you know, but I was like, OK, 53, 47, I think there were three Republicans that voted for her. And so and there were 47, including Tim Scott, that voted against her. And so I'm kind of like, OK, folks, you go around and bandy that party of Lincoln thing all the time. But at this crucial moment with a person who has all of the qualities that you could ever imagine, I thought that Senator Romney's comment on that in his approval of her was basically, hey, I might not agree with everything she's going to decide, but she is clearly qualified and got the right kind of integrity to be the person that's there. And if you can't get over yourself and your trips. Then never again, never again, call yourself the party of Lincoln. I don't know what you're the party of, but you are not the party of Lincoln based on that vote today. You know, that's how strongly I felt that, you know, yeah. Well, that party of Lincoln, that party of Lincoln ended in what, sixty four. Thank you. Thank you. I know, but you know, the so-called Republican Party, that thing switched up in in sixty four. Is it sixty four or whenever I forget it was. Yeah, yeah, with the cold water. Yeah, that that's when that ended. I mean, I, you know, I know of. You know, a lot of older, you know, blacks who would refer to being Republican. Yeah. In those times, because it was because that was what Lincoln, because I grew up in Chicago, so we don't have such things. But at least in my time, there were no such things, regardless. Yeah, my mother was a Republican. I grew up in the in the original daily era. So, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the daily machine and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I want to say my mother was a Republican and switched along the way. I don't know which one it was. Sixty four. Maybe it was sixty with sixty. It might I think sixty when Kennedy came in. A lot of those and then you had this whole southern strategy thing that came out of with the Democrats and the vote anyway. That's another story. But today is Judge Jackson's day. It really is. And I hope she is, you know, just so, so happy. And so many people, not only in the United States, but I would say around the world. Are happy that she is on the Supreme Court. I bet you're all over Africa. There are people saying, well, look at that. African lawyers, lawyers out in Asia and Europe and South America saying, look at this. This is not just an American moment. It is a world moment that we should all be enjoying rather than falling down into some kind of, you know, partisanship thing again, you know, but it's it's magical. It's magic. Yeah. What did you think, Chuck? You, you've been watching this too. So I think a couple of things that as badly as some of these senators behaved, interrupting, insulting, falsely accusing things like that, there were a couple of highlight moments. One of them pictorially captured and it's gone viral. The picture of her daughter looking on as her mom withstood those attacks with class and grace and dignity. And and after those attacks, Cory Booker is stepping up saying they're not going to take away our joy. Yeah. This is our time. We've earned it. We're there. We're going to finish this process. So what of her special knowledge and experience does she bring now that are especially important in these times and going forward? And then we kind of touched on it a little bit earlier. Ben, if you've got some thoughts on this, I, you know, having, you know, having been on the bench, not at the level that she is clearly, but, you know, having tried cases, particularly from a criminal stand on the criminal bench and having had to really understand what it takes to be in that space, to be in that place of having to make these kinds of decisions about people. I mean, I'm not getting away from just like, you know, discussing esoteric legal issues, but that understanding that there's a person in front of you who is, there's a person, there's a real live person in front of you for whom you have to make a decision, for whom you have to address whatever it is they may have done or whatever decision you made to make about the case, if they're real live people. And I think what she brings, having had all of those experiences versus as a public defender as a family member in law enforcement, knowing the impacts of that, having had a family member, you know, outside of the law and just having grown up as a black woman in America. Through all that entails, I think she brings a perspective to the bench that is needed. That's not to say that just being a, you know, black female or is, you know, I'd say calling it a get out of jail free car. That's not it. It's a perspective that you bring a way in which you lens through which you can see things in a different way than someone who's not had any of those experiences can do. I mean, you that's just I mean, I think that's the importance and the necessity of diversity itself is that it brings a different perspective, a different set of experiences through which you can see the lens of how you're making decisions. And I'll just share one little incident. I recall I was having a look at my stuff today and I was like recalling, I was walking down the street one day. This is like years after, you know, and this woman, very, very well-dressed woman, a black woman, smiled and spoke. And of course, in Hawaii, we don't have that many. So we always say hi and she stopped to exchange. And she told me that I had sent him to her son to prison. And when she told me her son's name, I remembered him well. I had sent him to prison. It was for 20 years. It was a very serious charge and it had was quite serious. And I remembered his family being in the audience as he was sentenced. And I remember having gone through the pre-sentence report that we had that detailed his life experience, his family. You know, he'd come from this was, you know, a regular. What I would, in my experience, you know, a typical kind of middle class black family, he had been given these values and grew up not to, you know, he had people supporting him. He had been given a set of values by his family. And he he just clearly deviated from that. And I knew that because I know a lot of people like that. So I remember saying to him for this particular experience that he was involved in, which was, you know, really off the mark. And I said, this is this is not you. This is not how you were raised. And he said to me, no, it's not. It isn't. And I and it's like, I could see him. I saw him. I saw this kid growing up in this family and having all these experiences. And then just, you know, taking a left turn. But I think because I knew people like that, I knew of that life experience that you could do that in this country as a, you know, as a black kid growing up and just have that happen. I understood that. And I told her that. And I told him that I said, this is not you. So, you know, you got to take responsibility for what you did. But I know this is not you. Your family knows this is not you. Make that change when you come out, you got to. You know, you got to pull yourself back together and not. And you have the ability to do so. Yeah. I had that experience. I knew that and she told me that she reminded me that that's she remembered what I said to him. Now, if I didn't have that kind, if, you know, I'm not saying another person who's not black wouldn't understand it, but I think my ability to having had that life experience enabled me to be able to see that. To see that he's just not some, you know, crawling up from under rock somewhere, doing something crazy. That's not him. I knew that. And I saw that a lot. I saw that a lot in the, in the, unfortunately, I saw it more often than you can imagine. Then you can, you know, the day in which is a woman who's asking for continuance for her son's case so she could go to the college graduation of the other son, what? Yes, you can go to the graduation. We can postpone that sentencing. This is what families deal with. This is what people deal with. As she understood and she's had, she brings it. I'm sorry. Go ahead. And she brings some of that to the table and you can understand these are real people, the real people with real life experiences. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say that because of the holes and the resumes of the other eight justices in terms of their experiences, I expect that they have myths that they believe about each of those levels and each of those kinds of experiences that they've been living on or inculcated along the way. And what she brings is actual experience in each of those areas that they cannot counter with some myth, you know, they cannot deny she has that experience. They can fight about it and disagree with it, but they can't just kind of blow some smoke, so to speak. And I've read some of these opinions of justices or even read some of the transcripts of oral arguments where I've been quite honestly appalled by the cavalierness of some of them, which suggested to me, they really don't have that kind of gravitas outside of the legal rules. Yes, she's going to bring. Yes, absolutely. You know, and and and and, you know, I'm just that's where I'm hopeful. In a way, it reminds me of a comment I think Justice Samaday Okana talked about when Thurgood Marshall, the Justice Thurgood Marshall passed away as they'd be in their meetings with the nine justices. And, you know, somebody would say, well, you know, that ten dollar fee is no big deal for somebody to, I don't know, get their registration for something. And Thurgood Marshall would talk about ten dollars, what it would mean and the cases he'd had to deal with, you know, where somebody was thinking twenty five cents was a huge thing. You know what I mean? And that kind of, you know, the other justices could not say anything against it, they can play around with it. But they know he had the background experience to be able to say those things and hopefully influence them in some way in the manner in which they approached whatever the case was in front of. That's what I think that she brings. Yeah, absolutely. And it's and that goes to the Chief Justice and the other seven justices on there, they have holes in their resumes. I'm not saying they don't have great resumes, OK? But they have holes in their resumes that she does not have. And that's the thing that she brings that will help them to be better justices, I think. Yeah, I think I agree. I think so, too. And I think because she's not her experiences have not isolated her from real life. And I think sometimes when you look at, you know, some of the other, as you say, holes in the red resumes, there has been this sort of isolation, you know, within the silos of, you know, legal dissertation sometimes that shelters you from the fact that real people are standing in front of you with real life experiences. And they're here because you've got to make a decision that's going to impact the way they live their life. Yeah, it is real life. I mean, I remember I used to tell my staff, you know, this is criminal court. Everybody who's coming in here is, you know, this is what we do for we do this, but everybody is traumatized. Folks stayed up all night trying to figure out what they were going to do, how they were going to respond, whether they were jurors, whether they were defendants, whether they were witnesses. People walking through these doors are traumatized by this whole experience of being in court, particularly in a criminal setting. And you can't. And I think she certainly gets that. Yeah, you got to get it. Yeah. Anyway, that's really valuable, valuable insight, because it connects with her other related experience, not once, but twice as a very influential mission member of the Federal Sentencing Commission. Yes, that. Yes, exactly. One who was able in a very divided bipartisan commission to bring about virtual unanimity on how broken that system was and how much in need of change it was. And one of the things that came out in the hearings was that her sentences were commensurate with those of other federal judges. Of course, it was the guidelines that were broken, not the judges. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just like when the questions are posed about stacking the court and packing the court, that's not her call. That's Congress's call. Yeah, yeah. And they decide to increase. That's not on her. That's not on judges. Anybody as it was as though they sort of forgotten what it is that, you know, the different branch to government do. Well, for yeah, I want to jump on, you know, on that particular point, too, with regards to the questioning that's there, I would like to hope that in the elections that come up this fall, there would be people who would have listened to the questions that were there that were said to her and would recognize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the questioner. That means that they need to leave the Senate. They don't get OK. And I don't know who's running against any of them. But I'm going to say, for example, the whole definition of a woman one was, for me, appalling. And by the way, I've seen there have been efforts by these some of these senators to define what a woman is. And one of the conclusions that one of them's definition was that a woman who had a hysterectomy was not a woman. That makes no sense. You know what I'm saying? You know, it makes no sense. The second thing I think it's important that people people say, I mean, I can understand ideological differences. I can understand, you know, theories or all that kind of stuff. But the kind of what I could only call sheep tracks. One of them that I would like to say and she had with such grace that I'm still amazed by was when there was a senator who asked her what her religion was as the first question. When we all know the Constitution has no religious test for any office, whether state or federal. And so it is so out of bounds under the Constitution to ask somebody about something that they may be public about. They may be private about, but you don't ask. And she handled it with grace and, you know, answered. But I thought of what if somebody was not Protestant, non-denominational, but what if somebody was Jewish back in the day? There was the whole thing with I think it was Justice Brandeis when these when these hearings started. Or what if somebody was Muslim or or Hindi or something like that, something that was quote, unquote, not sort of our American Protestant space, right? I felt for any candidate would ever be in that spot who had done all the kinds of remarkable things and would have to be confronted with something that is clearly not constitutional. Yeah, you know, and she handled it with grace. She did. You know, but I say, think about that when you're looking at the election this fall, so think about that. If you're a person in the in the district or in the state where one of these people is up, is this really the kind of person you want to represent you? And I wish that I'm not saying that you have to fit, you know, a Democrat, if it's a Republican, I'm talking about. I'm just saying that if there's a primary look at is this person the one I want or is it another Republican or another Democrat that I want to be the one who represents me because it's it's appalling to me. It was it was it was it was so beneath their role, if I could say it like that. And but she's confirmed and yes, for that. That's a great way for us to finish up today. We can rejoice. She is confirmed and she will go on to be. Oh, man, I OK. I'm getting excited now. Now, I'm looking for a first question and a first hearing in the fall. At some oral argument in October, just OK, what did she say? What was the first question? You know, I'm just waiting for that. That's it. Sandra, Ben, thank you so much for another great, lively candid session. And may we all hope that the invaluable, diverse human experience and the wonderful. Bipartisan communication ability that Justice Jackson brings to the table will help us see better choices. You know, we all can hope I like that. Justice Jackson. Justice Jackson. There we go. I like it. Thank you all. Come back and see us in a couple of weeks. We will be back. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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