Remarks of Cathy Cox
2007 Commencement
Walter F. George School of Law, Mercer University
Macon, Georgia – May 12, 2007

Thank you Dr. Fleming for your kind introduction, and thank you also Dean Floyd and President Underwood for giving me the privilege of addressing the 2007 graduates of the Walter F. George School of Law. I can assure you that when I sat where you graduates are sitting 21 years ago – the last thing that would have crossed my mind was the possibility of being the commencement speaker for my alma mater.

Back in those days, my class got to take the Bar exam during our third year. It made for a brutal spring semester, but it was certainly a joy to have it behind us at graduation. At least for those who passed  the Bar!

In those pre-Internet days, you had to wait to get your Bar results in the mail, snail mail, and you knew if you got a small, regular business-sized envelope that you had passed – and you received a letter of congratulations. If you got a big manilla envelope, you knew before you opened it that you’d failed – because it contained the application to take the exam again.

Now, the Bar results in 1986 were coming out the very day before graduation, and all my family was loading up in Bainbridge to come to Macon for the ceremonies. And they were ready to leave before the mailman reached our house with his daily delivery. I was a nervous wreck, and told my family they couldn’t leave without getting my results -- so my Dad drove up and down the streets of our neighborhood until he found the mailman and retrieved our mail. Sure enough, it had something addressed to me from the Bar Examiners.

He called me on the phone and said, “Cathy, I’ve got the mail and there’s a big manilla envelope for you. Should I open it?”

My heart sank – and of course, he was pulling my leg. But getting good news about the Bar made graduation a truly glorious day. Although your news won’t come for months now,  I hope you get the same reason to celebrate later this fall.

This is a day for celebration. It is a day to pat yourselves on your backs. It is a day to look back with wonder at all you’ve learned and all you’ve accomplished. I suspect many of you, as I did 21 years ago, are thinking back over the past three years – recalling late night study sessions, the stress of being called on in class, and the panic periods of exams. You also know now that you’re tougher than perhaps you thought you were, that you can push yourself to learn and do more than you thought possible.

And I hope you realize that you have changed. Law school changes people. I think it does so in a very dramatic fashion – because it changes the very way that you think. You have now become critical thinkers – women and men who know how to analyze an argument, who know better than to accept a statement at face value without applying some thought to it. You know how to separate substance from fluff, and how to do business in one of the most structured of all environments – our judicial system.

I had lunch recently with a young woman who worked with me over the past two years. She’s going to be starting law school this fall. I asked her why she wanted to go, and her answer made me realize that she already understands that law school is going to bring important changes in her life.  She said, “A law degree puts you on a different plane.”

Think about that. A law degree puts you on a different plane. It does. It means you have acquired and developed skills and abilities that set you apart from most of the world. And your eventual admission to the Bar is evidence that you “possess the integrity and character requisite to be members of the State Bar,” and you will have taken an oath to “truly and honestly, justly and uprightly” conduct yourself as a member of this learned profession.

The law degree you will earn today will set you apart – it will provide you with enormous opportunities that others don’t receive. Not only will law firms and businesses offer you good jobs that pay well and challenge you intellectually, but the mere fact that you have a Juris Doctorate degree will open doors that you perhaps had never considered.

I can assure that you without my J.D. degree – which is considered a “terminal” degree in academia – I could not have been considered for the job I will start this summer, that of a college president. The same was true of President Underwood.

I didn’t fully appreciate that on graduation day in 1986, but my J.D. degree has served me well. Yours will, too.

But while you all deserve to enjoy the fruits of your work today, I hope you appreciate that the acquisition of a law degree comes not only with opportunity but with incredible responsibilities.

And in the remaining few moments I have, I want to focus on one particular responsibility that you, as lawyers, will have – over and above the duty that your fellow citizens will have.

That responsibility, my friends, goes to the respect due our judicial system. Our independent judicial system.

As Americans, we value and take pride in our three-branched system of government, one in which the executive, legislative, and judicial branches exist constitutionally as equals. Our Constitutions, both federal and state, and our statutes have given us a system of checks and balances over and between the three branches – but each of them remains independent and equal.

As it’s because of that independence – and the public’s confidence in that independence -- that our form of government works and has lasted through the tests of time.

As graduating law students, you probably take this as elementary – and truly, one would hope that every American school child learned these concepts in elementary school. But a survey last year by the American Bar Association found that 48 % of people in this country could not define “separation of powers.” A whopping 44% could not name the three branches of government, and 38% could not identify the duties of judges.

I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.

Our education system, somewhere along the way, has failed to teach our children the very basic underpinnings of our democratic system of government. And when you can’t even name the three branches of government, when you have no clue what “separation of powers” means or why it is so important, then it becomes easier to understand why our judicial system seems to be under attack today.

The attacks are aimed at almost all aspects of our judicial system, and they’re springing, not surprisingly, from people and organizations that have an agenda – and the agenda is not fair and impartial jurisprudence.

Those generating the attacks want not a true interpretation of the Constitution and laws – but rather a skewed interpretation of the law. To put it bluntly, they want a judge who will rule with biases, even with partisanship, not a judge who impartially follows the law.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor published a column last fall in the Wall Street Journal in which she discussed the efforts to intimidate and undermine the judiciary. She said, “The breadth and intensity of rage currently being leveled at the judiciary may be unmatched in American history. The ubiquitous ‘activist judges’ who ‘legislate from the bench’ have become central villains on today’s domestic political landscape. Elected officials routinely score cheap points by railing against the ‘elitist judges.’ Several jeremiads are published every year warning of the dangers of judicial supremacy and judicial tyranny. Though these attacks generally emit more heat than light, using judges as punching bags presents a grave threat to the independent judiciary.”

Our own State Bar president Jay Cook of Athens took up this topic on the President’s page of the Georgia Bar Journal in February, noting that efforts to intimidate our courts wear “many disguises: threats to impeach federal judges who make unpopular rulings; punitive cuts in state and federal judicial budgets; judicial salary erosion; passing court-stripping laws that limit judicial jurisdiction; court packing; and running dirty campaigns to replace fair judges with those who can be bought by special-interest money.”

We saw it vividly right here in Georgia last fall when out-of-state special interests poured more than $1.5 million dollars into a race for a seat on the Georgia Supreme Court – an unprecedented amount of money for a judicial race in this state.  The organization that raised this money – again, almost all from out of state, claimed they wanted to rid the court of those “activist judges” who are “too liberal” for Georgia and, when you boiled their arguments down, it was clear they wanted a judge who would rule “their” way – they weren’t looking for a fair and impartial judge. Georgia voters resoundingly rejected these efforts and re-elected the incumbent justice with more than 63% of the vote.

From our own state legislature, where, coincidentally, lawyers now make up less than 35 of the 236 members of the Georgia General Assembly, we have elected officials who – like Justice O’Connor suggested, seem routinely to seek the “cheap political shot” by denigrating any judge that rules in a way they find to be unpopular.

One of the principal leaders in the Georgia House publicly attacked a federal judge in 2005 for “thwarting the will of the people” when the judge enjoined a state law that this leader had supported.  And several legislators have shown their true colors when they’ve been quoted making comments like, “Sure, I would support electing judges on a partisan basis.” Or, one legislator who recently showed his complete disdain for the judicial system (and perhaps his ignorance, as well) when he responded to an advocate who wanted him to vote against a pending bill by asking, “Is there something you can tell me other than it’s unconstitutional?”

The actions of our legislature speak louder than their words. This year, with the major Atlanta law firms offering first year lawyers right out of law school starting salaries of $140,000, we will have a significant number of  inexperienced first-year lawyers making almost 20% more than our most experienced trial court judges. That’s right – the basic pay for our superior court judges throughout the state is $116,000,  and no more -- unless a particular county adds a small supplement.  No judges in Georgia have received a pay raise in the past eight years other than nominal cost of living increases – and the governor and General Assembly this year again refused to bring the pay of judges into line with market realities.
And it’s not just our judges that get short-shrift from our state officials. They cut almost a million dollars out of the budget of our district attorneys – am I right Danny Craig?  And the state’s Prosecutorial Council expects it will have to furlough almost 500 employees for at least a week without pay before July 1 in order to make ends meet.

You may also have read about this year’s debate over the funding of indigent defense – something I hope every one of you now appreciates as a right guaranteed by both our federal and state Constitutions. The legislature cut indigent defense funding, too, and the State Public Defenders’ Office has already announced the layoffs of 41 employees effective next month.

Is this just fiscally prudent governance? No sir. No ma’am. The lack of funding illustrates all too sadly a complete lack of respect for and understanding of our judicial system – the judges, the prosecutors, and those who do their Constitutional duty by representing the least among us.
I dare say the lack of financial support for the judiciary is also a back-handed attempt by “activist elected officials” to intimidate the judicial system into kowtowing to a slanted view of jurisprudence, rather than that contemplated by our Constitution and laws.
 
Anyway you slice or dice it, the fight is on to diminish the role of the judiciary and the equal status and independence of our judicial system – and it will be up to you and me, the lawyers in this state and in this nation, to fight back.
 
When the talk-radio talking heads start spewing unsubstantiated, inflammatory garbage about our courts, or about a particular judge, you and I need to find outlets to counter that with the truth.
 
When you hear someone ask why the latest newsmaking murder defendant should even get a trial, and why we should pay for an indigent system – I hope first that the hair on the back of your neck will stand up, and that you will find courteous ways to explain why even people who seem clearly guilty deserve a fair trial in this country.
 
When a court makes a decision that is controversial or unpopular, and the media and bloggers go wild with the “activist judge” tripe – you and I need to find opportunities to re-educate our neighbors on a judge’s duty to follow the law, not public opinion polls.
 
And before the Georgia legislature meets again – hopefully not this year! – each of us needs to have a conversation with our own state senator and state representative about the importance of an independent judiciary, and the need to provide it with the resources it requires to operate.

It’s up to us to stand up. Justice O’Connor again summed it up, saying “There is no natural constituency for judicial independence, except for a vibrant, responsible lawyer class.”
 
Why does all this matter? It’s not just because our system of government was designed this way. It goes to the most basic elements of legal fairness and equity -- concepts that I hope after these three years of law school are fully ingrained in your psyche. We are in a fight against those who want privilege and advantage in our courts, rather than a level playing field.

I believe it’s a fight worth fighting.

And it’s a fight that I think is well illustrated by the scene in a movie – I hope that most of you have seen it (and if not, you need to rent it this summer!).  I think it portrays what lawyers know to be right about our court system, and why this fight for our courts is so critical.

It is the scene from the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, from Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. And Gregory Peck, playing the magnificent Atticus Finch, had this to say
in his closing argument to the jury in the trial of a black man falsely accused of attacking a white woman in Alabama in 1935:

“Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal. ... There is a tendency ... for certain people to use this phrase out of context … We know all men are not created equal… -- some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others -- some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal -- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."

Ladies and gentlemen, you leave here today with a law degree. You have entered a higher realm. Many doors will be open to you now.  And with those opportunities, come weighty responsibilities as a member of this learned profession – one of which will be the need to educate, to advocate, and fight – for the independence of our judiciary. “In our courts, all men are created equal.”

May it always be so.

Good luck to you all, the Walter F. George Class of 2007 – and thank you. 

About the Speaker

Cathy Cox has been a dedicated public servant for the past 14 years. She served six years in the Georgia state legislature before being elected for two terms as Secretary of State of Georgia, from 1999 to 2007, the first woman to hold the statewide office. Upon completing her term as Secretary of State, she became the Carl E. Sanders Political Leadership Scholar at the University of Georgia School of Law. In March, the Board of Trustees of Young Harris College in North Georgia elected her as the college’s 21st president, effective at the end of the academic year. She holds an associate’s degree from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and the juris doctor degree from the Walter F. George School of Law of Mercer University. Before entering law school, she was a newspaper reporter. For 10 years, she practiced law in Atlanta and Bainbridge.