U.S. Judge Carlton W. Reeves, (click here) a 1989 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, has been named this year’s recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law.
“Judge Reeves is an exemplary public servant whose decisions have reached well beyond his seat in Mississippi,” School of Law Dean Risa Goluboff said. “His opinions elucidate the law through powerful reasoning and a deep humanity that gets to the heart of the issues at stake.”
The judge will give a talk to mark the occasion on April 11 at 2:15 p.m. in the Law School’s Caplin Auditorium.
Reeves, a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, has served for almost a decade on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, where he has ruled in a number of important cases, including those involving equality and civil rights....
Judge Reeves gave a very resounding acceptance speech.
...Now, Jefferson would truly question (click here) what you have done if he knew I was not just a black man,
but a black federal judge. For he believed that federal judges were “sappers and miners, steadily
working to undermine the independent rights of the States” and “assault[] . . . the Constitution.” Jefferson led his party to attack the judiciary’s independence.
So I am here today not just as a black man, but as a black judge. My friend Judge Reggie Walton
once said that when black judges “see injustice,” we “have an obligation to stand up and speak.” So as a black judge, accepting an award7 named for a man whose views on race cannot be
untethered from an assault on the judiciary, I must stand up and speak about that pairing. How
corrosive it has been since the days of Jefferson, who we all agree, was a man of his time. How
often that pairing has been embraced throughout our history, by men of their times. And why we
must defend against its poison when spewed today, by men of our time. Because there is another
vision of what the judiciary is and should always be – a vision of the courts as the defender of
justice....
...At heart, justice is a search for truth. Deciding what is fair, what is reasonable, what is owed –
these questions are too important to be decided by position, power, or tradition. Only truth can
resolve them. Thus, as Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote, “the job of courts is not merely one
of an umpire in disputes between litigants. Their job is to search out the truth, both as to the facts
and the law.”
Finding truth is hard. It takes time. That’s why courts follow carefully-crafted rules of evidence and procedure – and why injustice happens when courts place expediency and finality ahead of
truth. Finding truth also takes independence. That’s why courts must be shielded from
partisanship and undue influence. Most of all, finding truth takes experience....
...Justice’s demand for diverse experiences is best seen in the heart of our court system: the jury. The
Constitution requires trials “by an impartial jury.” The Supreme Court says we should try to draw
juries that “reflect a representative cross section of the community.” Excluding classes of people
from juries, like women and black folk, results in decision-making that – according to the Supreme
Court – is exposed to “the risk of bias.” Reams of scientific evidence support this conclusion,
along with the idea that diversity is essential to all kinds of courtroom decision-making....
...The law of the land was Dred Scott, which said black people were “beings of an inferior
order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”...
...Reversing the untruths of Dred Scott took a war and a new Constitution, rewritten to reflect the
truth of black equality through the 13th, 14
th
, and 15th Amendments. It also took “revitalized
federal courts,” with expanded jurisdiction, more judgeships, and new causes of action to protect
civil rights. Mississippi’s court saw black plaintiffs, black juries, black lawyers, black witnesses, and – yes – black judges. For the first time ever, Mississippi’s judiciary was equipped with the
experiences of black folks.
But then came pushback....
...a former
lawyer to the Klan, L.Q.C. Lamar, is the only Mississippian to have served on the U.S. Supreme
Court....
...Plessy v. Ferguson, which assumed – in ignorance of all relevant experience –
that segregation “stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority . . . solely because the colored
race chooses to put that construction upon it.” If you want to know what that kind of all-white justice looks like, what it feels like, what it hurts
like, ask the people in Mississippi who lived through it.
Ask those whose lynchings were sanctioned by a judiciary that was “the Klan in black robes instead
of white sheets," as described by former Mississippi Supreme Court justice Fred Banks....
...As in Emmett Till...“Justice” whose servants called black folks
“niggers” in open court. “Justice” that ignored black eyewitness testimony. Justice that delivered
a unanimous “not guilty” verdict from an all-white, all-male jury that deliberated for all of an hour
and seven minutes. Why that long? Because they took a “pop” break....
...Judges like William Henry Hastie
integrated our Article III courts, ending 160 years of judicial segregation. Lawyers like Thurgood
Marshall revived civil rights statutes, prying open the doors of “antebellum courthouses where
white supremacy ruled.”...
..."Brown vs Board of Education"...That black people are “created equal.” That WE are included in “We the People.” Brown showed
that our courts were once again willing to incorporate the experiences of the many, rather than the
few, into their searches for truth.
Then came the second great pushback against the judiciary....
....To counter the experiences of Marshall and those like him, segregationist Senators wielded their
seniority, seniority built on the disenfranchisement of black people. Men like Senator Eastland –
who saw his voter suppression efforts in Mississippi rewarded with the chairmanship of the
Judiciary Committee – demanded the appointment of men who would enforce white supremacy.
Men like Harold Cox, a man who called black people in his court “baboons,” “chimpanzees,” and “niggers.” His “behavior was repugnant to anyone with a sense of fairness....
...And in Alexander v. Holmes County
– decided just 50 years ago this year– the Supreme Court ruled that “all deliberate speed” was no
longer a strategy for keeping Mississippi’s schools segregated. With the independence, power,
and fortitude to do justice, our courts’ search for truth bore freedom’s fruit.
I count myself among the harvest. Alexander came down when I was in kindergarten. So I was
among that first full class to enter an integrated first grade classroom at Annie Ellis Elementary. I
spent the next 12 years of public education with black and white children. Maxine and Melanie.
Don and Thomas. Phyllis and Charles, and every other member of my class of 1982, whose
graduation song was Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s classic, Ebony and Ivory....
...That opportunity, just like the opportunity of an integrated education, came from an effort to
defend and strengthen our courts. For eight years at the beginning of this century, building on the legacy of the President elected the year of America’s bicentennial, our nation witnessed a
revolution, one that dramatically expanded and improved the body of expertise federal courts
depend on to find truth. We saw the addition of more black judges, more women judges, more
Latina and Latino judges, more Asian-American judges, more Native American and Pacific
Islander judges, and more openly LGBTQ judges than ever before....
...That effort to make our judiciary reflect America was as brief as it was remarkable. We are now
eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary.
If you’ve never relied on a court, you may not see the assault. If you’ve never seen a friend or
loved one wrongly imprisoned, you may not feel it. If you have never been stopped for Driving
While Black, like my friend Judge Robert Wilkins, you might not fear it. But if you know the
words of Mississippi’s darkest moments, you can hear it.
When politicians attack courts as “dangerous,” “political,” and guilty of “egregious
overreach,” you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South.
When leaders chastise people for merely “us[ing] the courts,” you can hear the Citizens Council,
hammering up the names of black petitioners in Yazoo City. When the powerful accuse courts of
“open[ing] up our country to potential terrorists,” you can hear the Southern Manifesto’s authors,
smearing the judiciary for simply upholding the rights of black folk. When lawmakers say “we
should get rid of judges,” you can hear segregationist Senators, writing bills to strip courts of
their power. And when the Executive Branch calls our courts and their work “stupid,”“horrible,” “ridiculous,” “incompetent,” “a laughingstock,” and a “complete and total
disgrace,” you can hear the slurs and threats of executives like George Wallace, echoing into the
present.
I know what I heard when a federal judge was called “very biased and unfair” because he is “of
Mexican heritage.” When that judge’s ethnicity was said to prevent his issuing “fair rulings.” When that judge was called a “hater” simply because he is Latino. I heard the words of James
Eastland, a race-baiting politician, empowered by the falsehood of white supremacy, questioning
the judicial temperament of a man solely because of the color of his skin. I heard those words and
I did not know if it was 1967 or 2017.
This false seed is being sown across this country, from Mississippi to Virginia. I know, because I
am there. The proof is in my mailbox. In countless letters of hatred I’ve been called a “piece of
garbage,” “an arrogant pompous piece of sh**,” “a disgrace,” an “asshole . . .[who] will burn in
hell,” and the “embodiment of Satan himself.” One person has even told me that he has “prayed
that God will give [me] complete discomfort.” The deliverers of hate who send these messages
aim to bully and scare judges who look like me from the judiciary. And so they share an aim with
those who used whips and ropes and trees against my ancestors: scrubbing the black experience
from our nation’s courts.
Of course, courts can – and should – be criticized. Judges get it wrong, all the time. That includes
me. Scrutiny of our reasoning is not, on its own, troubling. Indeed, debating judicial decisions
improves, rather than impedes, our courts’ search for truth. But the slander and falsehoods thrown
at courts today are not those of a critic, seeking to improve the judiciary’s search for truth. They
are words of an attacker, seeking to distort and twist that search toward falsehood.
Of the Article III judges confirmed under the current Administration, 90% have been
white. Just one of those judges is black. Just two are Hispanic....
...Barely 25% of this Administration’s confirmed judges are
women. None have been black or Latina. Achieving complete gender equality on the federal
bench would require us to confirm only 23 women a year. How hard could that be? I suspect
Deans Goluboff and Kendrick would say, “not very hard.”
Think: in a country where they make up just 30% of the population, non-Hispanic white men
make up nearly 70% of this Administration’s confirmed judicial appointees. That’s not what
America looks like. That’s not even what the legal profession looks like....
...There is no excuse for this exclusion of minority experiences from our courts. Minority populations
are not monoliths; we contain multitudes....
...This Administration and a bare majority of the Senate, walking arm-and-arm, are not stumbling
unaware towards a homogeneous judiciary. Think of the slurs against Judge Curiel. Think of the
nominations to the bench of those who call diversity “code for relaxed standards,” who call
transgender children part of “Satan’s plan,” who defend the KKK in online message boards, who led voter suppression efforts for segregationists like Jesse Helms. Think of the pattern of
judicial nominees refusing to admit, like generations of nominees before them have, that Brown v.
Board was correctly decided. That same Brown which led to Alexander v. Holmes County,
which breathed justice into the segregated streets of my Yazoo City. As if equality was a mere
political position
Friends, let it be said that equal protection of the law is not a political position. It is enshrined in
our Constitution....
...With no Muslims on the bench, will our judiciary understand the many
facets of religious freedom? How can it defend economic opportunity with so few judges who
know the taste of a free lunch program or the weight of poverty? How can our judiciary understand
the depths of mass incarceration119 when so few judges have stood with the accused or know them
as neighbors, as Sunday School students, as loved ones? Filled only with the experiences of
prosecutors and state court judges, of Big Law partners and corporate counsel, of a single religion
or sexual orientation, our courts will fail to find the many truths justice must see. We need a
judiciary as diverse as our country – as diverse as “We the People.”...
...James Madison cautioned that it was “essential” a democracy’s officials “be derived from the great
body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it.” We ignore
this warning at our peril....
...Each of us has a role to play in defending our judiciary. Judges, politicians, and citizens alike must
denounce attacks that undermine our ability to do justice. It is not enough for judges, seeing racebased attacks on their brethren, to say they are merely “disheartened,” or to simply affirm their
non-partisan status. We must do more to defend our bench.
Those who control the judicial confirmation process – and those who elect them – must demand
that diverse experiences be seen as a necessary qualification for office, rather than a box happily
left unchecked....
...Courts must do more than denounce and diversify. For the attack on the judiciary aims to close the
courthouse doors to those who most need justice by shrinking the size, resources, and jurisdiction
of courts. Over the last 30 years, while the U.S. population has increased by over 30%; Congress
has increased the number of Article III judges by just 3%. Meanwhile, there are continued
attempts to close the doors to our own courtrooms. I think of heightened pleading standards, the
rise of mandatory arbitration, and judges who proclaim that “prisoner civil rights cases should be
eliminated from federal dockets.” Defending the judiciary requires judges to demand, not
diminish, the resources they need to find truth. We must expand the reach and power of our courts,
offering justice to all who claim the promise of America.
This speech began with Thomas Jefferson, and it will end with him as well. Because for all of his
failings, Mr. Jefferson, a man of his times, also framed our country’s greatest truth: that “all men
are created equal.” Searching for this truth, interpreting its meaning, and applying its mandates are
the tasks that make our judiciary a bastion of democracy – what makes “We” THE PEOPLE. We
do Jefferson justice – we do the martyrs of Mississippi justice – we do our country justice – by
defending our judiciary. Now, more than ever. Thank you.
