What a beautiful venue to give a speech about the Constitution! Thank you to the Georgetown Center for the Constitution for inviting me to give the 5th Thomas M. Cooley Judicial Lecture.1 My understanding is that many of you are law students or recent law-school graduates participating in Georgetown's originalism seminar. My guess is that most of you, if not all of you, are planning on doing a clerkship in either a federal or state court someday. I will start by speaking directly to you. Clerking is the best job you will have, bar none. You will learn as much in one year of clerking as you did in law school, or at least I did. So I decided to do the next best thing as a career, which is become a judge. Whatever you end up deciding to do, having clerked will make you better at it. Not to mention that you will make lifelong connections with your judge and their clerk network. Speaking of courts, that is exactly what I would like to discuss tonight. I have been studying them, serving them, or thinking about them my entire adult life. First as a federal clerk (three times), next as a federal-courts professor, then as a state-court judge, and now as a federal circuit judge. You might imagine I have a few thoughts on the subject. Having served in multiple roles, I want to help you understand how state and federal courts fit together, including pointing out a few places where we have deviated from the vision of our Founders. Tonight's talk is about maintaining judicial structure.
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