'SCOTUSBlog' Listening to the Law: On the Merits Inaugural Summit

Remarks as delivered at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center

Thank you for joining us here today. I am Ron Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University, and I am delighted that we are hosting the inaugural On the Merits Summit with SCOTUSBlog.

I am grateful for their partnership, and for that of our colleagues at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center and the SNF Agora Institute, to bring this program to fruition.

Truly, to stand in a room full of lawyers fills me with joy.

I understand that might not be true for everyone.

But as someone who spent a decade as a law school professor and dean at the University of Toronto, who now leads a university without a law school, I am savoring this moment … surrounded by sitting judges, legal academics, law students, and counsel, ready to dive into a day-long series of conversations on the law.

What can I say?

I suppose “fun” means different things to different people.

Now, it wouldn’t be a day devoted to the law without a reflection on a legal principle, indeed one that brings us here today:

On the merits.

As you well know, for lawyers and jurists, the phrase has a very particular meaning– to decide a case on the substance of the law, as it is applied to the evidence and facts, rather than on procedural grounds.

While the same principles do not apply strictly to the work of universities, there is something very meaningful and resonant about the idea of deciding something “on the merits.”

The mission of the university—and the scholars at them—rests on the principle of merit … the merit of sound ideas that must be proven, based on evidence and the rigorous assessment of it, tested against the force of others’ evidence and counterarguments.

This is our purpose—to seek and discover truth … and to share that truth with the world in ways that are impactful, deepen our understanding, undergird sound policy, and make the nation and the world safer and healthier.

To do this, we must be a place, as the Hopkins Bloomberg Center is, that embodies those foundational values that undergird not only the university, but our nation—values that Justice Amy Coney Barrett summed up so well in the book she will discuss today: the free exchange of ideas, tolerance of dissent, and as she writes, “the importance of balancing a commitment to ideas with a commitment to respect people who don’t share them.”

We must be a place that not only invites in but actively engages that wide-ranging spectrum of voices to take up ideas and assess their merits … a place that insists on those voices leveraging a growing body of data, evidence, and perspective to reach the strongest conclusion based on that corpus—and yet, remain open to the notion there will always be new insights or ways of thinking that might call upon us to reconsider what we thought was canon.

Since we opened these doors two years ago, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center has sought to embody this ethos, bringing policymakers and academics, practitioners and public leaders, students and subject matter experts, liberals and conservatives, here to meaningfully grapple with the merits of our society’s greatest concerns from the state of civic thought to the implications of artificial intelligence, from the need to reform science funding to the lack of conservative voices in the total reaches of the academy.

Today’s convening reflects that same spirit, gathering a cadre of exceptional participants who model for us the capacity to take up some of the most essential questions surrounding the evolving role of the law and the judiciary in America.

And today I have the distinct pleasure to introduce a conversation at the nexus of this broader conversation.

We are fortunate to have with us The Honorable Amy Coney Barrett, the 103rd Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Justice Barrett has served on the Supreme Court for nearly five years, drawing on a distinguished career in public and private practice.

Before her confirmation and prior term as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Justice Barrett served on the faculty of Notre Dame Law School, where she honed her expertise on federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.

In the words of her opinions and now, on the pages of her book, Listening to the Law, Justice Barrett offers her reflective and accessible perspective on the power and purpose of the law.

Justice Barrett, we are honored you are here with us today.

Joining her in conversation is Judge Patrick Bumatay, who has served as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since December 2019.

He brings a longstanding expertise and spirit of expansive engagement with issues in criminal law, including as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California and a Counselor to the U.S. Attorney General.

Once again, we are thrilled to have you both on the stage today. Thank you to everyone here for joining us for On the Merits and for what I know will be a meaningful conversation to kick off the afternoon.

It is now my pleasure to invite Justice Barrett and Judge Bumatay to the stage.