By , Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 23, 2008
PALO ALTO, Calif. — A former Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, inveighed against unscrupulous lawyers and corrupt government officials following a speech she delivered at Stanford University last night.
Asked about the struggle to maintain high ethics in the legal profession, Ms. O’Connor invoked what she called the “drastic results” of the collapse of Enron Corp. in 2001.
“It makes one wonder what kind of ethical standards the lawyers and the accountants were following,” the former justice told hundreds gathered at Stanford’s Memorial Church to hear her speak about the quest for “a meaningful life.”
“It’s clear, I think, that it isn’t enough to do one’s work as a lawyer or accountant by saying, ‘Oh, technically the law could be interpreted to allow this,’” she said. “We have a deeper obligation than that as a lawyer, as a human being, to reflect on what we’re being asked to do and put it in a larger perspective and ask if it is the right thing to do. Many times it isn’t.”
Ms. O’Connor, who served on the high court from 1981 to 2006, said lawyers need to find the “courage” to step in when companies are acting inappropriately, even if managers are not eager to hear such advice.
In response to another question, the former justice, 78, fretted over what she said were signs of “greater corruption” in government. “We see stories at all levels of state and local government and even in Congress about certain corrupt acts by public officials...We have to work to create a culture where that is unacceptable,” she said.
“I always tended to think maybe there was more corruption in other countries than our own,” the justice said, adding that she was no longer confident in that assessment.
The question-and-answer session came after Ms. O’Connor delivered a 20-minute lecture about existential issues she said she viewed as religious in nature.
“Who am I? What am I? And, where am I going? These are religious questions,” Ms. O’Connor said. She mentioned Jesus in passing, but her view of religion seemed to be a largely nature-driven variety, informed by her upbringing on an Arizona ranch. When the family’s land received the “miracle of rain,” she said, “some called it just a rainstorm; we and others called it God.”
“My own views are not sophisticated. They’re woven from time spent trying to eke out an agricultural living in a dry environment,” she said.
At the same time, Ms. O’Connor evinced no hostility to science as she spoke from a lectern, not the church’s pulpit. She referred at least twice to the theory of evolution and seemed to accept as established fact the “billion years it has taken man to evolve from a single-cell organism.”
When one seemingly-friendly questioner asserted that Ms. O’Connor said her religious views had shaped her court opinions, the former justice snapped back, “No. I didn’t say that….You take an oath to follow the laws and the Constitution, ‘So help you God.’ And you ask God’s help to help you follow the Constitution and the laws.”
The moderator of the program asked students to limit their questions to the subject of the former justice’s speech and not to pose political questions or queries about the inner workings of the Supreme Court.
Ms. O’Connor received her undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1950 and her law degree from the university in 1952. The lecture series she inaugurated last night is named for a Stanford law professor, Harry Rathbun, who taught the future Supreme Court justice when she was an undergraduate.
Rathbun, who died in 1987, taught business law, but was better known on campus for holding freewheeling discussions about ethics and the intersection between science and religion. “He was the most inspiring teacher I had ever had,” Ms. O’Connor recalled.
