Spread Freedom and the Rule of Law
President Hennessey, graduating students, and my fellow citizens in a world that must seek to come ever closer to the idea and reality of freedom under law. Thank you for inviting me to your Commencement.
Each of you graduates has your own story of the years at Stanford. Your story is bound up with your parents, your family and the loved ones whosustained you here. You-indeed all of us and the entire Nation-owe them warmest thanks.
Freedom must remain a central part of your story. From the beginning of our Republic, Americans have defined freedom by a moral principle. It is this: With our own freedom comes the duty to secure it for others. Freedom is the birthright of all. When we help others find freedom, we save our own.
Now, two people or two million people or two billion people cannot enjoy freedom without rules. So freedom goes hand in hand with law. This is just high school civics stuff. No surprise here. But the principles are so fundamental that it seems appropriate to discuss them at your commencement, as you consider how best to shape your life and your work.
Americans have the responsibility to try to advance law and freedom in other places. The task is daunting. For the stark truth is this: more than half the world lacks either the will or the power to embrace law and freedom as we know it. In struggling nations the jury on whether to pursue law and freedom is a jury that is still out. In the long run our last, best security is in the realm of ideas. It is urgent for our Nation and for you as young people to strive to make the case for the idea of law and freedom. We must make that case to a doubting world. On this question, the world must not be in search of two different destinies.
When lawyers make their case to a jury, they sometimes have a few hours. Attorneys in our Court have thirty minutes a side. Today, in order not to trespass upon your patience or delay your celebration, I shall take but eleven minutes more to make the case about your duties as the newest trustees of freedom.
We must be willing to persuade others to make law and freedom central in their own lives and their own Nation. For the past twenty years or so, I have tried to visit a certain country often to teach. Of course, on any given day, asin any classroom in any place, some students may fold their arms over their chests, the universal sign of resistance to the message or the messenger.
Still, there is an audience of eager students. They appear at least willing to consider finding common ground to pursue a common cause. This last fall, this country opened its first law school on the American model, a three year graduate program. The problem was how to select the entering class of about one hundred students from thousands of applicants. For those one hundred or so places, there were thousands of highly qualified applicants, scientists and engineers, artists and humanities majors. The list was trimmed again, and then the committee decided to have interviews. One of the questions was: what inspired you to go to law school？ Any number of students answered that it was a movie. Students of this country like to build their language skills by watching movies from England and the United States. So I thought, well, the movie that inspired them was 12 Angry Men, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Witness for the Prosecution. Wrong answer. The movie was: Legally Blonde.
After watching the movie and then talking to the students at the new school, we found an explanation. The movie, after graduating from a college in California, depicts a young woman who decides to go to a famed, rigorous law school in the East. She is, or so it seems at first, the very caricature of some one so frivolous and naive that the audience cannot take her seriously. So when she goes to the law school she takes a serious risk. She must enter a new, unfamiliar, unfriendly, threatening, small universe, one formerly closed to her.
You must prepare to take some risks to make the case. You may enter a realm of ideas or a real world place where freedom is not just in doubt but opposed. You must find inventive, new ways to make the case for freedom. And to be prepared for this role, to be prepared to confront the reality of half a world without law and freedom, you must know what is at stake.
You must know that in Sri Lanka over a thousand people a year go to jailfor three hundred sixty-five days for want of a one dollar fine.
You must know that there is an African country where a woman who is raped must pay five dollars to file a complaint with the police.
You must know that each year eight hundred thousand people-mostly women and children-are the subject of capture and trafficking for slavery andsexualexploitation.
All of these failings come from the absence of the rule of law. You would think this would be clear to everyone.
In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave a commence-ment speech. It was puzzling at first that, in a speech moving in so many other ways, he attacked the West for being too devoted to the law. After a few days I reached this conclusion: his understanding of law was simply different from our own. For him the concept, the history, the meaning of law made it a diktat, a ukase, a cold threat, a decree. We believe otherwise. For us the law is not an obstacle but the instrument of progress; not a command to be feared but a hope to be embraced; not a threat but a promise.
Let me give you another example of how absence of law takes away the chance for freedom. A recent U.N. Commission studied a populous, struggling country, and asked this question:“Suppose you want to open a bakery. How hard is it to get a business license？” The answer was: It takes over five hundred working days; over twenty agencies; and the cost is in excess of three and a half months wages for a skilled worker. So there is the other choice: pay a bribe and support a corrupt government where bribery itself is justified as the way to subsist.