Legendary Supreme Court litigator Paul M. Smith was welcomed at the University of Guam Tuesday evening. He was the 33rd speaker in UOG's ongoing Presidential Lecture Series, a program that welcomes distinguished guests to share their thoughts and experiences in their fields of expertise.
Smith is the vice president of litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., where he works with a team of other lawyers to advance key protections for democracy. He has more than three decades of experience litigating a wide range of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The topic for his lecture was "Arguing Civil Rights at the U.S. Supreme Court." He said the high court is a "remarkable institution," given "the number of huge, difficult problems we expect the court to decide and address." He said the central role of the Supreme Court is "to protect the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority.”
Smith also argued that the United States is not a pure democracy, and never has been. "It is, rather, a constitutional republic where the court believes the minority rights need to be protected. Instead of the court focusing on the Constitution’s interpretation, it instead creates new rights that weren’t apparent in its language to the people who wrote it."
"The Constitution," said Smith, "has open-ended provisions and broad principles that it creates, like equality, liberty, federalism and due process, that give the Supreme Court a ton of discretion about what the law is going to be.”
For a variety of reasons, Smith said, he believes that the court doesn’t like being a dictator, and that it recognizes that it occupies a unique position in the democratic process. Moreover, he said, the court's decisions are "highly attentive to what the American public actually likes, believes in and supports."
In particular, he cited a landmark 2008 Second Amendment "right-to-bear-arms" case. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm, unconnected with service in a militia. That decision represented a 180-degree reversal from decades of previous interpretations of the Second Amendment, he said.
He also talked about Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case in which the high court overturned an earlier decision. In a 6-3 opinion delivered by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that a Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain sexual conduct violates the due process clause.
"They’re not too far head of the American people on these controversial issues," said Smith, adding that this an important lesson for people to be aware of.
