Page 12 - 2024 March April Magazine

Lincoln Day Banquet Presentation By Steven C. González
Thank you for the invitation to join you today. My wife and I are about to celebrate 30 years of marriage.
We have two sons we are very proud of. They are both away at university. I keep a photo of them in my wallet – to remind me why there is no money in there.
Our oldest son announced last year that his major is history so I told him there is no future in it. Sorry for the bad jokes.
My high school counselor suggested I become a mechanic or
a claims adjuster. There is nothing wrong with those choices but they were not mine. When I went to meet with her as a sophomore because I was concerned about getting a couple of B’s, before I could speak she said: “It is good to see students like you doing well in school.” It was clear to me that I had already exceeded her low expectations for “students like me.” I stopped going to see her. Jumping to conclusions is a mistake we all make, I have learned.
In the summer before my senior year in high school I decided to apply for early admission at one of the colleges in my home town. I walked in to the admissions office at the first one I came to and asked for an application. The person behind the desk held her head to the side and asked if the application was for me. I got defensive and said that it certainly was. She explained that Scripps is a women’s college. I have been trying ever since not to jump to conclusions.
I did not give up. Since Pitzer was co-ed, I applied for early admission and was accepted. I majored in East Asian Studies and had the privilege to study abroad in Japan and in China. I worked in Century City as a paralegal after college, then
I did graduate work in Japan for 2 years, thanks to Rotary International.
After law school at Berkeley, I joined a firm in Seattle, worked for the City Attorney, then the United States Attorney’s Office and started as a judge in King County Superior Court over 22 years ago.
I am the first Chief Justice of color on the Washington Supreme Court, and have been the chief for the last three years. We are the most diverse supreme court in the nation. I have been on the Washington State Supreme Court for over 12 years and hope to stay on the Court at least 7 more. We are facing some significant challenges as a profession and as a nation. I would like to talk about some of them and suggest a framework for thinking about them.
We have a public defender shortage and a shortage of prosecutors, too, especially in rural areas. Law school costs too much and graduates then have a debt burden that is often too heavy. We do not recruit well from rural Washington and I feel the incentives are inadequate. The bar exam as it exists today
is anachronistic and does not measure the right competencies. We are a profession resistant to change, however change is necessary.
There are bright spots. We have hired a new director of the Office of Civil Legal Aid, Sara Robbins. We will need her to lead the update to our civil legal needs study among other things.
My court issued a very important letter on June 4th 2020 calling on the entire legal profession to take responsibility for making our legal system more just and acknowledging our role in past harms, especially in the Black community.
We are working hard to live up to our espoused ideals.
This is going to be a difficult year. I treasure all of our rights, including freedom of speech. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of that speech. While we may not be able to address all contentious issues without sincere emotion, we must do so with respect for each other and for life itself.
True civility is creating space for hard conversations, not being superficially polite to each other. I urge you to engage in these discussions with one another across religions and ethnic differences as hard as those discussions may be. Many are hurting profoundly. The current rise in hate crimes is but a symptom of our difficulties. We must be part of the answer without further polarization.
I look to all of you to help us achieve the promise of America.
For me, being proud to be an American is not to hanker for an imaginary time left behind. I do not yearn for that perfect point in history when we were the ideal republic. We never have been. We formed a more perfect union, but not a perfect one.
For me, we celebrate the principles upon which our nation was founded and the direction we were headed – that is toward realizing those principles. We have yet more to go.
I am proud of us to the extent we continue to cleave to these founding principles of liberty, freedom and equity and continue to move closer to realizing them for everyone.
Abraham Lincoln is an ideal case study for this approach. I am not here to say that Lincoln was great and that we are great for loving him. He was decidedly mortal and fallible as are we.
I made the mistake two years ago of speaking to the appellate judges in Illinois about diversity, equity and inclusion and included what I thought was a balanced view of Mr. Lincoln. Perhaps I should have realized the flaw of treating Lincoln as a mere mortal in the ‘land of Lincoln’. And again today, treating him as human at this event. I’m afraid I can’t help myself. It is my honest view of history and of the man.
Before I get into my discussion of Abraham Lincoln, let me
[ Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice, February 9, 2024 ]
12 PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER | March/April 2024