Kevin Walsh:
Welcome, good afternoon. My name is Kevin Walsh. I’m Knights of Columbus professor of law in the Catholic tradition here at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, director of the Project on Judicial Virtues at our Law School Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual tradition or CIT, where I also serve as senior fellow.
It is my privilege on behalf of CIT and its director, Professor Joel Alicea, to welcome you to our event, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition: A Jurist’s Perspective. We’re grateful to the three federal judges who will be presenting their perspectives as jurists at this event. After we open with a prayer, I’ll introduce our moderator who will then introduce our other presenters and conduct the event. After this event, I invite you to visit our website, cit.catholic.edu, where you can learn all that we’ve been up to. Let’s open with a prayer.
The Father, Son, the Holy Spirit. Lead us Lord in your path and we will enter into your truth. Let our hearts be gladdened that we may fear your name. Let us take joy in your law meditating on a day and night, that we may be like trees planted near streams of water, that our leaves may not wither and that we may yield fruit in season. Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and they shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. Name of the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit, amen.
So our moderator for this event is Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a visiting jurist at Catholic law this year, Judge Duncan has served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit since 2018. Prior to that, Judge Duncan held some of the most interesting and challenging jobs a lawyer can have. Well, from 2004 to 2008, he was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Okay, you might think what about the interesting and challenging parts? Maybe I’m overestimating the law professor calling.
Okay, well, from 2008 to 2012, Judge Duncan served as Appellate Chief at the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, and then from 2012 to 2014 he served as general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. In fact, we represented a client together at one point. Immediately before becoming a judge, he practiced at the DC firm of Schaerr and Duncan LLP where he was a founding partner. So that’s interesting and challenging. Thank you Judge Duncan for presiding today and for all you’ve done for our law school. Over to you.
Kyle Duncan:
Thank you Professor. It’s a joy to be here. I always love coming to moderate these panels so that you students can hear how the Catholic faith has informed the careers, the vocation and the judicial obligations of real judges. And it’s wonderful to be to a school where we can pray and not be sued, and it’s great to be here. I see one of my future clerks, I see an intern who was with my office this summer, so it’s wonderful to be here.
To my right, Judge Bill Nardini of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. We’re glad to have him with us. Judge Nardini was appointed to the Second Circuit in 2019. Prior to that he was with the US Attorney’s Office in Connecticut for 19 years where he served both as appeals chief and criminal chief. For four years of that, now I want to know how to get this job. He was DOJ attache to Italy, San Marino and Vatican City. Talk about interesting. I don’t know if it was challenging, but the food must have been nice.
Prior to that, he was a Fulbright scholar in Florence, and also worked at the Constitutional Court in Rome. He clerked for really a pretty stunning array of judges, Judge Cabranes, Judge Calabresi and Justice O’Connor. Prior to that he graduated from Yale Law School and Georgetown and also attended La Sapienza University in Rome.
To my left, Judge Rudy Ruiz, who is a district judge, a United States district judge on the southern district of Florida. He was confirmed to that position also in 2019. Prior to that he had quite a bit of judicial service. He was from 2014 to 2019 a judge on the 11th Judicial Circuit court to which he was appointed by Governor Rick Scott. Prior to that he was on the Miami-Dade County Court. Prior to that he was an assistant county attorney for Miami-Dade County. He was a law clerk to Judge Federico Moreno, also of the Southern District of Florida. Does Judge Moreno still sit [inaudible 00:05:10]?
Rodolfo Ruiz:
He does. Senior, yep.
Kyle Duncan:
He received his BA from Duke University, his J.D. also from Georgetown. And I wanted to point out that he was on the state championship water polo team in 1997, which I was not on that team. We’re delighted to have these two eminent jurists with us and without further ado, I think the first topic, general topic, this is going to be a conversation, we want to talk about the subject of vocation, and what does vocation mean? What does vocation mean as a lawyer, as a judge, how has your sense of vocation and your Catholic faith shaped your career and your work? Let’s see, I’ll go to Judge Nardini first.
William Nardini:
Well thanks very much Judge Duncan. I’m pleased to be here with all of you here at Catholic. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about vocations today is the entire way I got on the path to becoming a judge. It really started when I was growing up, when I was in high school back in New Jersey in a small town. There were no lawyers in my family, but a very good family friend who was a lawyer in town and a graduate of Catholic law school. He really gave me the opportunity initially to see what it meant to be a lawyer, what it meant to go into court, what it meant to meet with clients, what it meant to research law school or to law.
And this particular mentor early in my time, Joe Mecca, who was a close family friend, he was one who put me onto this. And I think it’s very fitting, at least for me to be talking about vocations, about what puts you on a path to something that you find as a calling. Back here at Catholic where I know that my mentor started out his path towards the law. So I’m grateful to be here, I’m grateful to him.
What I thought I would talk about is first a little bit of a general sense of what I think of when I think of vocations and then give you just a little illustration about my own path, how I have moved forward with my career over the years thinking in the Catholic framework of vocation and give you an idea. And I thought it would be helpful, because probably so many of you are wondering, where will my life take me? Where ought my life to take me? So hopefully it’s something that may resonate with some of you as you start to think through the many wonderful things that lie in front of you.
So in general, what’s a vocation? Well, it comes from the Latin word to call, vocare. It’s a calling. And if you look at the catechism of the Catholic Church, in the glossary, no less, there is an entry for vocation. And it says a vocation is the calling or destiny we have in this life and hereafter. And it’s important because very often as Catholics, we think of vocations in the religious, in a sense of the calling to a religious life, right? So in Connecticut, our diocese right now, at the end of every mass we say a prayer for vocations, that people might be inspired to the priesthood or to a consecrated life as a sister or a brother. And that’s a very important type of vocation that’s central to our Catholic world.
But the concept of vocation in a Catholic framework is even broader than that. Because even those of us who may not be called to the consecrated life or to holy orders, we all still have some kind of vocation, or more than one vocation. And it was Pope Benedict the 16th who actually said, “Each of you has a personal vocation which He, God has given you for your own joy and sanctity.” So when we enter into our adult lives, we have to think what are we called to do? And I think it’s important to preface this discussion with at least two observations. One, your vocation may change over time. You may be called at different points of your life to do different things. So don’t think that there is one path, there’s one thing that you’re being called to do and thus shall it ever be. You may be called to do different things over time.
You may also have multiple vocations to fulfill at the same time. And so for myself right now, I feel like I have a vocation as a husband, as a father, and professionally as a judge, you may have other callings, say, as a community leader. For about 10 or 15 years I’ve been a scout leader for my kids in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. And because the intensity of that, I felt like that was a vocation, something I was called to. So when you think about your own lives, think about that in terms of change over time, and think of potentially having multiple callings at the same time.
So when we talk about vocation, I think of at least two things. One is, we have to go through what the church talks about, a sense of discernment, a process of examining ourselves and our lives and figuring out what are the gifts that have been given to us? Because all of us have been given some gifts and they will vary considerably. And you may have different talents, you have different things that have been given to you, and it is your calling to make use of those. And I think of the parable of the talents. You have the three servants who are given the talents, and the talents, it’s a great, I think of double entendre with the translation into English because it really just means a chunk of gold back then, a talent of gold.
And the two servants, they go out and they are entrusted with this amount of gold from their master while he’s away and they go and they invest it and they get a return on the investment. And when the master comes back, they’re able to give him even more than he entrusted them with. And that’s expected from us. And then there’s the one who says, “I’m going to bury this because I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to get in trouble.” When the master comes back, he says, “Here you are. I know that you’re a hard master and I’d get really in trouble if I blew the money. So here is exactly the amount you gave us.” And that’s the guy who gets in trouble from the master and he says, “That is not what I expected you to do with it.”
And I always think that that’s again a wonderful translation, the talent of gold because it really is a translation to what we are given. I don’t know what the talents you all are given. I’m sure you’re all given many things, but you’re expected to take them, let them flourish. And here’s the thing, the way they have to flourish is in service to other people. You need to take those talents, and not just turn them to your own use, but find ways to make the world a better place, to help your neighbor, to be in service of God and of your neighbor. That is what those talents are for.
Now, you may ask yourself, well, how am I going to figure out how to make these talents helpful? Well, one thing is of course determining what you’re good at. And presumably you are all sitting here because one of the things you figured out is you’re good at the law, and I’m sure you all are. And you’re in a process of learning from your professors to how to improve those talents, how to develop them, how to make them blossom. And then you will go out and you will find a way in the law to put them to the service of other people.
And there’s not necessarily one way to do it. So you might think, well, it’s obvious if I do something that’s very public-facing, you might want to work for your community and you could work in government. So it’s like on the criminal side, you could be a prosecutor and you could be a public defender, right? There’s some obvious ways where you’re putting yourself out into the public in some way, or a judge, but there are so many other ways you could deploy that. And what I love to give is what I tend to think would be to say, a counterintuitive example, let’s say bankruptcy law, which frankly I always assumed would be really, really boring. No offense to anyone who’s studied in bankruptcy or teaching bankruptcy.
Kyle Duncan:
I can’t imagine why you’d think that.
William Nardini:
I know, who knows, right? The bankruptcy code is such a scintillating read. Except I took bankruptcy when I was in law school, and the first day of the syllabus was not about any provision of the bankruptcy code, but it was the professor talking about how this was going to be a course about the pathos of human failure and redemption. And I thought, wow, when you put it into that framework, that can be a really inspiring thing. So you could find a passion, a way to deploy your legal gifts in an area that maybe to me might not have instinctively struck myself as a way to serve other people. But you think, wow, that could be very inspiring. So I am pretty convinced that in almost any area of the law, you can find a way to develop your gifts in a way that’s going to give back to your fellow people and serve the greater purpose that we’re all called upon to achieve.
So let me just give you a really simple outline of where I’ve been, my path, and it has been a fumbling path, a little bit of reaching into the dark, not quite knowing what to do. I don’t think any of us would ever profess to have said, “Well, I emerged from college and I knew like a laser exactly what I was called to do and I never missed a beat.” So I think we do fumble away, but as long as we’re continuing to grope and try, that’s what can be expected of us. I always sort of had this bug in my mind about the law, but I never quite knew exactly what that was because I hadn’t come from a family with lawyers in it. So I didn’t really understand what it was to be a lawyer.
But I also, in a very weird way, also as Judge Duncan mentioned, I always had this thing for Italy and learning Italian. I think part of that was my father died when I was in high school on my mother’s side, he was an Irish American family, on my father’s, it was an Italian American family. And I think I was very interested in sort of exploring that side of my family’s history and my life. And so I in college started studying Italian and I studied abroad for a semester. And when I graduated, I wanted to go back to Italy and I wanted to live in an immersive environment and study Italian politics, which I had done in college. Now let me just mention, in terms of one of the other vocations in college, I was fortunate enough at Georgetown right across the way from here, I was able to meet my future wife, Holly. And we knew from an early age that one of the parts of our lives, one of these important vocations would be our marriage together.
And that has been probably the lodestar of our lives together. Building around that we both wanted to be in Italy. She wound up moving back to Sardinia. I wound up moving to Rome for a year to study at the University of Rome. And you might think, well, that’s a distraction from this mission, right? If I had had a single-minded mission to study the law, this was a distraction. Why on earth would I go off to the University of Rome and I would study political science? But I did, because that was something that somehow I understood was important to me and maybe didn’t understand how it would be useful in the future, but hopefully it would. And I came back from that year in Italy where I did become fluent and really learned a lot about Italian politics and how the government worked and came back to law school for three years, and went through that in New Haven. I did find ways to say write a paper about comparative constitutional law, but again, I wasn’t sure what am I going to do with this law thing?
So I did what many people do, and I highly encourage many of you to do, is I clerked for a judge to say, well, let me learn from someone who really knows what they’re doing here. And I clerked for Judge Cabranes who was on the District Court and the Court of Appeals in Connecticut in the Second Circuit. He had just been named to the Second Circuit, but he was still sitting by designation on the District Court. I really had almost a double clerkship that year. And then Judge Calabresi in the Second Circuit and then Justice O’Connor and I really got to see what was going on inside the courts, learning at the feet of masters. And one of the things I learned about what I might want to do was I watched the litigants who were appearing in front of us, and in particular in the district courts, and also in the Second Circuit, I was struck by the appearances of the US attorneys who would come in, and on occasion, they would confess error, and this was sort of a crazy thing.
They would come in and say, “Yeah, we should have lost.” Period. That was it. “The sentencing was messed up. The District Court should not have given the sentencing enhancement, you should remand this and have the District Court impose a lower sentence.” Period. And I thought, what a luxury, what a great job that you get to come in and argue for what you think is right, even if it might superficially seem to be against your interests. But it wasn’t against their interest because the Department of Justice’s view was, no, no, we’re serving the public, and if something has gone wrong, if the law has been misapplied, that disserves the public interest. So I thought to myself, well, that’s really what I want to do when I grow up. So of course when I finished clerking, I did not apply to the US Attorney’s office. I thought, well no, I have this other thing that’s pulling me still, right?
This whole pull back to Italy and my wife and I wanted to go over, we wanted to live abroad, we wanted to go back to Italy and I got a Fulbright, I studied comparative law in Florence at the European University Institute. And again, was fully immersed. And that led, one thing to another to working for a year at the Italian Constitutional Court in Rome where I got to meet some of the Italian justices. And they were great because they were very curious about knowing what was going on in the US. They were curious to know how the US Supreme Court was deciding things. So I would help them research things, and I would have this again, master class with them to learn how their system worked. And then when I came back to the US, cutting it for, I wound up at the US Attorney’s office as a lying criminal prosecutor, and I was doing things like bank robberies, drug cases, all the little things, wound up becoming the appellate chief, wound up becoming the criminal chief.
But in the middle there, there was this opportunity to be the Department of Justice attache in Rome. And that’s where it all sort of came together, this passion for service through the department, to the public and the law, but also this love of Italy. I wound up being the attache in Rome where I spoke Italian at this point. I understood the Italian system, and I could be the person who was the go-between for the American and the Italian legal systems. To the point where I even argued a couple of cases in the Italian Supreme Court trying to explain, for example, racketeering law, RICO, the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. We were trying to extra extradite people to try to explain our relatively arcane statute in terms that would be understandable within the Italian legal system that doesn’t really line up.
And it was a time when I was really pleased that I was able to bring together two of those things that I loved and understood that I think I had a good handle on, studying Italian law and speaking Italian and understanding American criminal law. And I was able to put them together in a way that I think was useful.
Kyle Duncan:
I’m not surprised there’s a word for racketeering in Italian.
William Nardini:
There’s not. There’s not. I would explain that it was analogous to Associazione Mafioso.
Kyle Duncan:
That sounds about right.
William Nardini:
So all these sorts of analogies that I was able to bring. And then when I came back from Italy after those four years, I was the criminal chief, was there for another five years in the department before I then get this call. Literally, you talk about vocation being a call, right? You get a call out of the blue to be a judge, and here I am on the Court of Appeals. And I think I’m going to stop there because here I am a judge, but I think it’s just an illustration of you don’t know how your life is going to go, but if you pursue the things that you think you’re good at, and that inspire you, there are ways when opportunities present themselves or you create the opportunities, where I think you can bring them together in ways that you think, at least you hope that somehow you’re doing something useful that’s making use of your gifts. So I’m going to stop there.
Kyle Duncan:
Thank you. That’s certainly been true for me as well. Judge Ruiz, vocation, what has it meant to you in terms of your career? How did you get where you are? How does it inform what you do today?
Rodolfo Ruiz:
Well, thank you for the introduction, Judge Duncan and to Professor Alicea and the whole team at the CIT in Catholic. It’s really an honor to be here and share this moment with you all. I hope that all of you as students appreciate just how unique and special this environment is, that CIT and Catholic have created. It’s not something you find every day. It’s certainly not something as I was at law school also at Georgetown, not too far away that I saw much of in any law school environment. And so this is a really special place and I hope you all take advantage of all the programming and opportunities that the team at CIT has designed for you all. And it’s really an honor to be here and share the stage with two jurists that I really admire and look up to. I will say so much of what you just heard from Judge Nardini can be similarly applied to my path.
And I think if you could try to discern from that one of the themes I think that ties in well with our faith, it requires a little bit of surrender, which I think we all know is a large part of what our faith teaches us. We as lawyers and you as soon-to-be lawyers, we like control. We as judges like control. I can tell you judges hate surprises. Certainly district judges hate surprises. I can tell you that. And no matter how many motions in limine I’ll rule on, a trial is very organic and I try to minimize those surprises. But I’m sure in the trial I’m going to start on Monday that I will be inevitably surprised. It happens every time. And so I’ve learned to deal with it. The same applies with your career and your path in the law and your path in life. And so much of the twists and turns you will take from here and as you go into your career, you may not be able to discern at the time what they mean in the longer arc of what your career will be.
I am sure, as you just heard, Judge Nardini mentioned that he couldn’t have imagined the connection between his time in Rome and how that would come full circle where he would be arguing before the Italian justices where it would ultimately then be something that would advance his career at DOJ. You couldn’t script that or plan that if you tried. And so I urge, you don’t try. Some of this doesn’t mean that you don’t want to be aggressive and challenge yourself and find the moment and the place where your talents marry your interests. My father always used to say to me, “If you can’t really do physics, you’re probably not going to be an astronaut.” And I would say to him, “I think, dad, you’re probably right. I mean I’m okay at math. I’m not that great.” And the message was always not that you don’t want to try and push yourself and try to challenge yourself, but it’s also finding that what I would call them was the sweet spot of where your gifts, your God-given talents, can be married with what your interests are.
What’s interesting to me, listening to Judge Nardini’s story is a lot of that happened to me too. Down to the fact that his mentor was educated here at Catholic Law. Mine was educated in Notre Dame undergrad, not law school, university of Miami, but a big Golden Domer, okay? And that was a judge I clerked for, Judge Moreno, and as you heard Judge Nardini say, I couldn’t say it any better. That was a pivotal turning point for me in that I came out of law school thinking that I was going to be in boardrooms, drafting contracts and working on mergers and acquisitions and asset-backed financing deals and project finance. I was true and true thinking I was a transactional guy. In fact, I think I’m the only member of my court that spent time in big law doing transactional work, purely transactional work, nowhere near a courtroom.
And at the time I was in law school, I thought that’s what I wanted to do. I was an economics major from undergrad, I spoke Spanish, I was recruited in a law firm that had a big Latin America practice, and I just kind of plugged along because that’s what everybody was doing. And I was going to do my summer associate gig and I was going to go on from there. And it wasn’t until I was a 3L that mentors of mine mentioned, “You might want to look into this clerking thing. You’ve kind of stepped aside from it, but you like a lot of the things that would bring you into the courtroom. You’re doing well in those arenas. Why not open that door? Don’t close that door.” And it wasn’t until I clerked that I realized really what I was missing. I had not given myself a fulsome opportunity to really explore what it would be like not only to be a true litigator and a true trial lawyer, but also the public service aspect of it.
I had engaged in public service throughout my time as an undergrad and had kind of left a little bit. I had spent a summer interning the US Attorney’s office and opened some doors, but I kept thinking that the path had to be something in private practice, and had moved away from government as an option. And it really wasn’t until I clerked and I found myself very similar to what you just heard from Judge Nardini in court watching trials, watching prosecutors and public defenders argue before me watching lawyers day to day do what they do in defense of their clients, that I had this drive that maybe I needed to redirect where I was headed.
And I went back to the law firm despite the insistence of the judge I clerked for, told me this is a bad idea. You just saw this. How are you going to go back? This is not where your path is, but sometimes again, you have to learn the hard way. And I did. And he was right. And a few years later I called him and I said, I think I want to get back into being a lawyer that is appearing in court that’s litigating and away from doing a transactional work. And the call of public service happened at that time, and that’s when I became an assistant county attorney. And my career changed completely. I moved into Civil rights defense. I defended law enforcement and corrections personnel in 1983 litigation in federal court, really hard-working noble individuals who were being held in a court for doing the best they could in the line of fire.
And I was defending those people and in many times career altering cases that they were living through. I was there with them, the most rewarding work I could possibly imagine. I did defense of the mayor, the city commission or the county commission, the tax collector property appraiser. I was in local government in and out of court both trial and appellate work. And it was wonderful. And at no point similar to what you’re from, judge Nardini did I imagine I was going to be a judge. And it was through those appearances in court that something in the back of my mind said maybe one day. And once again, going back to a mentor who also was very much rooted in the faith and has always said, just run was always said, it is very much a vocation. It is like taking vows. It is like being religious in that sense.
You put on the road certainly different in many ways, but there’s a commitment there that’s life altering. It’s not a job. It’s really something that you have to embody in everything you do when you take on the role of a jurist. And he was the one that motivated me to put in to be a state court judge, which I was for seven years before I joined the federal bench. But it’s interesting to me that both Judge Nardini and I had mentors who were very much rooted in their faith and served as templates for us as individuals who lived their faith in their practice. They didn’t leave their faith or check it at the door. Now of course it doesn’t inform your decision-making. We all take oaths to protect and defend the constitution and the laws of the United States, but it makes us better jurists in my view, in that we have that underpinning, that core conviction, that search for truth that grounds us really in what we do.
And so when we talk about vocation, I really think it is a choice that you make where you’ve really discerned what is calling you as you just say, what is really, what is it to serve? What are you going to be doing day in and day out that you feel that not only are you answering to a calling, but also that you’re helping those around you. And I urge you, it doesn’t really matter. You could have stayed in private practice, but there was always the pro bono to do. There was always other mechanisms by which to help those that are less fortunate. So it doesn’t have to be public service. I think you can get there in different ways, but you can never forget what many of us or many of you will take in an oath as you become members of a bar in our country to help the poor help those less fortunate.
And you have to remember that that’s part of the oath and that’s part of the mission that you’re undertaking as lawyers, especially in a past like Catholic, which is teaching you not just to be a great advocate but is also teaching you that there’s more to it. There’s more to what you can give back in the world with the gifts that God has blessed us all with. And so as long as you try to marry those two things, you will find yourself in the place that the Lord wants you to be. And I will tell you, I look back on those moments of sitting in boardrooms in Panama on an airline deal and wondering, okay, I think I’m doing good things here. I’m helping the client. And you wonder, well, did that ever come full circle? Did I ever have my Italian Supreme court moment that Judge Nardini had?
Not as exciting as his, but I will tell you that I remember being a young state court judge in a complicated contractual dispute and looking at the papers and saying, “I’ve drafted this. I know what happened here. And I’ve told people all the time, especially those that don’t know where they want to go, do I want to be a litigator? Do I want to be in bankruptcy as we just talked about? Do we want to be in transactional?” Whatever path you find, all of it will come around full circle and help you. There’s no mistakes. Go back to the surrender.
I’ve discerned now looking back that that time, those formative years, after clerking before I went back to public service, came back to help me immensely as a jurist in so many contractual disputes, so many issues I’ve seen in court that I speak the language. And if I hadn’t taken that turn and done that time, I wouldn’t have been as prepared when I had my opportunity to serve on the bench. And so all of it has come to a moment to help me, but it is hard to tell at the time it’s happening. As doors are opening and closing you have to have a lot of faith and a lot of trust that what is unfolding in your career is where you need to be.
Kyle Duncan:
Thank you. As I listen to the good thoughts and good advice that both of you judges are giving, I reflect that it sounds like y’all have been faithful Catholics for your whole lives. I have not been. I was out of the church for 20-something years and did not come back into the church until after I was already a lawyer. I had already practiced in different venues and I was teaching law at the University of Mississippi. And I remember vividly when I was confirmed, I made my first communion when I was 10. I wasn’t confirmed until I was in my early 30s. And I remember vividly feeling the grace of my confirmation as it impacted what I understood my vocation as a lawyer, a law professor to be. I remember distinctly thinking maybe being successful, making money or as a law professor, writing law review articles and having a comfortable easy life because let’s be honest, being a law professors easy life, right?
Is this what the Lord wants for me? Because it’s a great job. I’m sorry. You guys work very, very hard.
William Nardini:
He definitely wants it for you.
Kyle Duncan:
Very hard. Is this what the Lord is calling me to do? And I remember asking him, I said, “Is this what you want me to do? I mean, this is wonderful writing law review articles, teaching the students it’s great.” Living in a little town. We were in Northern Mississippi. Is this what you want me to do? And it turns out the answer was no. You need to do something else. Because actually my law review articles weren’t that good. I’m like Professor Alicea and Professor Walsh of course the Lord said, “No, you need to do something else.” And sure enough, then I found myself going back to government, and then I found myself at the Beckett Fund, and then I found myself at a table with Professor Walsh talking to this potential client in these religious liberty cases.
And the Lord, I found a huge difference in my life when I started seeing my life in terms of, Lord, what do you want me to do? As opposed to how can I make the most comfortable life I can for myself? Which I think is, that’s something that tends to motivate lawyers. How can I make a lot of money? And yet we hear there’s a crisis of meaning in the law, in the practice of the law. So I guess trying to translate that into now what we do, which is being a judge, we obviously don’t open up the catechism to find out how to rule. I’m not even tempted to do that, right? That’s just not going to help me rule on a bankruptcy case or a 1983 case. And yet your faith, you don’t leave it at home. It has to inform how you do your work. So how does it inform how you do your work? What do you think?
William Nardini:
Well, I think it makes us take our job seriously. And if you want to plug it into some of the ways that we think about how we should be good Catholics, I think of charity, take charity, which is one of the main things that we are supposed to embody in our lives every day. How can you embody that as a judge? Well, it can’t be in the form of sympathy, right? It can’t be, well, I feel bad for this litigant who’s had it rough, so let’s rule in their favor. No, you’ve got to follow the law. And we take an oath to that effect. But how can charity map in to how you do your work? Well, it can mean reading a party’s arguments as charitably as possible. In other words, to understand what they are saying, to take the time to understand what they are trying to argue to the court, and not being dismissive of them without fully giving them the time to make themselves understood.
And I put it this way, one of the things I like to do a lot when I’m in oral argument is to say, “Well, let me just get this straight. Your brief is a little unclear, but is your argument as follows?” And I will try to as fairly as I can, and honestly as I can characterize what I think they’re arguing, so that I have not misunderstood what the scope of their argument is, and then I allow them to correct me. They can say, “Oh yeah, no, that’s exactly right. That’s what I’m trying to argue.” Or they can say, “No, actually Your Honor, that’s not it. There’s this other twist that you’re missing.” So I think if we give ourselves that extra push to make sure that we are not putting words in somebody else’s mouth or making assumptions about what they’re trying to say, but really being charitable to them in the way that we understand and we’re listening to them, I think that’s one thing that we can do to make sure we’re doing our jobs well.
Kyle Duncan:
And you and I have to see Judge Ruiz, he just gets to rule. It’s just him. We have to get along with other people. And we may not agree with them all the time. Often, I mean in most cases I do agree with my colleagues no matter who appointed them actually. But sometimes we disagree and boy, charity comes into play when I have to, I feel very strongly, no, this is the right answer. And some colleague to my right or to my left on the three-judge panel may say, “No, no, you’re exactly wrong.” And one has to call on deep reserves of charity that I don’t always have in order to say, “Okay, I respect you.” And to mean that. “I respect you, as I disagree with you, but I do respect you.” I find that often happens. Judge Ruiz, what do you think?
Rodolfo Ruiz:
Well, it’s funny because I think that having a multi-member panel, having someone next to you can also serve as a bit of a check. As you all know, we are shoot first a little bit at the district court and we don’t have that counterbalance, if you will, of figuring out if this is the right answer. But what that does is I think it emphasizes Judge Nardini’s point even more so because really what I think he’s touching on is a sense of judicial humility. And that is I think at its core what we learn in our faith. And by that I mean not humility in the more constitutional sense of judicial restraint. I mean truly from a virtue, from a Gospel of Luke, Gospel of Matthew virtue, I mean what we’re talking about in Christ’s teachings of trying to espouse humility in your daily life. As a district judge, you have to listen. You don’t have, for example, another judge there that might be able to steer you in the right direction, or at least you can check and cross-check your position with.
And I will be frank, as judges with volume, when you have a lot of cases and you’ve seen your 7,000th FLSA for Labor Standard Act case, or you seen your 200th ADA case or your Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case, whatever alphabet soup case you want to have, that is a good 30 to 40% of my docket or a slip and fall on a cruise ship, which is a maritime case that we get down in South Florida and Miami, of which we have thousands of them. You see those cases and you think you’ve seen it all. You think you’ve seen it all. I tell my lawyers, “I’ve seen this fact pattern a hundred times.” I know it’s a constructive notice issue and this, and we’re just going to, and that is something you have to be very wary of. Because what that does is it’s an absolute lack of humility. It’s just I’m going to assume that I know better than the litigants. I’m going to go out there, I’m going to pull the trigger, I’m going to keep it moving.
And the reality is, there’s so many times that if you give yourself that space, I always think of the pastor at my church. I used to always say to him, “When you go out and you give your sermons, how much do you write?” And he’d say, “Well, I write almost all of it, but I leave a little room for the Holy Spirit for when I go out.” And I thought that, I said, okay, well that humility leaves that space. You think you know where it’s going to go, but you do a little bit of what you just heard judge Nardini say, you do a charitable reading of the arguments. You try to understand where they’re at, but you leave the space you need to listen because in listening, you’re going to reach a better decision.
And it might be rare, Article III judge saying, “We’re not the center of the world.” But we’re not the center of the world. We really are not. And we make mistakes, certainly the district court level with the volume and the speed. We don’t have the luxury many times of being able to deliberate on things as long as we would like. And so keeping a sense of humility as a Catholic virtue to me, it promotes listening. And good listening means better judicial decision-making. And that is such a huge part of something that not informing the decision, right? But it is a core value or virtue from our faith that helps us do a better job in our vocation. And so that to me has been something that I try to remind myself.
I’m sure I do it better some days than others, but it’s so vital that we keep that in mind because it is very easy to jump the gun and assume the position because seen it before. And there have been moments where I’ve been very surprised. There may be a wrinkle in the fact pattern that I was not appreciating in the papers, and I discern it when I’m there in oral argument. And I would not be able to do that if I went in with my mind made up. So that’s that key component of keeping that open mind.
Kyle Duncan:
Well, how about this, I’m not sure this has happened to either one of you, but a case comes before you, very, very difficult. You’re not 100% sure of what the right answer is. And you know that whatever you decide it’ll be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, and you will be deeply criticized no matter what you decide. What then?
William Nardini:
You suck it up.
Kyle Duncan:
Well, yes,
William Nardini:
But no, I’m serious. I mean, I think one of the things that we have to do-
Kyle Duncan:
So fortitude.
William Nardini:
Yeah, fortitude. I mean I think one of the things we have to understand is our job is to do what may be unpopular. I mean, that’s one of those things. And I’m reminded, now, I went to a Catholic high school, but my sisters all who were older than me went to a different Catholic high school one town over. And I remember that they always said that this was the motto of DePaul High School in Wayne, New Jersey, if to be right is to be different, by all means be different. Now, I don’t know why I remember the motto of my sister’s high school and not my own. My mother used to repeat this all the time. And I think that we as judges need to have that in mind that our job is not to be popular. And of course that’s a fortunate thing that we have life tenure. We don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. So we should be putting our self-interests aside. Maybe we won’t get invited to as many law schools to give speeches again.
Kyle Duncan:
I think it’s overrated.
William Nardini:
Well, some of them are pretty nice. This would be a great sacrifice.
Kyle Duncan:
This one’s great.
William Nardini:
A great sacrifice if we miss this. But I think we do need to, right from the get-go, just realize, suck it up. And that could also mean being very unpopular with some of our colleagues.
Kyle Duncan:
That’s right.
William Nardini:
Who may, honestly and legitimately have a completely different view of the law. So just because they disagree with us doesn’t mean that they have ill motive. It could just mean that we’re just taking a different view honestly, of where we think that the law requires us to come out, but we need to figure this out for ourselves. And whether you think of it as fortitude or one of the other virtues, it’s something that we just have an obligation to do.
Rodolfo Ruiz:
Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think it’s fundamental to our role that we make these rulings of course, without fear of favor. And we know that there’s definitely not a popularity contest. I mean, that’s not something that we signed up for. And I do think that faith strengthens you in those moments, certainly. Not because it’s going to impact your decision. You’re going to do what the law dictates and you’re going to reason out your decision. But invariably being human, knowing that there will be fallout, you have to have that faith that you know you’re reaching the result for the right reasons. You’re approaching the law correctly, and you’re not in it to get glowing reviews. That’s not what we signed up for.
And more often than not, we don’t get those types of reviews, but I think our faith teaches us that we don’t let the popularity of the moment sway us. We’re not chasing fads. We are really tethered to a truth. It’s what we’re grounded in as Catholics. And so I think that that kind of reminder that a prayerful life, a life in faith enables us when you go through those moments to not feel like you’re walking alone, whether there’s a colleague with you or not, Christ is always walking with you. Your faith is with you, but it is a strengthening component. I think that helps certainly in those difficult moments reach the right decision, by far.
Kyle Duncan:
Amen. Should we have some questions, professor? Or not.
Speaker 5:
Thank you so much, Judges. So my question, a few weeks ago, the other center on campus, well one of them, the Center for Law and Human Person invited Father Dominic Legge from the Dominican House of Studies over. And Father Legge gave a really fantastic presentation about the role of morality in the law and kind of viewing the law as a teacher in the more classical sense. So we’ve talked kind of about maybe what I would qualify as sorts of procedural virtue when it comes to justice from the bench, whether that’s charity and considering both sides, humility and going into arguments and listening to them with a fresh mind, so as not to come in with a prejudice. But I was curious what each of your thoughts are with respect to the extent that morality can inform the actual substance of the law and decision-making, that sort of thing. The limitations of positive law kind of is a bundle of questions, but…
Kyle Duncan:
Okay. That’s a big question. Who wants to go first? Not me.
Rodolfo Ruiz:
I don’t know if it’s so much informed by morality, but I’ll tell you an area where you move a little bit more away from the law, at least for me, is in sentencing. So I’ve listened to the last year four events, and I think every judge that has spoken here, my friend Judge Packold, I know in the district court in Illinois, I know Judge Bianco, Judge Sullivan have all mentioned application of sentencing guidelines, 3553 factors. And you start to move a little bit away from the law into that kind of gray area where we have what we call the parsimony provision. It’s what is sufficient but not greater than necessary. I mean, that is an unbelievably difficult determination for any jurist.
And there’s so many times where going back to the comments of humility, where having a sense of by the grace of God go I, and looking at someone, looking at the experiences and some of the difficult broken humanity that we have to engage with and we’re trying to work with every day, some of the backgrounds of individuals who come through our court system, requires us to have such a delicate balance in figuring out what is the right sentence for this person while also doing justice. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily that morality seeps in, but there’s certainly a balance. You’re required to take into a number of statutory factors that do it every single time. But even after you’ve exhausted all of those factors and you’ve looked at every mitigating circumstance and every aggravator, whatever it may be, there is always that kind of gray area where you’re trying to figure out this person in front of me, what amount of time do they need?
Are they someone that’s going to reoffend? What message am I sending? What kind of specific deterrence do they need? Have they received all the specific deterrents they need? And maybe now we’re dealing with only general deterrents. There’s so much of that, and I think at least in my world, that’s probably where some of that starts to seep in. And it’s a very, for me at least, and I think most judges will tell you on the district level, the hardest thing we do by far. And the moment where the most, I think the gravity of the responsibility that you’ve been blessed with hits you the hardest. And I carry all those sentences with me. Students come and wonder, “Oh, what is it like after you sentence?” And I say, “You lose sleep, you have to move on. But if you’re just working by way of numbers, if you’re scoring people on a guideline chart, and you’re just assigning numbers to criminal history and dealing with how they score, you need a vacation, right?” You’ve lost a sense of the human in front of you.
And I always share that when I was a brand-new judge, they took us to FCI Richmond, not too far from here, where we met with a number of individuals who were doing life sentences. And I thought it was so interesting. They had all accepted responsibility. They were in there for the rest of their lives. We met with all of them and to a tee, every single one. The only thing they wanted to talk about was the imposition of sentence by the judge. And now they were hanging onto that moment because they were treated as less than human. And they asked us as newly minted judges, “Whatever you do, we earned it. We deserve it. We have to go away, whatever it is. But when you impose, we’re still human. Do not let it define the entire arc of my life. I made a mistake, I will pay for it.”
I have never forgotten that. I think it’s such an important thing, no matter how difficult the circumstances, no matter how many victims are in the courtroom, and no matter how horrible the offense may be, when you dehumanize the individual, not only does it run afoul of what the guidelines tell us to do, but even from our own faith, right, about what we’re supposed to do, and we’re trying to see that human, and the face of Christ in everyone. So it is challenging, but I think that’s probably the one area where to the extent it informs, it doesn’t deviate from the statute, but it’s certainly something you’re trying to capture what you think is correct, and some of that can have a morality angle to it.
Kyle Duncan:
Well, the whole idea of being a judge, right? If you believe in the New Testament, where the Lord himself says, “Judge not.” So you have to reconcile yourself. What are we doing?
Rodolfo Ruiz:
Right.
Kyle Duncan:
I mean, we are judging. It is our job to judge, but we’re not going to do what the Lord said not to do. And that’s the ultimate, to judge somebody in that sense is to say, you deserve to go to hell, right? We are not doing that. We should not do that. That’s not what, I don’t have to sentence people, but that’s not what you’re doing when you sentence someone. What do you think, judge?
William Nardini:
I think as appellate judges, we are in a different position because I think that our district court colleagues have that difficult job of imposing sentence. We don’t, we are sitting in review, which is really at quite a distance with a much more differential standard of review once it gets up to our level. So we don’t have that sort of encounter in a daily moment. The place where morality comes in, as you said, into positive law, really comes through the political branches. Congress is going to pass laws and they’re going to make all sorts of substantive value judgments all the time. Even our constitution makes value judgments. Why do we have a First Amendment that protects speech? Well, that’s a value judgment that was made by the framers, and by the people who ratified the Constitution. Plenty of value judgments are going on in the political branches. When it comes to us, we’re not there to second-guess them unless we are going to say that say, in executive judgment of values is contradicted by what’s in the Constitution.
And we say, well, that value judgment wins. So we’re examining value judgments and where certain of those are brought into the law, but we’re using some yardsticks that have already been provided to us. What I think is important is to follow-up on something that Judge Ruiz said is looking at people as individuals. I think this goes back to what you might think is a very sterile provision of Article III. What is our job? What is the judicial power of the United States? It’s to resolve cases or controversies. Well, what does that imply? When you look at Stani and Mucha’s doctrines and all, it means that there are people on both sides of the V. It means this case matters to somebody. People who have come in before us. And it could be something that we think, this is something we see all the time. One of these alphabet soup lawsuits, and we think, ah, a dime a dozen, we see a million of these. But you know what? That one case to the parties who were before us, this could be the single most important thing in their lives right now.
I mean, how many people are in court? I mean, how many of you, don’t raise your hand, have a lawsuit going on right now? Probably not that many of you. But to someone who’s got a lawsuit, this could be everything. So if we pay attention to the fact that we have real people whose lives are really impacted by whatever the case is, civil, criminal, administrative appeals, we are making sure that we are respecting who they are, and that this is something that matters to them. And then I always think back to the Beatitudes, and I don’t know, maybe it’s wishful thinking on our part, but the idea of blessed are the peacemakers. The whole project of justice and law upon which all of you are embarking is a critical one. Because the law is a way that we find peace in our society.
Because you go back to the state of nature, if you disagree with somebody, what do you do? You bop them on the head and whoever’s strongest wins. And we have decided through the social compact that we have a better idea. That we’re all going to come up with rules of behavior. And if we think that someone has violated those rules, we will not resort to force. We don’t bop each other on the head and whoever’s strongest is going to win. But what we’ll do is we’ll come to neutral arbiters, and we’ll argue our cases civilly. And then our job is to try to work with those rules to figure out how they apply and then say, “Okay, this is how the rules play out.” And I think that’s why everybody who has a role in this, whether as lawyers or judges or otherwise, you’re all playing an important role in that job of being a peacemaker. And when you think about the law in that framework, I think it can be a very rewarding way to live your life.
Kyle Duncan:
I agree. I agree very much.
Rodolfo Ruiz:
Absolutely.
Kyle Duncan:
Should we have one more question?
Speaker 6:
This is for the whole panel. I’m curious to know any particular saints that have served you through intercession during your career and also any recommendations for spiritual reading. Thanks.
William Nardini:
Good. You got it? I probably am most in need of St. Jude, most of the time, patron of lost causes. So I don’t know.
Kyle Duncan:
He’s busy on the Fifth Circuit.
William Nardini:
I will say, and this is like most good litigators, I’m going to tweak your question. One person to whom I have looked is not a saint, although I hope he’s going to get there. He’s Blessed Michael McGivney, who’s the priest who founded the Knights of Columbus and of course we’re a little biased because I’m in New Haven. And he’s from, well, he’s actually from Waterbury, but he’s basically from New Haven and he’s buried there.
And I think that there’s something that has really always resonated about the mission that he followed when he was in life serving the widow and the orphan and forming the organization, the Knights of Columbus. That has been very important right here for this law school. My father was a devout, very committed member of the Knights of Columbus. And at the end of his life, he was an insurance agent for it. So I’ve always felt this particular connection, I think, to that very special calling that he had. And he died actually relatively young, unfortunately. But it’s amazing to see someone that young who has made that long and lasting an impact and throughout my family and throughout my life. And I just think that, I don’t know, he’s not a saint yet, but when there’s a canonization and I’m going to Rome.
Kyle Duncan:
Yeah.
Rodolfo Ruiz:
I would say we just actually went to the shrine earlier before he came over here, St. Pope John Paul II. And I think it’s because of my age and where growing up to me, he was such a force for change. So I’m the first American born in my family. Both of my parents are Cuban exiles. They fled Castro’s communism in Cuba. So my mother came over in ’67 on the Freedom Flights. She went to a beautiful all girls Catholic school in Havana, Cuba that was shut down by the Castro regime. Some of you may know that after the revolution in ’59, one of the first things that the regime did was get rid of all the clergy, nationalize many schools, but many of them, almost 250 Catholic schools were shut down and taken over by the regime. Next thing came in declaring the state atheists in the 70s with Marxist and Leninist philosophy. And so when my parents fled, my mother on the Freedom flights in ’67, my father actually came over on Operation Peter Pan, and I encourage you to read it.
It’s actually an operation that took about 14,000 unaccompanied children out of Cuba in ’62. He came over without his family, and it was actually in large part organized by the Catholic Church. Monsignor Walsh was the head of the Catholic Charities who actually help orchestrate to save children from being indoctrinated by communist ideology. Both of my parents came over with absolutely nothing. They pretty much only came over with their faith. And began their lives anew in this country. And so as I was raised, my faith formation drew a lot on their experience and their faith that got them out of Cuba and got eventually my grandparents out of Cuba as well. Throughout that time, he was such a force St. John Paul II in terms of not only from Poland and Eastern Europe, but what he did in terms of communism, culminating in 1998, he was the first Pope to visit Cuba when Castro was still in power. And I remember him visiting Miami as a kid. And I mean it was football fields of individuals there. Most of the Cuban exile community had a love for him.
And it’s just one of those things that it’s kind of the Pope you grew up with, I guess is one of those things. And so my wife and I made a point to go to the shrine, before we came here today, we had not been able to visit it before. And it was just a reminder in terms of praying for intercession that, and then one that I think, I don’t necessarily know if in terms of the same, but San Michael the Archangel for me, which was my confirmation saying, and to me with what we do, the San Michael prayer is recited often in my home with my children, with my wife who’s here, and also a lawyer. And that’s just for the strength. That’s for the strength because you do see things in court that they test you, and you need to be able to draw on that strength. So both of those I think would be the key folks that I pray to for intercession, things that I pray for intercession.
Kyle Duncan:
Just very briefly, because we’re out of time, but St. Josemaria Escriva and St. Francis de Sales were both trained lawyers. They’re good intercessors. My patron saint is St. Thomas Moore, obviously. And go visit at St. Joseph’s church on Capitol Hill. There’s a statue of St. Thomas with the Axe, and there’s a prayer to St. Thomas Moore at that statue that’s been extremely important for me and it got me through my confirmation hearing. With that, let’s thank the panel members. Thank you very much.
William Nardini:
Thank you.
Kevin Walsh:
Thank you guys. Thank you guys.