Fifty years ago, Stanford Law School began a transformation from regional respectability to national preeminence. A central rite of passage in the school’s progression was the establishment of the Stanford Law Review in 1948-an event made possible by the presence of an enterprising group of students, some dedicated young faculty members, and a new dean. The year that the Class of ’49 embarked on their legal studies at Stanford, Dean Carl Spaeth began his stewardship of the law school. It soon became apparent that founding a Law Review would figure prominently in the new dean’s vision for Stanford’s future.1 Once he obtained the unanimous support of the faculty, he called upon Charles Corker and John McDonough, two young professors with previous law review experience, to guide the new venture. They played the role of senior editors for an Intramural Law Review that served as a training vehicle for the first editors. As John McDonough has described:

By precept, example, and the time-honored process of remorseless, word-byword editing of student manuscripts, they sought to instill in the neophytes of ’49, who would edit Volume I, those standards of excellence in research and analysis and of meticulous care, if not obsession, with detail, citation, and language that are the hallmark of a first-rate law review.2

The Class of ’49 itself was an unusual group of students: Many of them had recently returned from military service, some of them were older than their predecessors had

FEDERALISM OF FREE NATIONS

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR*

At the end of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson took leave from the Court on which I now sit to serve as America’s chief prosecutor at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. He opened the case with these words: “That four great Nations, flushed with victory and stung by injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”1 I think it evident that the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, reflecting an unprecedented level of multilateral cooperation and restraint, was a watershed in promoting the rule of law among nations. The principled success of the Nuremberg tribunal fostered confidence in a post-War regime of international dispute resolution predicated not on Power, but on Reason; on Right, not Might.

This timely conference finds the international community in the midst of another seachange in how we resolve conflicts among nations and disputes that transcend national borders. New international institutions are proliferating faster than at any time since the years immediately after World War II. We have witnessed the establishment of several new multilateral development banks since 1989, three environmental bodies since the United Nations’ Earth Summit in 1992, and new multinational bodies that will come into being under the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round of

Sandra Day O’Connor, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2007, served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. The first woman to serve on the Court, she is the author of ”The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice” (with Craig Joyce, 2003 ) and ” Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American South west” (with H. Alan Day, 2002).

© 2008 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

More than one hundred years ago Roscoe Pound delivered an important address to the American Bar Association called “The Causes of Popular Dis satisfaction with the Administration of Justice.”1 In that address, Pound, who would later become dean of the Harvard Law School, warned his audience, “[W]e must not be deceived… into overlook ing or underrating the real and serious dissatisfaction with courts and lack of respect for the law, which exists in the United States today.”2 I believe that Pound’s words apply with at least equal force today as they did in 1906.

The United States has promoted the notion of the rule of law as a means for helping to ensure peace and democracy around the world. In our work with emerging nations and with the breakup of the Soviet Union, we have continual ly advocated the importance of the rule of law. One necessary component to achieving the rule of law, of course, is a fair, impartial, and independent judiciary. The United States ‘s federal judiciary has been the envy of the world for many

Establishing Justice

Sandra Day O’Connor

Edilors Note: This paper was delivered by Justice O’Co nnor as the Society’s Thirteenth Annual Lecture on May 6, 1988. This paper is the text of that speech.

Precisely 201 years ago in Philadelphia, 1 55 delegates from 12 states at the Constitu tional Convention set their minds and hearts to work in order” to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the comnion defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

The delegates told us their purposes at the verystartof their final draft of theConstitution. If the order of the list of their purposes means anything, ”estab lishingJustice” was particu larly important;it rankssecond only to forming a more perfect union.

Many things are involved, of course, in the effort to “establish justice”: enumerating rights possessed by every individua1, selling stan dards for holders of public office, and placing limits on the powers of government are just a few examples. Io a sense, the whole of the Constitution was an effort to establish justice by establishing a just government. But from my perspective as a judge, one thing that “es tablish justice” s-urel y means is the establi’sh ment of a judicial system.

This is an auspicious time to examjne the framers’ development of Article Ill, creating the judicial branch of our government. We have witnessed recently the process of selection of a new

HISTORY OF AMERICAN COPYRIGHT LAW

I want to speak today about the history of copyright law in the United States and how that history compares with that of copyright law in Ireland. The history of copyright law in my country is not so different from yours. For one thing, both of our laws have been written in English. Unfortunately, that hasn’t made either of our laws easy to read.2 More seriously, our two sets of laws share a common ancestor-the Statute of Anne, passed by parliament in 1710. Before the Statute of Anne, only the publisher of an author’s writings had the right to issue copies of those writings, and held those rights in perpetuity. The Statute of Anne granted initial property rights in literary works to authors, who could then sell those rights to publishers. The Statute also limited those property rights to a period of up to 28 years. Finally, the Statute of Anne only provided remedies against the literal copying of protected works.3

The Statute of Anne remained the law in the American colonies until the United States declared independence in 1776. Soon after, the United States adopted its current Constitution. That document established a national government with a limited set of powers. The powers of our national legislature, the Congress, are enumerated in Article I. Among the legislature’s powers is to “To promote the useful Arts…, by securing for limited Times to Authors… the exclusive Right to their Writings… ” 4 Under our system, our legislature-the