The Three Rs: Return, Remember, Reconnect

Graduates, old and new, celebrated timeless friendships—and the vibrant school that brought them together.

Alumni Weekend 2003, with its talks by Justice Anthony Kennedy (BA ’58) and Riley Bechtel, JD/MBA ’79, was another high-powered gathering of the generations. Nearly a thousand graduates of the Law School came from all corners of the globe, partaking in their alma mater’s vibrant scrutiny of current crises while celebrating past times and future ventures. 

What made the Oct. 16–19 reunion so remarkable was the personal gestures and intimate conversations that are a Stanford hallmark. Hank Barry ’83, for instance, opened his Palo Alto home to classmates for a Sunday brunch. Barbara Babcock, Judge John Crown Professor of Law, swapped stories about juries with a dozen alumni in one of the afternoon sessions of Classes Without Quizzes. Justice Kennedy and Bechtel remained after their respective presentations (see pp. 29 and 30) to catch up with old friends. 

And where else but at Stanford would a discussion about North Korea (see p. 31) prompt a comment about the nation’s nuclear capabilities from an audience member who was none other than former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey (BA ’63). He was on campus to mark his undergraduate reunion. 

It was the fifth and final Alumni Weekend over which Kathleen M. Sullivan would preside as Dean. A day before the reunion began, she had announced that, at the close of her five-year term as Dean in fall 2004, she would return to the faculty to establish a new constitutional law center at Stanford. Sadness over her leaving office was overcome not only by the celebration of all she had accomplished in her term, but also by the excitement over her new endeavor. 

Still, the Dean’s announcement led to an outpouring of affection. At the opening event, the Dean’s Circle Dinner on Thursday night, her remarks were interrupted when Professors Richard Ford (BA ’88) and Joseph Grundfest ’78 surprised her with a bouquet of flowers, sparking a standing ovation. The next day, among nearly 200 people at the Law School’s largest-ever reception for alumni and students of color, Sandra Herrera ’05 told Sullivan that she would miss having her as Dean, but Sullivan offered only good news: “I’ll always be at your parties.” 

Walking into the reunion dinners on Saturday evening, guests felt as if they had entered one of Jay Gatsby’s celebrations. The white pavilions shimmered under a starlit sky; Japanese lanterns glowed warmly over a red-carpeted boardwalk. And the voices of Fleet Street, a Stanford a capella group, wafted through the gathering. “The alumni were especially spirited this year,” remarked Michael Bernstein, a Fleet Street member. “We had more requests for ‘Dirty Golden Bear’ than the aggregate sum of many years past.”

As Stanford Law School searches for its next dean to succeed Kathleen M. Sullivan this fall, auditions for physical stamina might well be appropriate. Sullivan’s schedule at Alumni Weekend 2003 spanned 21 separate events, 18 different venues, and 5 costume changes. From the Dean’s Circle Dinner Thursday evening through Friday’s Volunteer Leadership Summit, outdoor luncheon, Korea panel, Reception for Alumni and Students of Color, through all 10 class reunion dinners, Sullivan tried to reach out to every one of the nearly 1,000 alumni in attendance. “This weekend is a great joy and the highlight of our year,” she said, pausing for breath between tents in the lantern glow of the Saturday evening celebrations. “I could not possibly do it without the help of the world’s most devoted, professional, and omnicompetent staff.”

A Homecoming With a Supreme View

Justice Anthony Kennedy shared constitutional thoughts with alumni and students.

Among the Supreme Court Justices, AnthonyKennedy(BA ’58) is one of the least likely to have attained celebrity status. A down-home and soft-spoken Sacramento native, he eschews the limelight and reportedly is so unrecognizable that tourists have asked him to take their picture on the grand steps of the Court’s building. 

Indeed, when Kennedy agreed to participate in an Alumni Weekend event, he was happy to share the stage with three other panel members. Yet for the standing-room only crowd in Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 18, the star attraction was Kennedy, who had returned to the Farm for his 45-year undergraduate reunion. The event, “We the People 2003,” was a wide-ranging discussion of the Constitution, and Kennedy’s observations were both personal—he expressed his admiration for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom he called a “prophet,” and quipped that Justice David Souter still writes his decisions with a No. 2 pencil—and analytically historical. 

“Federalism was the unique contribution of the Framers to political theory,” he said, noting that it involved more than the idea that freedom is best preserved by balancing power between federal and state governments. “Federalism had an ethical and a moral imperative,” he explained. “It was wrong for you as a person, for you as a free citizen, to delegate so much authority over your life to a remote central power that you were no longer in control of your own destiny.” 

The crowd broke into rousing applause when Dean Kathleen M. Sullivan, the panel moderator, mentioned Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, which declares that the right to privacy bars the state from treating sexual intimacy between consenting adults—even if they’re the same gender—as a crime. Kennedy, in keeping with the practice of Supreme Court Justices to avoid public discussion of their rulings, spoke only broadly about the challenge of honoring precedent and the law while making room for the law to evolve. He remarked: “When you take your oath to uphold the Constitution, are you going to say this person must continue to suffer because we’re not ready as an institution? That’s the tension.” 

Two days later, Kennedy spoke on campus again, this time for an audience of Stanford Law students. He told them that he listened to opera while reading cases and that he judged a case’s complexity by whether it was a “one opera” or “two opera” review. A student asked which was his hardest case. “We don’t take them unless they’re hard,” he responded. “The hardest one is the one I’m working on.”

 According to one report last year, only 5 percent of Americans were even aware that he was on the Court. But he received a standing ovation when his session with the students ended. And a few weeks later, when a survey of 1Ls (see p. 7) asked them to pick their favorite Justice, Kennedy was among the tops.

Making Connections, Looking Ahead

Multidisciplinary talks and panels probed the role of the United States in world conflicts.

Ultimately, the success of Iraq might turn on whether the infrastructure of the Middle Eastern nation—ravaged by decades of neglect and post-conflict looting—can be quickly rebuilt. Riley Bechtel, JD/MBA ’79, Chairman and CEO of Bechtel Group, Inc., spoke on its Iraq mission at the Oct. 16 Dean’s Circle Dinner. 

The U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in April awarded a Bechtel subsidiary a contract to help restore Iraq’s infrastructure. This includes work on schools, fire stations, hospitals, water supplies, sewage systems, airports, railways, bridges, and power plants. 

Bechtel told alumni that the company has since achieved some major milestones, such as the repair of more than 1,200 schools in time for the first day of classes, the reopening of the Um Qasr port (which had been blocked by silt and wrecks and was essentially without power), and the return to pre-conflict electrical generating levels, all by October 2003. He noted that Bechtel was employing more than 30,000 Iraqi craftsmen through 100 Iraqi subcontractors. 

But Bechtel added that daunting challenges remained. The power sector was “an unbelievable mess,” he said, noting that Iraq had been “power starved” in the years before the war and that raising Iraq’s electrical system to Western standards would be difficult given peak furnace-season demands and transmission system issues. 

The contract has subjected the company to criticism, but Bechtel pointed out that USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios had explained publicly that Bechtel won the contract in competition against half a dozen competitors because of better experience, a superior team, and a low price. 

“Forget the New York Times trying to get you to believe that there is some element of political influence in the award or that the Iraqis don’t want us there,” Bechtel said. “We won the job entirely on the merits, and we are seeing appreciation on the faces of the Iraqi schoolchildren and their teachers as they return to school. We feel this is a noble assignment.”

Rwanda

Nearly one million people in Rwanda were slaughtered during four months of 1994. Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Assistant Professor of Law, calls it a “100-day killing spree with a speed never seen before.”

It’s difficult not to use the word “genocide” to describe what happened, but Cuéllar suggests that at a critical juncture, United States policymakers carefully avoided using the term. And on Oct. 17, in an Alumni Weekend 2003 panel, “The Power of Influence, the Influence of Power,” Cuéllar explained that their choice of terminology had tremendous implications for the Rwandans—and the rule of law. 

Cuéllar held up a recently declassified document from an interagency discussion group including Defense and State Department lawyers. It was prepared in May 1994, at the very beginning of the slaughter, and it suggests that officials were well aware of the situation. One of the issues was whether to support a United Nations proposal for an international investigation of “possible violations of the genocide convention.” 

Cuéllar read the response from the higher-echelon officials: “Be careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday—Genocide finding could commit USG [United States government] to actually ‘do something.’” Clearly, he added, officials thought that intervening in Africa was not going to be politically popular at home. 

For the rule of law to have an effect internationally, “We cannot just look at governments’ actions,” Cuéllar explains. “We have to look at ourselves and what makes our government want to act.”

Korea

No one elsewhere in the world wants to see North Korea wielding an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Why, then, is the United States having so much difficulty leading a response to the Korean nuclear crisis? 

That was a major issue raised byAllen Weiner ’89, Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, who moderated the panel “It’s a MAD, Mad World: Prospects for Security, Diplomacy, and Peace on the Korean Peninsula” at Alumni Weekend 2003. He opened the discussion by noting that the Bush administration had not clearly communicated its aims: “Is the United States intent on a regime change or on putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle?” 

That question has caused the longstanding U.S.-South Korean alliance to be the “rockiest” it has ever been, explained panelist Mi-Hyung Kim ’89, Executive Vice President of the Kumho Group/Asiana Airlines and an outside adviser to South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun. “South Koreans believe they have the most to lose in the event the North Korean issue does not get resolved peacefully,” she said. If preemptive U.S. policy leads North Korea to attack, “thousands of South Koreans will die.” 

Another panelist, Bernard S. Black ’82, George E. Osborne Professor of Law, who has served as an economic policy advisor to the South Korean government, added that the economic prospects of a regime change are terrifying to South Koreans. South Korea would be faced with a migration of hundreds of thousands of people from the north, which is in the grip of a famine.

 “South Korea would have to devote 30 percent of its GDP”—or receive roughly $1 trillion in foreign aid—“to bring North Korea up to its standard of living, and that’s not sustainable,” Black said. “This is a hard problem; South Koreans don’t know what to do, and neither do I.”