I am fifty-four years old, and I have spent almost eighteen of those years on the federal bench, six of them on a United States Court of Appeals. That is the sort of sentence people expect to be followed by a list of accomplishments, but I have learned to hear it differently. It is not a credential so much as a record of exposure. For eighteen years I have sat in rooms designed to make truth legible and watched how often it refuses to cooperate. I have questioned witnesses who lied beautifully, their stories smooth as river stone, every detail placed with a craftsman's care, and I have questioned lawyers who told the truth badly, stumbling over facts that were on their side and making honesty sound like evasion. I have watched prosecutors turn uncertainty into confidence in the space of a single cross-examination, not by discovering new evidence but by rearranging the old evidence until doubt looked like a character flaw. I have watched defense attorneys turn obvious facts into fog, not by denying them outright but by asking so many careful questions about them that the jury began to feel that clarity itself was suspicious. I have learned that a courtroom does not sort people into the honest and the dishonest. It sorts them into the persuasive and the unpersuasive, and then it asks the rest of us to pretend those are the same thing.
That was on my mind the morning I flew out to give a keynote speech about trust in public institutions. The irony was not lost on me, even then, before anything had happened. I had written the speech in the careful, qualified language judges use when they are trying to be honest without being reckless. Trust, I had argued, is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is what happens when an institution does the same right thing often enough, in public enough, that people stop needing to check every move. It is also fragile in a particular way. It does not erode because one person makes a mistake. It erodes because people watch a mistake get defended, rationalized, rewritten until the record no longer matches what they saw with their own eyes. I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it more now, though not in the way I expected to.
My wife Denise was traveling with me, though not beside me at that moment. She was in another concourse, sorting out a coffee and a gate change of her own, and we had agreed to meet at the plane. That is how we travel after thirty years of marriage, not out of distance but out of competence. We know how to move through airports separately and arrive together. She had texted me a photograph of a departure board with a small arrow drawn in her own hand, the way she does when she wants to make me laugh at the absurdity of being directed by a screen. I had not yet answered it. I meant to, once I found my gate.
In my jacket pocket, as always when I travel, I carried a small wooden gavel paperweight my daughter made when she was eleven. It is not a fine object. The handle is slightly off-center, the paint is uneven, and one side is sanded smoother than the other because she lost patience with the rough edge and decided it was good enough. It does not look like a gavel so much as it looks like a child's idea of authority, which is perhaps why I have kept it for so long. She gave it to me the week I was confirmed to my first judgeship, with a seriousness that eleven-year-olds reserve for things they understand are important even if they cannot yet say why. I have carried it to hearings, to conferences, to airports. It weighs almost nothing, and it reminds me, when I touch it, that the authority I exercise was once something a child tried to carve into shape with her own hands. That morning I touched it once, briefly, in the security line, not as a ritual but as a habit, the way other men touch a wedding ring or a pocket watch.
The airport itself was ordinary in the way airports are ordinary before they become memorable. The light was flat and artificial. The floors had been polished to a shine that made every footstep sound slightly louder than it should have been. People moved in that particular airport rhythm, half hurried and half lost, pulling suitcases that clicked and squeaked behind them, reading signs and then reading them again as if the second reading might change the answer. I had already been through security. My shoes were back on. My belt was back on. My bag was back in my hand. I was not in a hurry. My flight was not boarding yet, and I had time to find my gate properly rather than by rushing toward it.