Monday, July 13, 1992, 8:00 pm

On the first evening of Session 299, “Transnational Law and Legal Institutions,” in 1992, US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor took to the podium for the second time that day. She had delivered the session’s opening lecture, “The American Federal System” that morning, but now convened an informal evening discussion to reflect on the recent Supreme Court’s decision on a woman’s right to abortion. It had promised to be one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings since Roe v. Wade in 1973, which had established a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy two decades earlier. O’Connor knew the public uproar the court ruling would unleash and decided to travel abroad as soon as the court recessed in June 1992. The 62-year-old justice, the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, had met with judges in Kigali, then continued into the Rwandan highlands to experience first-hand the legendary “gorillas in the mist.” “The woman who had pored over stacks of National Geographic as a girl,” O’Connor writes in her memoirs, “was drawn to exotic and far-off places by her love of nature.” O’Connor was now in Salzburg having missed much of the resultant furor while in Rwanda.

Session 299 belonged to annual series on law and legal institutions that dates back to June 1953. Then, at Session 26, the Seminar convened its first law program with Harvard Law School and gradually expanded to include faculty from the US Supreme Court. In 1972, US Chief Justice Warren Burger served as a guest speaker at Session 136 and became a regular faculty member over the years. A staff member recalls him “raiding” the Schloss kitchen for food to bring to the Bierstube in the evenings. A portrait of the Supreme Court, signed by all nine justices, is displayed just outside the Schloss Library, with the inscription: “To the Fellows, Faculty and Staff of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.” Other justices followed including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Steven Breyer and Anthony Kennedy. 

In July 1989, Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, joined the faculty of Session 276. “A State’s restrictions on a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy also implicate constitutional guarantees of gender equality,” Blackmun wrote in the 1973 ruling. “State restrictions on abortion compel women to continue pregnancies they otherwise might terminate. By restricting the right to terminate pregnancies, the State conscripts women’s bodies into its service, forcing women to continue their pregnancies, suffer the pains of childbirth, and in most instances, provide years of maternal care.” As a reminder of the intensity of emotions associated with the 1973 ruling, Blackmun told a staff member that he had a chair at home with a bullet hole from a would-be assassin. “One of the most moving presentations we have heard here—clear, logical, thorough, modest—was,” the Session 276 in-house report notes, Blackmun’s presentation “to a packed house on ‘The Anatomy of Roe vs. Wade.’” 

Now, three years later, in July 1992, Justice O’Connor was in Fellows Hall to discuss the recent Supreme Court case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, that sought to overturn the 1973 landmark ruling. The nine justices, O’Connor told the Fellows, had been divided with four justices seeking to uphold Roe v. Wade, and five justices seeking to reinstitute a national ban on abortion. Then something remarkable happened, as O’Connor told the Fellows, and subsequent disclosures confirm. “Dear Harry, I need to see you as soon as you have a few free moments,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote Blackmun on April 24, 1992. “I want to tell you about some developments in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and at least part of what I say should come as welcome news.” Kennedy had changed his mind.

O’Connor said that as a woman, her position on Roe v. Wade was clear, but for Kennedy, as a man, as a conservative, and as a devout Roman Catholic, the decision to uphold a woman’s right to an abortion was more complex, personally and morally, but ultimately his belief in precedent prevailed—a sentiment reflected in the majority decision.

“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” Justice O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion. “Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe,” which was the reason for compelling Justice Kennedy to vote for upholding a woman’s constitutional right to protect a woman from having her body conscripted by the state.

In the years to come, Justice Kennedy became an annual presence at Salzburg Global, speaking on immigration, global citizenship, freedom of speech. In 2012, following his swing vote on gay marriage and the affordable health care act, Kennedy was featured on the cover of TIME magazine, with the moniker “The Decider.” Described as the most powerful man in America for his ability to tip Supreme Court rulings, Justice Kennedy continued to appear most summers at Schloss Leopoldskron, most recently in 2019, always with a smile and a pocket size copy of the US Constitution.

The Salzburg Global-Supreme Court connection continues beyond Schloss Leopoldskron, with the Court itself serving as a regular venue for the Cutler Lecture on the Rule of Law held annually in Washington DC since 2010. Justices O’Connor, Ginsburg and Kennedy have all hosted the annual event, with Justice Breyer delivering the lecture itself in 2013. The lecture is named in honor of Lloyd N. Cutler, the Washington “superlawyer” and two-time White House Counsel, who had been instrumental in bringing both senior judges and early-career jurists from not only the US but around the world to Salzburg during his long tenure on the Seminar’s board of directors. 

Cutler’s legacy also continues in Salzburg Global’s Cutler Law Fellows Program, which has been bringing together some of the brightest young lawyers from top US law schools since 2012. Just as timely as O’Connor’s talk was three decades earlier, the 2022 law session, “The Future of Public and Private International Law,” opened the day Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, with a keynote panel featuring former US State Department and National Security Council legal advisor John Bellinger, political scientist Pavel Baev, and former counsel to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Svitlana Starosvit. “The Cutler Fellows Program is always looking to respond to current world events,” the session report noted, “but this session happened at a particularly crucial time in history, as the most ‘notable use of force that we have ever seen on the European continent since World War II’ was happening simultaneously.”

As one new Cutler Fellow noted, hearing from such speakers the same day as Russian tanks advanced upon Kyiv was both “inspiring and surreal.”