Remarks at Georgetown University Law School

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 2, 2000

September 26, 2000

Thank you very much. Father O'Donovan, thank you for giving me another chance to come back to Georgetown and for your extraordinary leadership over these many years. And Dean Areen, thank you for giving me a chance to come to the law school.

I have to tell you that when they told me I was coming into the moot courtroom--[laughter]--my mind raced back 30 years ago--almost 30 years ago. When we were in law school at Yale, Hillary and I entered the moot court competition, and it was sort of like the Olympics. There were all these trial runs you had to get through, and then you got into the finals, and you tried to go for the gold.

So we finished first and second in the trial runs, and then we got into the finals. And the judge, the moot court judge, was Justice Abe Fortas. You've got to understand, this was the early seventies; it was a sort of irreverent time. [Laughter] Fashion was not the best. [Laughter] Some of us made it worse. [Laughter] And anyway, I had a bad day. [Laughter] Hillary had a good day. I thought she should have won. But Justice Fortas thought that her very seventies outfit, which was blue and bright orange suede--[laughter]--was a little out of order for a trial. And so he gave the award to a guy, a third person, who is now a distinguished trial lawyer in Chicago. And for his trouble, he has had the burden of contributing to all my campaigns and now to hers. [Laughter] So I suppose it all worked out for the best. [Laughter]

Mr. Hotung, Mrs. Hotung, I thank you for your generosity. I loved your speech. [Laughter] And I'd like to thank you, especially, for what you've tried to do for the people of East Timor. It means a lot to me because I know how important it is to the future of freedom throughout Southeast Asia and, indeed, throughout all East Asia, that we come to recognize that human rights are not some Western concept imposed upon the rest of the world but truly are universal as the United Nations Declaration says.

East Timor is a small place, a long way from here, that many people thought the United States should not care about. And the fact that you did and continue to care about them and the enormous odds they have to cope with still is, I think, a very noble thing, and I thank you very much for that.

I'd like to thank the faculty and staff and students who are here and all the members of my administration and administrations past who are here and my friends from Georgetown days who are here. Georgetown Law School has given more talent to this administration than any other single institution in America. And I'm almost afraid to mention some for fear that I will ignore others or omit them, anyway.

But among the people in the administration who are Georgetown law grads are: my Chief of Staff, John Podesta; my White House Counsel, Beth Nolan; my Deputy Counsel, Bruce Lindsey; former White House Counsel Jack Quinn; Budget Director Jack Lew; former Trade Ambassador and Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor; Counselor to the Chief of Staff Michelle Ballantyne; Deputy Communications Director Stephanie Cutter. They're all graduates of Georgetown law. And I've had various Ambassadors and other appointees, and Lord knows who else you gave me. So I'm grateful for that.

It's also quite interesting to me that Beth Nolan's assistant, Ben Adams, and my personal aide, Doug Band, are actually working full-time at the White House. In Doug's case, he's working around the clock, because we're traveling and we're working. We haven't slept in 3 weeks. And they're enrolled right now in Georgetown law. [Laughter]

Now, therefore, I would like to make a modest suggestion, and that is that when they take their exams in December, they be judged not only on the basis of legal reasoning but creative writing. [Laughter]

I also want to credit one other person for the remarkable fidelity Georgetown students and Georgetown lawyers have had to public service over the years. My freshman philosophy teacher, Father Otto Hentz, used to say that the Jesuits are convinced there was only one serious scriptural omission on the first chapter of Genesis: God created politics, and God saw that it was good. [Laughter] You would get quite an argument, I think, from some people on that. But Georgetown has always been there for America's body politic, and we are a better nation because of it.

The Eric Hotung International Law Center Building will house work that will, in no small measure, shape the kind of nation we are and the kind of world we live in, in the 21st century.

The 20th century raised a lot of questions of lasting concerns: of ethnic and religious conflict; of the uses and abuses to science, technology, and organization; and of the relationship between science and economic activity and the environment.

But the 20th century resolved one big question, I believe, conclusively. Humanity's best hope for a future of peace and prosperity lies in free people and free market democracies governed by the rule of law.

What Harry Truman said after World War II is even more true today. He said, "We are in the position now of making the world safe for democracy if we don't crawl in the shell and act selfish and foolish." Sometimes his unvarnished rhetoric was more effective than more strained eloquence. We are, today, in a position to make the world more free and prosperous if we don't crawl in the shell and act selfish and foolish.