Welcome, everybody. I think maybe it's time we could get started. So again, welcome here to the Horace E. Reed lecture. This is our 42nd annual Horace Reed lecture. So thank you again for being here. I want to begin by acknowledging that Dalhousie is located in McMoggy. The ancestral and unceded territory of the McMaw, we are all treaty people. I also want to recognize that African Nova Scotians are distinct people whose histories, legacies, and contributions have enriched that part of McMoggy that known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years. So my job here is to say a few words about this wonderful lecture series. We have many excellent lecture series here at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie. But this one is the oldest. The Reed lecture was established to honor the memory of Horace E. Reed, who was the dean of the law school from 1950 to 1964. The lecture series was established as a joint project of the Reed family and the law school. We are, in fact, pleased, very pleased, to have Dr. Robert Reed here from the family. So welcome. I'm about to say a few things about Horace Reed, but I just want to say some of the stories I just heard from Dr. Robert Reed are far more colorful and far more influential and far more interesting than some of the stuff that I'll share. He was clearly a remarkable character. But to some details, so Horace Reed had a full life dedicated to the legal academy and to public service. He enlisted during the First World War. I just learned he was a pilot. He served as a chair of the Regulations Revision Committee with the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, as a longtime member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board. He served as a longtime member of the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Legal Profession and the Conference of Commissions on the Uniformity of Legislation. He was the honorary president of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society in 1966 to 1967 and was a Canadian delegate to the Conference on Private International Law at the Hague in 1968. Not only is Horace Reed remembered for his remarkable life of public service, he's also remembered fondly and with great respect for his scholarly achievements and his contributions as a teacher and a dean of this law school. In an editorial in the Halifax Herald in 1975, his life as a scholar was described in the following way. Horace Emerson Reed, and then followed no less than 21 initials of degrees and recognitions. So Horace Emerson Reed, former dean of Dalhousie Law School and a legal scholar and law teacher, taught law with all of the authority of a profound and mature scholar of international renown. But he also brought to his teaching the benevolence and humanity, which were among his most admirable qualities. Kindly and affable, readily available to students and colleagues alike, he presided as dean over a lengthy period of unparalleled expansion and development in the faculty of law and marked it firmly with his philosophy and objectives. In recognition of all of his remarkable achievements, Dr. Reed was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1973. And among his other honors are honorary degrees from Acadia, Queens, Dalhousie, and Windsor universities. Horace Reed began his teaching career in Minnesota. I just learned about how that came about. That's another fascinating story. But eventually answered the call to return to Dalhousie as dean. We are very glad that he did, of course, and we are pleased to be able to honor him with this lecture series. We are also especially pleased this year to be partnering with CBC Ideas to broadcast this lecture as part of their programming. So out of courtesy to the speaker, the audience, and to future listeners, please make sure you have silenced your cell phones. So this year we are delighted to have Professor Martha Minow with us to deliver the 42nd annual Horace Reed Memorial Lecture. Professor Jennifer Llewellyn will introduce our speaker. But if I can just have one word about Professor Martha Minow, just one brief thing. I've heard her speak in public many times. So I can say wholeheartedly and from personal experience, we are very lucky and privileged to have her here today. So with that, I'll pass it over to Jennifer Llewellyn. OK, so I'm doing as I was told. That is unvibrate. Good evening. My name is Professor Jennifer Llewellyn. I am a professor here at the law school and the director of the Restorative Research Innovation and Education Lab, also at the law school. And it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our Reed Lecturer, Professor Martha Minow, this evening. It's no easy task to capture in a short introduction this incredible person, especially since among her attributes is that she is as humble as she is accomplished. And so she will not like anything that falls. She literally said, name, serial number, sit down. So I'm not going to not quite sit down yet. It's also difficult for me to be measured in my introduction because of the gratitude I have for the profound and lasting impact she's had on me as a scholar and a person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Obama said, when I was at Harvard Law School, I had a teacher who changed my life, Martha Minow. This may be the only time in my life I get to count myself in the same company as Obama, so like me too. Professor Minow has been recognized as one of the world's leading human rights scholars and as one of the world's leading figures in bridging legal ideas and scholarship to bear, to bringing legal ideas and scholarship to bear on issues of identity, race, equality, and inclusion. And to seed through her work innovative approaches to reconciliation among divided peoples. Her scholarship, teaching, public leadership, advocacy has all supported and inspired generations of leaders to be their best and to seek to do the best they can to contribute to a better world. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs where her sense of obligation and commitment to problem solving for our most difficult issues was nurtured by her father, Newton Minow, an accomplished attorney and the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission who just passed this past May.  And she appears to be the perfect blend of both. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and then her master's degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education before earning her JD from Yale Law School, where she was the editor of the Yale Law Journal. She then clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States. She joined the Harvard Law Faculty as an assistant professor in 1981 and was promoted to professor in 1986. Professor Minow then served as dean of Harvard Law School between 2009 and 2017. And she is currently the 300th anniversary university professor of law at Harvard. Professor Minow has dedicated her career to imagining inclusion and equality at the level of systems, structures, policies, practices, and of tackling the barriers to realizing these ideals for social life. She's examined the possibilities for forgiveness in the face of vengeance and reconciliation amid division. All of this has been driven by a very clear-eyed and unflinching commitment to the equal moral worth of people and a radical belief in our shared humanity. Minow served on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and helped to launch the Imagine Coexistence, a program of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. She partnered in a five-year initiative with the Federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology to increase access to curriculum for students with disabilities, which resulted in both legislative initiatives and voluntary national standards to create open access for curricular materials for individuals with disabilities. She worked on the Divide Cities Initiative, which is a building and alliance of global cities dealing with ethnic, religious, and political divisions. In August 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Dean Minow to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, which is a bipartisan government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans. The US Senate confirmed her appointment on March 19, 2010, and she served as both vice chair and co-chair of its pro bono task force. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Access to Justice Project of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. She has published so many scholarly articles in journals in law and history and philosophy that actually leads one to wonder if or when she sleeps. But her books have tackled and provoked us to engage in a dialogue about some of our most urgent social issues, including her most recent books, Saving the News, Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, When Should Law Forgive, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence, the book Not Only for Myself, Identity, Politics, and the Law, and the book through which I came to know her, Making All the Difference, Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law. It is my great pleasure to welcome you, Retha. Wow, well, thank you very, very much. I give my deep, deep thanks to your dean, wonderful dean, to Professor Llewellyn, to Elizabeth, who offered me everything, including chocolate, to Dr. Reed, to the entire community, to ideas from the CBC. I learned more about Horace E. Reed this evening. I was so deeply honored to be given the chance to speak in this series, because not only was he a dean and a great dean, he also has a Harvard degree. And more importantly, he learned how important was to teach students in every class of the law school for second and third, something that I wish I could do. And I will hold him as someone to aspire to emulate. Work against injustice. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. And yet another wise adage is, don't demonize your foes until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved, especially the ones we have helped to eliminate. I'm not sure we'll really ever be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization, one philosopher put it recently. And this is especially true when societies are divided and polarized. Work against injustice. Don't demonize your enemies. Can both of these be right? I suggest that the answer is yes, and indeed, urgently so. My exploration focuses on finding durable approaches to injustice and deep conflicts. And this means being mindful of ongoing cycles of violence while also understanding that the status quo for too many people involves intolerable violence and degradation. It also means making inviolable respect for individuals as political equals and bolstering the architecture that secures nonviolent ascent amid ongoing disagreement. As histories of wars and coups, collapses of democratic states show, these are very tall demands requiring active renewal and struggle in each generation, including struggles over what justice means. Concretely then, what should justice mean for communities that are riven by divisions, political or otherwise, communities confronting traumas from the past and present abuses, societies seeking to emerge from injustice. The touchstone for this inquiry comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail. Dr. King was held in contempt for disobeying a court order against a peaceful civil rights protest mounting against racial injustice. While he was in jail, eight white Christian clergymen opposed the civil rights protest and issued a public call urging patients. Dr. King wrote his letter in response while he was locked up in that era of lynching in the jail in Birmingham, Alabama. And here are words from his now famous response. He said, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. This statement endures because it makes palpable how justice is and must be about recognizing how all of us are interconnected despite deep patterns of social division and separation. Dr. King praised the nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham. He said for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its great heroes. And the world indeed has recognized the heroism of the nonviolent civil rights movement participants in stories recounted in schools during holidays, memorial structures teaching new generations. Or so it seemed. In the past few years in the United States, politicians in Florida and some other states have by law restricted instruction, by schools or programs by employers that make anyone feel that they bear for personal responsibility for historic wrongdoing because of their race, gender or national origin. To such laws violate freedom to speak and to receive information, there are court challenges ongoing. I confess I'm involved with them. The surge of these anti-woke laws and the rhetoric and ordinances related to them show how culture wars spread fears and actual menace and even ignorance. Culture wars may seem a distraction from the persistent patterns of injustice, yet understanding polarization and social division is crucial. I began work on this talk before the recent violence in the Middle East taking the lives and safety from so many with shocking brutality and indifference to human suffering. The Hamas assault, killings and hostage-taking violate human rights. There's no question about it and also decency. But it should be possible to say this and at the same time recognize that the risk to civilians in Gaza are also jeopardizing human rights. Both Israeli leaders and leaders of Hamas say that they are standing up against injustice. Even as leaders on both sides demonize the opposition. The conflict imposes terrible suffering on innocent people while triggering divisions within other watching communities including my own campus that is right now torn up on these issues. Can struggles against injustice avoid the path to hatred, violence and destruction? Righteous opposition to injustice can unfortunately be a rationale for acts of violence by people retaliating against what they understand to be terrible wrongs. Narratives of resentment can overtake understanding of common humanity. Knowing this risk should lead to redoubled devotion to the principles of respecting the humanity of all and to constructing true and inclusive narratives of past and the visions of the future. People from different groups must be able to see themselves in how societies make sense of the past and plan to go forward. Restorative justice efforts and cultural initiatives can be vital resources in this effort. Tools of acknowledgement, repair, rectification, transformation offer responses to injustice. Such efforts at their best work at both the levels of individuals and also social narratives, but also may fall short of changing structures and gaining more than temporary traction. Processes of acknowledgement may help build new understanding for individuals and for nations even when they do not themselves produce concrete political and economic change, but they can also produce backlash and resistance. Anticipating headwinds is an important element of the work addressing social division and historic injustice and so is constructing deliberate actions that strengthen the institutions that make change durable. Can all of this be done without demonizing opponents? That's what I wanna talk with you about. So first let's look at polarization and divisions. Over and over again, in societies around the globe and through history, oppression and violence both reflect and perpetuate lines of difference, isolating individuals and groups from recognizing the pain of others. I inevitably reflect my own context, the United States late October 2023, while I'm also trying to be attentive to developments here in Canada and elsewhere. Strikingly, people surveyed from societies across advanced economies last year report perceiving greater social division now than from before the pandemic. In the United States, the belief that we are divided is perhaps one of the very few things that Americans currently have in common. I like the joke that the world is made up of two kinds of people, the people who think there's two kinds of people and the people who don't. But current divisions are unfortunately no laughing matter. Half of Americans report that they prefer that their country to be composed primarily of people with roots in Western Europe. Another half disagree with that view. Political polarization occurs when people's political views diverge towards the extremes and away from the center and they build distrust. Some politicians amplify white grievances. Meantime, a majority of African American parents in the US perceive persistent racism and police violence as big problems. Anti-Asian, anti-immigrant sentiments are on the rise and are prime concerns for others. American Jews perceive heightened anti-Semitism and risks of violence. American Muslims face religious discrimination and increased rates of suicide attempts and conflicts between religious free exercise and equal treatment of individuals regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation are mounting in workplaces health care policies and schools. A recent poll shows that white evangelical Christians report that they fear more than any other group in the United States, what they perceive to be as threats to American culture. And many people in poor and predominantly white rural communities report that they feel left behind, disrespected and resentful. Divisions and distrust accompany a kind of collective amnesia about past collective amnesia and about growing inequalities. Many people in different and often opposing groups fear that their way of life, their beliefs, their very existence is at stake. Informal political settings like the United States Congress, disagreement within groups, rivals conflicts between groups outside and even threatens to spill over to physical violence. And as a Norwegian social scientist recently noted, it is a dire time for a democracy if honest disagreement deteriorates into shouting matches of distrust. Well, then I have to say it's a dire time. Current social divisions and distrust around the globe have many sources, including the unscrupulous behavior of leaders and of social media. Politicians in Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, the Philippines and Turkey appeal to the fears and hatreds of masses of people at the expense of minorities, truth, reason and fundamental values of equality, tolerance and the rule of law. The problem is not though a handful of demagogues. Every age has them. The problem is the discontent of millions of people facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts and vulnerable people willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame. Social media companies contribute by amplifying extreme and outraged producing content in pursuit of engagement and revenue. Misinformation and disinformation circulate freely on social media and are more likely to be forwarded than truthful material. Even Canada cannot escape these forces, although reports of this polarization in this country may be artifacts of media hype. Domination, division and oppression operate in part through ideas, permeating cultures and beliefs held by individuals regardless of facts. Drawing distinctions between groups is apparently deeply ingrained in human beings but identifying who is us and who is them varies historically by context. There's nothing about any of the named social divisions that has an immutable reality. Ideas about racial or gender hierarchy rest on notions that lack scientific validity and such ideas persist. Ideas about religion, disability, differences, inform people's fears and beliefs again without a foundation. Narratives about identity and history become part of people's consciousness from children's exposure to adult explanations from formal education, from social settings and from cultural practices. Beliefs that resist facts operate as ideologies. Societies are often organized to reflect and reinforce beliefs around group identities and that makes them real regardless of any factual foundation. Power maintaining such organizations can operate overtly or subtly and conscious and implicit attitudes in people's minds and institutional patterns entrench cleavages and prejudices. Scholars for decades have documented relationships between patterns of violence and oppression along lines of difference or identity that have been adopted and reflected in institutions and attitudes and their relationship to genocide, to ethnic cleansing, to brutal separation of parents and children, appropriation of land and resources, exclusion from opportunities, mass incarceration and daily degradations. Every country has social conflicts and social divisions. These are ancient and history seems to show that we need labels to define our own place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others and treated them under a hierarchical framework. Some are treated as less so others can feel like they're more. What is new is the growing use since World War II of the language of rights rather than misfortune to talk about such things. Legal responses to atrocity can take the form of treaties, constitutional reforms, statutory changes, criminal trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations and each do hold promise. But they also can give rise to backlash. Law enforcement can anchor commitments to justice and human rights, but it too can be abused. Moreover, even admirable pursuits of justice can generate a kind of political response that fuels cycles of violence and violations of human rights and dignity. And so it's to the subject of backlash that I turn now. Responses to injustice and mass violence sadly often take the form of more violence, more people being harmed. And narratives of victimhood play a key role in entrenching justifications for power and oppression. In the 1870s in the United States, many southern towns and farms lay devastated by the Civil War and the national government enacted what we call reconstruction amendments that accorded to blacks the same rights as whites, accorded citizenship, suffrage, protection under the law. Many white southerners starting in the 1870s responded by calling for what they called redemption, the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for blacks and often used murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the white league and mobs to terrorize southern blacks. Historian W. E. B. Du Bois later described the period as one, and I quote him, where the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun and then moved back again towards slavery. Researchers of white supremacist rhetoric and organizations produced violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and contributed to the January 6th, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol. Popular cultural sources in South Africa have recently projected an unfounded claim of white genocide related to a series of murders of white farmers in the country. South Africa's president, Cyril Remaphosa, has warned against igniting the tinderbox of race hatred and said, no, these are crimes. This is not genocide. Let's respond with the legal system. Debates over land reform and worker mistreatment continue to expose the legacies of racialized differences in power and resources. There are serious problems there. Sometimes backlash also involves ignorance about the past. Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer and human rights activist recently warned about the effect of forgetting and in his case, forgetting the impression that his country experienced. He wrote an essay called, I Watch Democracy Die and I Don't Want to Do It Again. Dorfman reminds his readers that between 1973 and 1990, more than 40,000 people were subjected under the regime of President Augusto Pinochet to physical and psychological torture. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans, political opponents, independent critics or innocent civilians suspected of having links to them were jailed or murdered or persecuted or exiled. And there has been some progress since them. This is still from Dorfman speaking. But today's Chile's radical right and more than a third of Chileans have expressed approval of the Pinochet regime. Now this is me. The percentage of Chileans who say that the military was right to carry out the coup increased from 16% in 2013 to 36% this year. Chile itself is very politically divided and those divisions include disagreements about how to remember the past or whether to remember it. These episodes illustrate some of the dynamic of backlash. Backlash is a strong resistance to change. Advances in women's legal and social equality have met with movements restricting women's reproductive choice in the United States, censorship in China, exclusions from schooling and employment in Afghanistan. Backlash against court orders to end racial segregation of public schools is a prime example from the United States. And here in Canada, a recent survey reports that 53% of young women polled fear so much for their safety when they speak up against harassment, trolling, bullying and physical violence that they are deterred from doing so. Now look, I certainly don't assign blame for backlash to those who have fought for long-denied rights. But there are warnings here about these dynamics, warnings about how losers can lose in the face of backlash and perhaps how victimization narratives contribute to that backlash. Victories for those who've historically been marginalized can have sharply negative unintended consequences or be perceived to have unintended consequences when there continues to be a backdrop of imbalance in power. When embedded in dynamics of violence and hierarchy, even solace can perpetuate and escalate pain. Author Alice Monroe, I'm a fan, captures this problem exquisitely in her short story, Royal Beatings. The story reveals a repeated family dynamic. Stepdaughter triggers anger in her stepmother and both of them know the cycle that will follow. The stepmother calls the father to physically discipline his daughter. And after giving her a look filled with hatred and pleasure, that's Monroe's language, he lashes the daughter with his belt and then with his hands and the beating continues long after she shrieks and cries. The daughter is a victim and knows that that is her role. Later, the stepmother comes as always to comfort the daughter with a tray of food to eat in bed. Violence in a household is not the same, of course, as societal oppression, but for those caught in dynamics of violence, the interactions of behavior, emotion, narratives hold similarities. In the context of family violence, there are no easy answers. And this was underscored for me when I discussed this story, Alice Monroe's story, with a group of judges in a program that uses works of literature to help judges reflect on family violence problems. The judges were learning at the time how to implement a then new law authorizing judicial civil protection orders at the request of someone experiencing violence at home. One judge in the conversation said, I just find it so frustrating, someone will come in and not complete the process. This story spoke to them. The judges immediately recognized the pattern and the judges acknowledged that all three of the participants apparently knew each time what had happened in the past and what would happen in the future. And one judge memorably commented, you know, when a family like this comes to court, I never know whether the court is breaking the pattern or simply becoming another participant in it. The judge worried that the court's processes could be manipulated as another weapon caught up in the party's struggle. With the assertion of judicial power backed by the threat of state coercion perpetuate rather than alter the pattern of abuse. In a similar vein, opponents of the death penalty which we still have in the United States warn that state violence can engender more violence. Even lawful and warranted assertions of power can continue rather than end violence. This is one of the reasons for my enduring interest in restorative justice. Tooth-seeking efforts such as truth commissions and restorative justice circles differ from adversarial adjudication. The focus on collaborative truth-telling and construction of constructive steps for change, building relationships of respect among people who come at problems from very different places. I think it holds potential for breaking cycles of violence and building something focusing on the future. Sometimes gathering and sharing facts broadly can change public understandings and intervene in the dynamics of violence and suppression. An aspiring example comes from Brazil where the secret at first fact-finding effort and then a public commission inspired truth commissions around the globe as a mechanism for generating findings and altering prevailing silence about the past. You all know what had happened in Brazil, the military regime between 64 and 1973 had subverted democracy, suspended legal rights, tortured or disappeared thousands of people who engaged in resistance. And then the economy changed and the political situation changed. In 1979, the military agreed to an amnesty agreement that protected the officials involved in the repressive military from prosecution. And the deal offered amnesty also for political prisoners and a gradual return to civilian leadership under a new constitution. But because amnesty met no legal accountability, there was this regime of silence all over the country and a serious danger of suppression about what had happened. So to obtain information about the torture practiced by the state's apparatus, a private investigation secretly started with the support of the Catholic Archbishop of San Paolo and the World Council of Churches. They gathered materials and produced a massive report in 1985 documenting political murders and acts of torture. It became unexpectedly a bestseller in the country. And eventually demands for public accountability produced the National Commission on the Disappeared that thoroughly documented human rights violations through personal accounts of abductions, tortures, death, and analysis of the systematic organization of the state power. The truth telling process became a model then for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the transition from apartheid. The South African TRC collected and amplified 20,000 statements from victims and survivors. And the facts gathered through amnesty applications from persons who committed crimes and human rights violations informed the five volume report. The report shows how cruel assaults on individuals and families and humanity came to pass and makes clear that every part of the society contributed and bears responsibility. The commission's work brought many facts to life and helped many victims feel acknowledged. A public opinion survey 10 years after the TRC found compelling evidence that its work contributed to reconciliation within the country. That survey and other accounts underscore that after the TRC, South Africans reported they all understood the wrongness of apartheid as a crime against humanity. Albysacks, South African anti-apartheid freedom fighter who ultimately became a justice on the post-apartheid constitutional court reflected on why the TRC worked in South Africa. And he said it worked because the truth telling activities offered an emotional settlement for those who had suffered under apartheid. And it worked he said because the commission offered no space for denying what had happened and also gave perpetrators an incentive to confess. And further he said it converted the information it acquired into official acknowledgement by the state and at least symbolically by the society. Now look, the TRC was imperfect. It didn't fulfill all the hopes that people held out for it. A dominant criticism is that it failed to hold responsible institutions like courts and corporations and subsequent governments have failed to implement the recommendations of the reports. The major failure to address political and economic structures that embed racist practices in the country has led to an ongoing challenges including ongoing violence. And individuals and generations born after the TRC concluded it's been more than a quarter of a century did not experience the process. Many younger Black South Africans in particular have responded with violence to the ongoing economic injustices of structural racism. And during 2022 victims of the apartheid regime in protest slept outside the nation's constitutional court in a campaign seeking to enforce promises of never received reparations. A recent book reports that many White South Africans are fearful to go out in public and many have not accepted a world where Black people move ahead and White people are not superior. So the problems are not over but the TRC know one activity could prevent such problems. It still played an important role in building a peaceful transition to apartheid. Question is what else needs to be done both there and in other places that seek to learn from that experience. Restorative justice mechanisms promote truth telling by individuals who've survived abuses and atrocities with encounters with other people and with a forward looking approach as Professor Llewellyn explains, restorative processes hold potential for transformative agenda especially if the process builds personal understandings and a shared sense of unity and purpose for change. So it's that that I wanna talk about now. How if at all can the narrative building activity be amplified so that there is a sense of joint participation in creating a future? I think in this context it's good to recognize that lawyers don't have all the answers. Cultural practices in particular including arts and education hold a very important role I believe in effecting the understandings of individuals and communities about social divisions and social injustice and about imagining a shared future. Rituals and art processes of remembrance and repair, meaning making in response to atrocities that have roots and cultural practices can be incredibly meaningful and commemorative activities afford chances for reflection by people who have direct ties with terrible events but also people who are born generations later. An arresting study of German elections over seven cycles of elections finds that exposure to memorials commemorating victims and survivors of Nazi persecution is associated with reduced support for far right political parties. The memorial used in the study is called Stolperstein, Stumbling Stones. These are really the size of a cobblestone embedded in sidewalks on streets across, it started in Berlin. It now has spread to 1,100 locations in 17 European cities. And what's unusual about this particular form of memorial is that they're embedded in ordinary life. They're put in near where the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution last freely lived, their last chosen place of residence. So you're walking down the street and you stumble on the stone and you remember it's more integrated into ordinary life than the more memorial you have to go several kilometers to go see and probably don't. Compellant cultural work has been led by a brilliant and superbly effective lawyer and law professor I know, Brian Stevenson, who founded and leads the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Its successful legal challenges over the years have worked to eliminate excessive and unfair criminal sentencing and exposed abuses of people in incarceration and the treatment of children as if they were adults by a criminal system and secured the release of over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners sentenced to death. But a few years ago, Brian said, despite these successes, he reached the conclusion that until the national narratives about race change, the problems that he and his team were challenging in litigation would persist.  You will accept things you shouldn't accept. He commented that it was a choice of narrative to treat drug addiction as a crime rather than an illness. And it was a narrative choice to label children as super predators on the grounds that they didn't show remorse for violent crimes. And that choice led many state legislatures to lower the age to 14, to treat 14 year olds as adults in the criminal system. So Professor Stevenson set about to change narratives around race and around guilt and innocence and around crime and punishment. What should be remembered about slavery, about lynching, about racial segregation and about their connections to current day mass incarceration and racial bias? And he recognized the power of art museums and memorials and he and his Equal Justice Institute team created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which commemorates the 4,400 lynching of black individuals in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Visitors walk up a hill to encounter first a few and then eventually 800 large steel blocks, one for each county where a racial lynching took place and each block is etched with the names if they are known of the victims of the lynching. And as visitors walk through this memorial, the orientation of the hanging monuments changes and becomes eye level then overhead, evoking the way that a lynching victim was hanged often in public spaces. Noting specific dates and the places where the lynchings occurred, these monuments commemorate individuals whose names and lives were neglected and suppressed, not to mention destroyed. And nearby on a site where enslaved people were forced to work at a cotton warehouse is the accompanying museum. It combines first person narratives in film, kind of holographic films with experiences about slavery with exhibits about with data and history about slavery and about mass incarceration about lynching about Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation subordination. People come to visit, the initiative has sparked efforts by local communities to reckon with racial violence in their past. And since its opening in 2018, the memorial and the museum have drawn millions from around the world. Popular and academic writings reflect on it. Their presence has transformed, kind of ironically, the economy of Montgomery, Alabama. It's the best thing that's happened to Montgomery, Alabama in a long, long time. And there are people in the town that kind of grudgingly say to Brian, well that was a good thing you did. The major purpose of these initiatives is to overcome the suppression or the forgetting of knowledge about slavery and lynching and to share a narrative about the nation's past that can support a transformative future. Restorative and cultural narrative building efforts that mobilize facts, education and experience can offer means for transformation both of individuals and of communities. Necessary for transformative justice is not just narrative building, however, but also concrete actions. So what kinds of concrete actions can be fought for, can be held out to break out of existing patterns? I think it has to work on multiple levels. These levels include interactions between individuals. Individuals who have to do the hard work of treating one another with respect even when we sharply disagree or perceive one another as threats and know that we are right. And work at this level is essential for building trusting relationships and any kind of movement for change. But transformative efforts have to work beyond the interpersonal, and another level does include the social narratives that are absorbed in the minds of individuals and groups, the narratives that assign blame and causation in ways that trap people in biases and assumptions and in the sense of personal hopelessness. Renovating existing institutions is another level of the work and it needs to happen because rules and practices so often encode ideas and attitudes that get in the way of according people, respect or addressing ongoing harms. Institutional and cultural practices have to ensure genuine norms of respect for individuals and that is hard work. Democracies from ancient Athens to the present have tried to summon people to avoid turning other participants in the project of self-government as enemies of Athens excluded most of the people, but it didn't even work for them. Philosopher Margaret Walker describes this goal in terms of morally adequate relations that assure people confidence that they share some basic standards for the treatment of each other. That people can trust one another to abide by those standards and to acknowledge fault if not. And that means that people are justified in their hope that unacceptable treatment will not prevail and victims will not be abandoned in their reliance on that shared commitment. This is a tall order, but I think it's good to make it explicit. People who have had repeated experiences contradicting these expectations are understandably wary and distrustful and only demonstrated experience. Warranting trust will gain trust. Respect for individual dignity means resisting the temptation to dehumanize any individual or group simply because of their identity or even when they say disagreeable things. This requires emotional self-management as well as norms of respect as well as institutional reinforcement. Maybe it requires learning to step back from disagreement and prevent hostility from spiraling out of control. When dealing with large groups and societies of the whole, laws and norms have to be continually renewed to channel disagreements away from violence, to deepen respect for each person and to work on the reforms that are necessary to make that respect visible and real. And this requires something even harder, a spirit of humility and openness to learning. This is the advice of our former justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was reflecting what it takes for people to build a society that's founded in justice, liberty and equality. And she quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century visitor to the United States who wrote, the greatness of America lies not in it being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. Disagreements will be inevitable. The question is whether they can occur with civility and respect, which requires genuine openness, decent and smart people can profoundly disagree with each other, come to my classes. They and we can on occasion even persuade one another. There's a wonderful lawyer named David Singleton who used to direct the Ohio Justice Policy Center. He once explained to me and to my students that people he had completely written off because they were political opponents ended up being the critical allies for the reform of the criminal laws in Ohio. Today's adversary could become an ally in another day and looking at someone you disagree with that way is a different way to see them. I know that you were lucky enough not long ago to have visiting here, Fania Davis and Angela Davis, Margaret Burnham. I was so amazed to discover that this leader of the US Restorative Justice Movement, Fania Davis has as a sister the well-known political activist and professor Angela Davis once on the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigations most wanted list for false accusations that she was exonerated in a criminal process. What's amazing to me is to see these two people focusing on repair and structural change in dialogue. And you can see their talk here that's available through ideas at the CBC. The two sisters compliment each other in dialogue about restorative justice, Angela observes. Now we're thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the social world. Even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence in their relations with other people. It's pretty profound. What concretely would justice entail for divided communities, altering conditions of injustice for the long term, building support for that internal change for individuals, developing cultural narratives and practices. I am not an optimistic person, but I am a hopeful one. And hope is renewed for me when I meet inspiring people. One such person is a man named Porig O'Malley, an international peacemaker from Ireland. And he organized the entity that Jennifer mentioned the divided cities initiative that brought together people living in cities that are subject to the governance of two different countries and the countries can't even agree about where the city belongs. And his strategy was to bring together people from these divided cities who had been enemies with one another to see if they could help each other. He explained his guiding principle is that one divided society is in the best position to help another. And I was lucky enough to participate in some of the convenings and listen as people share their perspectives, people, the delegation from Beirut, Lebanon, Nicosia, Cyprus, a city in Northern Ireland that can't even agree on its name. It is called Dairy or London Dairy, and there's a slash. And so sometimes it's called the slash city because people can't agree on what to call it. And sitting in the presence of these delegations from each of these places and listening to people who would say kind of with a laugh how they had fought each other was really remarkable, but even more remarkable was seeing the light bulb go on with the delegations across the cities as they realized, oh, these are patterns. This is not just unique to us. There's something that maybe we can learn. We can learn maybe not to demonize each other and to work tirelessly for justice at the same time. They did almost come to blows over soccer teams, but that's another story.  When motivated even by a righteous indignation against injustice to demonize others opens up passions to destroy and shame that spurs new rounds of dehumanizing violence. And my hope is that we can learn from patterns of division and polarization that we can learn to use the resources of narrative building, restorative justing, transformative practices, cultural creativity, and strengthening ourselves and our institutions to deal with disagreements. And as I close, I have a confession to make. I am a fan of Star Trek. This is the franchise that grew from a very small cult television audience. I am old enough to have been in that cult audience to now a global media franchise that explores the 23rd and 24th century space travelers with allegories to contemporary dilemmas. In one 1993 episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, which is the best, competing groups race across the planets to find scattered pieces of a prized relic from a prior civilization. They locate first one piece and then go to another planet, find a second piece and then a third and find a third piece. And suddenly one of the characters turns on all the others having put the pieces together and discovered that it's a powerful weapon and turns it on the others and says it's mine. Our hero, Captain Picard, who conveniently for this purpose is also an archeologist, orders his team to drop their weapons and clear their minds of aggressive thoughts. He says so quickly, it's hard to believe they understood it, I was able to read the symbols on the pieces of the artifact and I discerned that what it says is that it amplifies anger, but peace defeats its power. Metaphorically, this tale underscores how tamping down even understandable fury is key to building enough peace to proceed with the work of building better days. A character in a more recent Star Trek spin-off says, the past is written, but the future is left for us to write, one way or the other, we will write the future. And my hope is that we will learn not to amplify hate even of our enemies if justice is to prevail. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have time for some questions and Professor Minow is happy to take those questions and CBC Ideas is happy to hear those questions and to do so they require you to come down to either of the mics to ask that question and to try to do better than I'm doing now and speak into the mic so that they can capture that. So I would invite you, I'm gonna ask the first question to give you time to come to the mic. If you can't get to a mic and you'd like to ask a question, if that's difficult for you, would you just let me know with a bit of a wave of the hand I'll be watching and we will figure out how to bring the mic to you or how to hear your question from where you are and repeat that. So really welcome the opportunity Professor Minow was saying today that all good scholarship is actually intended to open up a dialogue and contribute to a dialogue. So I know how excited she will be to hear your questions. I wanted to start with one that asks about the connection to narrative. So I'm always struck by our propensity to think about restorative justice as returning to the past rather than restoring the future and was captivated by the acknowledgement that that's an ongoing process. So I'm interested to think about where that process should take place on the everyday. Like how do we continue the work of these moments where we started and know you've done a lot of work in terms of education and other sites where we can do that work and wonder about your thoughts about where we place some of that ongoing work when it isn't just a reaction to something bad but a chance to be doing that work of narrative building. So I'm about you maybe to answer that question and then stay here while others make their way to the microphones. Well, it's a terrific question. I wish I had a good answer. I think one of the invitations that your question poses is to actually turn to young people and to say you can narrate our world and to invite young people to make sense of their experiences of the world that they're in and the world that they hope to mean. Jennifer knows I've worked for a long time with a group called Facing History and Ourselves which is a global educational group. And one of the exercises that it gives to people it tends to be people somewhere between 11 and 18 is to design memorials and to use visual arts as well as their own narratives. And the unlocking of creativity that comes out of that is simply extraordinary. I do think that there's an underestimation of young people that adults are very guilty of. And I think I'm reminded of a classic book that was written in the 1970s about Boston where interviews with white teachers reported that they didn't wanna talk about race in the classroom because they didn't wanna tell their black and brown kids that there was racism. Hello, the kids know what's going on in the world and the chance that education offers is to give them an opportunity to make sense of the world and to envision something different. So that's where I've put my money. But I think that there is really a kind of amazing opportunity as much as I hate social media for people to actually use the power of their own phone to be able to tell narratives and to share them. It wouldn't the world be different if that's what the social media algorithms accelerated instead of outrage and hatred. Of course, that's a choice. I'd like to make a comment or two. Please. First of all, to thank you very much for your talk. Thank you. One little error in the Dean's introduction, however, that my father, Dean Horace Reed, began his teaching in Minnesota. He did not. He came back from the war as a World War I pilot, back to Acadia, went through it in three years. In the summer, for a job, went to the local newspaper in Amherst where he lived. They told him, go down to the courthouse and report what you find, what he found made him enter the law school a couple of years when he finished Acadia. Went through the Dell Law School, finished about 1921. He practiced one year in furrow, told me that he, just about one case from that year, there was a contract, and he argued that it was, and something happened after a certain number of months or it was supposed to happen and didn't. And he argued that it hadn't been stated whether the months were calendar or lunar and he won his case. At any event, his teaching, the error in the dean's introduction was that he did not start his teaching career in Minnesota. He started it right here. After that year in furrow, he was asked to come back here and teach. He went in his second year, about 1924, to Harvard, got an LLM. Later on, 1932, he went to Harvard and got an SJD on international affairs. At any event, I'd like to acquaint you very briefly with an important part of the history of this law school that you're now attending. That is the 1920s. In the 1920s, there were just three full-time faculty. The dean, Sid Smith, who went on to help the University of Manitoba, the president of Toronto University and then Diefenbaker's foreign minister. That was Sid Smith, the dean. The two others were my father and Angus L. MacDonald, of whom you may have heard. And it so happens that about 1932, there was a liberal provincial caucus. There were two main candidates for leader. There was a tie and a tie and a tie. Finally, this soft-spoken, mild, law professor Angus L. MacDonald got nominated. He was Premier of Nova Scotia from that day until he died, except for going to Ottawa during the war as minister of the Navy. So one time, my father, 1930, got appointed. He asked if he'd take over the ROTC for now. He said yes, with it came a rank of Lieutenant Colonel. The next day, Dean Smith came up and kicked him in the rear end. And Dad said, what was that for?  So that's part of the 1920s. And finally, why he went to Minnesota and I born, well, 1931, that makes me 92. Anyway, while he was getting his STD in Harvard in the spring, he phoned the then president of Dalhousie about arrangements to come here at Kearn Keep Teaching. But during his time there, former graduate of Dalhousie Law School, Fraser, his last name was Dean of the Law School of the University of Minnesota. And he wrote Oscar Pound. Does everyone here know who Oscar Pound was? He knew anyone who doesn't? Good, yes, encyclopedic knowledge. So anyway, Fraser contacted the Dean at Roscoe Pound and asked if he knew any young lawyer who could come and introduce the case method of teaching to the University of Minnesota, Roscoe Pound mentioned my father. My father got an offer from Minnesota, which he did not intend to honor. In his conversation with the then president of Dalhousie, in order to see if he could get maybe a little more money when he came back here, he mentioned his offer from Minnesota. The president replied, I hope you enjoy your stay in Minnesota. That's where I grew up, came back here to the medical school and on from there. Thank you so much. Wow, wow, it's extraordinary. I really think there's a biography about your father that needs to be written. And that is really just fabulous. Thank you. Could you just say a little bit more about the idea of durability? You talked a little bit about that. Do you think it's sort of part two of the question is, do you think it's rooted in the interdisciplinarity that you were talking about? Or do you think there's more to it than that? Wonderful. I found myself using the word durable a lot in this talk. And I don't think I was so focused on that in the past, but both because of backlash that I'm watching in my country and also because of the fragility that I see of democracies around the world, I do think that we need to talk about durability. So look, I'm a 60s person. I grew up against the war in Vietnam, railing against all kinds of institutions. The idea that I became a dean of a law school is kind of unthinkable because I was kind of one of those radicals out on the edge. But I do have to admit I've become an institution person that I think that institutions can actually be bulwarks against emotions that can really rile a society. So when I say durable, I guess I'm meaning institutions. And yet I also know that norms are a big part of that. And again, the United States has experienced just a radical tearing apart of norms that people just thought, well, you just, no one will do that. Yell at the President of the United States who's giving a speech in the Congress, there are norms. Hold up approval of people to the appointment of leadership roles in the military because you have a disagreement about a different issue. I mean, there are norms that are being totally violated. So when I say institutions, I mean the norms that surround them. And how do you create those? I think it still requires that hard work of trust. And face to face. And look, institutions can be a problem too when they need to be changed. But I do think when I invoke durability, investing in changing the institution so that they speak to new times is a big part of the work that has to be done. There's a political philosopher who says that human beings create institutions to serve our purposes. And then the institutions live on beyond their service of our purposes. And that's a sobering message too. So I remember visiting one of the walled cities in Florence in Italy. And being very struck that this walled city had these places that were holes to bring a stilt in to repair the wall. What would you have to think? To think ahead of time? When we build this wall that is brand new, it will someday need to be repaired. It's that kind of thinking that I think is critical to durability. Not only to build institutions, but institutions that institutionalize the process of renovating the institutions. So thanks for the question. Question that takes us back to Professor Llewellyn's question, which is the power of narrative resource that was obviously very much a theme in your talk. And very much resonates with me. But as an educator in a law school and as a dean of a law school bearing that sort of institutional cloak as well, how do we bring that into our work, right? It's not something that we're all comfortable with in terms of teaching and educating people in the law. We think it's simpler in some way. But I'm really taken with that idea. Can we bring the power of narrative as a resource into what we do here? I'm hoping you do that in Harvard. I would love to emulate that. So if you could say more about that. Well, it's a marvelous question. I can't say that we have licked it, but I do believe we were talking about this a little earlier that law schools ought to spend more time on facts. And the narrative section of an opinion that describes the facts is a narrative. It's a narrative. And actually I have a colleague who has an exercise that he does in class where he lists 10 facts that are relevant to a particular case and he has students organize the facts. What's the order in which to put them, but also which ones are made salient, which ones not? In light of what the legal rule is or what the legal rule should be, it's kind of mind blowing that they don't realize that the facts weren't just these are the facts, but that somebody actually crafted them. Another exercise I have seen some people do is to actually compare the factual sections of briefs in a case and to look, well, what's the persuasive work that's going on? Can you predict without knowing who wrote the brief, what side they're on? So that's one thing. The one thing that I have done, I am a film buff, okay? So after I step down from being dean, I said, what do I really want to do? I want to learn more about documentary film. So I convinced a friend of mine who's a documentary filmmaker to teach a class with me to law students about how do you make a documentary film? And we made five short documentary films because this is, I think, the narrative form of our age is documentary films. And I've long thought that documentary film is more like law than almost any other enterprise. You have to deal with a found reality, it exists, it's not imaginary, but it is shaped somewhere, I don't know, my name must be written in a phone booth if anyone here remembers what a phone booth is, but I have several documentary filmmakers who I am their humanities expert when they're applying for grants. So I am a fan and I watch them. And to watch people actually assemble, here are these clips and here are these episodes and what is the arc, what is the story? What I learned from working with the documentary filmmaker is that every narrative has a story and has a protagonist and the protagonist is usually a person, but it could be a building, it could be a neighborhood. And that it's not by accident that stories matter to human beings. You think about great religious traditions, they're organized around stories, they're not organized around a list of rules because it turns out now there's great neuroscience work about this, human brains are organized to remember things in terms of stories and we are much better able to remember things. The case method, this is the case method, definitely Dr. Reed, you can cite the case and it can summon up for you the narrative, the facts, the ruling, all of that. So I think more experience, putting together and taking apart narratives in different forms is something that we can do, we should do and ones that operate at the level of an individual case, but then something that's bigger, that's about history. I can't say that we have figured it out, but I do think this is something that law schools can do and should do and I know that it's something that education can do. I know that again, this is the younger generation is a visual generation watching short films that young people make, absolutely staggering. One of the five films that my students made, one in Emmy, we did this in six weeks. It's kind of amazing experience. Thank you for a wonderful talk. You did say in your remarks that you had prepared this prior to the current conflict and I'm wondering if your closing statement with regards to some of the challenges with respect to amplifying hate is something that you'd be willing to comment on with respect to what's happening right now. Yeah. Well, thanks for that. Writing this at this moment was hard. I will be absolutely frank and my campus is totally torn up and I've just agreed to serve as one of the advisors to our university president on anti-Semitism on campus. I have no idea how to advise her. It's very, very challenging. I think, and one reason I say that is that as my talk indicates, I think it's possible to think two things at once, to think both that this assault on civilians in Israel was reprehensible and also to think there's a larger context of very disturbing behavior by Israel against the West Bank, but apparently in some communities, including my own community, you say that, you sound like you don't understand. So this is a moment where my instinct to try to look at it from multiple perspectives is actually, you know, I have a risk of being kicked out of the community if I say that. So it's a very, very fraught moment. One thing I think to always hang onto is that these are moments, things change. There might be a time and a place, but at this moment, I think that the amplification of hatred by social media has escalated. This particular conflict certainly on campuses in North America, but also many, many other conflicts. And it is not a lie. The big social media companies have full employment for psychologists who study what part of the brain is activated so that people are riveted because the revenue models is based on engagement, how long people stay on the platform. And so there's a verb, I never knew it was a verb, rubber-necking. What is it that makes human beings turn their neck and look at something for a long time? And that's what they are doing. Most people do not post. Most people actually just read the posts. And again, this finding that it is the most outrageous headlines that get sent the most. The ones that are misinformation, what is that about? It's about the lizard brain, the part of the brain that is bypassed by rational thought. So outrage. And I would like to have a moratorium. I don't know what to say. I have a question kind of connecting on the one hand. Your comments that you were making about the attack on the Capitol in 2021 and on the trafficking and misinformation on the one hand and then the power of narratives on the other hand. What do we do with people that are members of far-right groups or just traffic and misinformation and conspiracy theories that aren't willing to listen to these kind of narratives or maybe otherwise? How can we craft narratives that those people that are kind of maybe antagonistic towards us will listen to given that they might not be willing to listen to a narrative just by virtue of where it's coming from? Well, you hit it on the head. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg of formerly known as Facebook company, now known as Metta, concluded looking at the data that people trust information from their friends, their network, more than they do from journalists, more than they do from scientists. So we're living in a time where who said it matters more than what is being said. There's also really disturbing studies that show that people who have a strong belief are presented with contrary factual information, hold on to their own beliefs even more fiercely. There's a little bit of counter evidence but it's again affected by who's giving the information. So all that you're saying is really true. One thing that I think was finding during the pandemic was that that insight, that who's saying it can be a resource. So in the vaccine hesitant communities in many parts of the United States, it turns out if the message was coming from someone in the community, it made a huge difference. So this again is about the hard work of doing the relationship building and building the networks. And it's about the message and the narrative but it's also about who's giving it. We've written down here. You talked about making respect real through law. My generation struggles with trust in the police and a belief that the judicial system is politically polarized. Can you talk about the role of the judicial process in reinforcing respect in a culture with those issues? I really appreciate the question it's something I am grappling with. I don't have a perfect answer. I'll tell you a story. As was mentioned, I had the incredible opportunity to clerk for Thurgood Marshall who was a before he was a justice, maybe more than any other justice of the US Supreme Court. He was as important as a lawyer, if not more important as a lawyer. So my colleague, Randy Kennedy, grew up in South Carolina, African-American and had heard about Thurgood Marshall from his father who was a mail carrier, not a lawyer. And his father heard that Thurgood Marshall was coming to argue a case in South Carolina and he got a day off and he went to go hear him. And what he remembered was that the judges called him Mr. Marshall. And at that time, no black men in that community were called anything other than boy or something worse. That's emblematic of what law can do. It didn't matter what his life was like outside the courthouse, in the courthouse, he was accorded equal respect. And obviously he was brilliant and he and his team figured out a way to use the system to build a kind of stepping stones, chipping away at the separate but equal doctrine and changing the law. You know, I think that there are, I'm from Chicago, I know about corruption. I think that there are tremendous problems in the criminal system. I won't call it the criminal justice system, it's not just. But I also have seen the power of law in challenging it, Brian Stevenson is just one example. And I don't know a better way. I don't know violence tearing down the prisons. It's not gonna be very successful. In my own studies of history, what I discover is that when there are revolutions, it's the least powerful who are hurt the most. So I think it's about changing who's in those systems. It's about developing patterns to expose the problems. But I do think that the law has the ability to accord respect and to equalize people who in the economic world, in the political world don't have equality. And we should build on that, not throw it away. So thanks. Well, first I wanna thank all of you for coming this evening and being a part of this incredible opportunity to hear and to learn from you, Martha. Professor Minow has spent her entire career driven by the call of justice, to do justice for and with one another. And she stepped up to help us think and act better in some of our most difficult moments. And so when we could not have imagined when we asked you to come to speak about justice and divided societies today, that we would be standing in the midst of this moment in which we needed to hear what you said to us and what you helped us to hear and imagine your wisdom as much as we do now. And we can only hope that your vision informs those who are struggling on the ground and in community around the world today and in the future. So thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom and for your work. And this is a token of our appreciation. So we're very grateful to have had the opportunity to be together again for the read lecture and for the partnership with CBC Ideas. We hope that you will have the opportunity to listen again to this incredible lecture and to encourage your friends to do the same as it airs on CBC Ideas and as it's posted on the law school website at the same time. And thank you very much again for joining us.


You have seen the model of my journey towards being and becoming a professional. Let me explain self-reflection, the first signpost on the journey. Self-reflection is a useful tool to continually explore our everyday practice, personal belief systems, our perception of others, our interpretation of motivations and attitudes. And as a student teacher, self-reflection is a process to pause and think about learning that happens on a personal and professional level. I confess, when I began my studies, I spent so much time and energy on the progress and behavior of children that I forgot to reflect on my own experiences and conduct. Self-reflection helped to make me aware of how I was learning. I began to realize that teaching without reflection is teaching blind, teaching without knowledge. When I systematically inquired into myself, I understood myself better. I became more conscious of my thoughts and actions. As an early years teacher, I used self-reflection in my formal learning to deepen my ECCE knowledge and skills. I also used it on a personal level for my personal improvement through lifelong learning. Self-reflection builds a bridge between theory and practice. I can see and name different thoughts and practices in the context of ECCE. I used tools to develop the skill of connecting the what and the why of self-reflection in practice. In my studies, I learned skills such as using a learning journal, creating a self-reflection log, participating in debates, reflective writing, peer review, peer coaching and mentoring, personal planning and developing portfolios. Self-reflection is not an individual activity. You need to be guided so that your development is informed by your peers and other knowledgeable people. Guided reflection moves you forward in your journey to being and becoming a professional.


Nicky Picasso, he was using the n-word. Why would Spotify want to keep that on their platform? I don't know the context of it, but You know how many rappers I've listened to in my life and I still listen to that use the n-word? Like It really depends on the context, right? That that's as far as I'm concerned Okay, so Spotify should remove All the songs from their platform. Okay, and Anybody that's used the n-word on their platforms, right? Well, damn.  Why? That's ridiculous Right, that's ridiculous Yeah, go fund me again really this is some Played Martin maybe the conversation the word appears in is more valuable than the use of the word and is damaging very well set Play it Martin. So play it Martin in regards to removing the n-word Maybe the conversation the word appears in is more valuable than the use of the word is Damaging, okay, extremely well set extremely well set. That's a great argument. I'm gonna start using it


and say to the guests that we have here. I liked having the times on there, I just have to say. And I didn't know if you wanted me to go ahead and adjust them so we can end on time or thank them. You don't have to say, is there anything given time? I hate to put it off in the day, but I think the staff work relations and communications just doesn't matter. Anybody have a problem with that? No, I think work plan. Like, we have actually six and a half. Do you have a time? That's what she asked me to read. I do, not printed. If you would not read it on the end. First to our community, it's one of the hardest jobs I ever took on and I appreciate your time, thought, and dedication to improve your writing to express my strong opposition to prevent the consolidation being encouraged by the State Board of Education for Act 36. The writing's on the wall, folks. Rather than invest our time, expertise, and money in a risky and, I believe, ultimately doomed effort to oppose change, we need to do our consolidation plan. When I was on the board and we read an impasse over teaching negotiations, our superintendent asked us, are you ready to fall in your swords over this? Even though we were angry and upset with the teachers, we agree that strike is the worst possible outcome for students and buckles down on the hard work and complied on the contract.  Are you ready for the backlash of anger from townspeople and the price students will pay that their leaders attend? It's time to stop fighting and get to work on unifying, equalizing, and strengthening. We received an email from a community member last night. It's not a public, I guess it wasn't a fair official public comment, but just expressing their position on it. Yeah, we're at, yeah, is that in the moment? So next up is to our June 6th, 19, is that in the 19? Now we want to do this separately. Is there any comment? Is there a motion to move forward on June 6th? On the 4.2 page three, 4.2 under fiscal, the remainder, it was 70, what was it, it was up to the level, it was up to a certain level, I can't remember the date. We were looking at a budget at the time, and yeah, I think the number was right around 7,500. So I was like that, but instead of the 10,000. The potential, it was, yeah, like a potential surplus looking at the budget. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify 3.2 review process. I think that I don't see the value in the board just interviewing what's already been recommended from the principal by the current committee and the Supreme if the board is to be involved in. Just to clarify, do you think it was said during that meeting? Well, a little more clear, but I felt like his main part of his plan was that we increased the skill of our teachers by coaching them and the way we get the money to do that is we've made out fair professionals. But wait, hold on. There are also minutes for the retreat. I'm just trying to know, do you think that was part of the discussion that we had in the library at Romney on August 28th, and therefore these minutes are inaccurate? I do, because I thought it would be, I felt like it was just venous to not say that to them. That you said it? So we were talking about, not that the board shouldn't be talking about these. And we're sorry, we're just sorry, and Jenda, we're doing Act 46 and budget process. But in budget process. We'd appreciate feedback. There's, I would say, there's a caveat to that. There are, for our board, there are other schools that have, there was an example shared of that at our retreat. Again, just through attrition, it was just, I mean, like teaching. Also to read the meetings of the audience. You're discussing the articles or we're just appointing someone? Just appointing someone. Different articles of agreement that require you vote. That votes.  Is there anybody who's willing to be interested in being the representative for the force margin? Sorry. Unless we change our roles. Proposed by the state in their draft. So we probably could change our clerk now. No, we can, well, you can't. It's as of July 1st. Oh, I'm sorry. But in the post, yeah. So, I think one of the, go ahead, I'm sorry. If that's the case, I guess I sort of felt like the people on this team should both be involved and almost certainly be on the team. But I think we should. Want to serve, or is not in a position to serve in that capacity. There's other questions that, as I understood it, that would be the charge of the subcommittee to then also report back to, I see, the board. Is it a nomination or anything? It's been out there for so long, but just for those of us, you know, for those before. When is our November meeting? Yeah, we would have to, because it's for talking November. That's budget. And the October meeting, I guess is another carousel. I think it's starting half an hour earlier. The costs are something that, the costs of a loss, the highest cost. I'd advocate for those that are developed. Talked about our meeting protocol. So that's the approach that I'm going to take for a take. I don't see it being in that transmission to survey what now, but we pursue this. So be it. Wrote down what the other, what the board members' statements were when they had 90 seconds. And then I sort of ranked them to see like how much of me agreed. And I tended to fall more with people who were talking about reasons to wait with one exception, which was Woden's comment. So Woden's comment about merging is not necessarily not best for kids. He probably said it differently. So I've always been nervous about Act 46 because I taught in a state that did have merged, merged, I guess, supervisory unions. And there was a huge difference in how schools were, how decisions were made financially that impacted the school. And that's always been a concern of mine. But when I heard the statement, losing a lawsuit can make things worse, that made me a little nervous. I would like to know more about how that, what that could potentially look like. And that if you're not sure you can win, you shouldn't join. I don't feel very sure that we could win. I'm uncomfortable joining it. And the other statement was that it was premature to decide because of not knowing about cost specifically and just needing to discuss. I guess I would need to know a little more. What would it mean to have our name, Middlesex School Board, on the litigation? What does that really mean? And without having a really clear answer to that, I'm not comfortable tonight doing it. I also wasn't totally comfortable with the second question that was asked at the SU about if we would in the future. I wouldn't join litigation purely because the state was forcing a merger. It would really depend on more information about the litigation and what that means and what is the toll on our administrators and our students, certainly any type of distraction is not best. But I did like today after school kind of find myself wishing I was doing like a little poll. What do you think we should do? What do you think we should do? Because I really don't know where the majority of the community falls. And I think that we've said that before at board meetings. So at this time, I just don't have enough information. And like I said, the people that kind of spoke most of what my gut and my feelings are were the people who were opposed. So at this time I would be opposed to it. That actually means that we... The idea that we only worry about that the money of the lawsuit is very... So I'm worried about things like, okay, it's like taking state funding. Like when, I don't, I guess I, yeah, my concern is there are things that we get from the state, fall on the sword. So then how far? Because some schools in Vermont years ago, they did the independent route and then they don't get any state funding. So you're talking about Dodie and Callis and the effect of them if they merge. There's a whole other effect if then we're in this litigation and it goes one step further and then one step further and then it's us against the state. You know, the thing that didn't come up at all, and I kept thinking of it in June when we were reading the forced merger and some of the sense of trusting when we were sending out the draft proposal, sorry, it wasn't June, it was last December and feeling like the people that we were sending it to at the agency of education at that time were the ones who were the experts in education. And so there's this piece, like when I hear that statement of, but are they looking at it with good intent and this is their recommendation for us? I don't know, that part to me, like I said, I did not go in to all of this for merger because I had that experience, but I also am not totally ready to be completely opposed. Anyway, that's it, I just, I don't know, I should have thought of it before. I think we have to do the, well, yeah, and appoint the representative or proxy. We got the email, or it was in the packet. Or the visiting. Yeah, and did I read it right? Bill wants it to be him. And then if somebody else wants to go, they can go as well. There's reason for it, like keeping open the budget season.