The politicization of the process by which judges are nominated and appointed to the Supreme Court has resulted in the American public’s profound loss of confidence in an institution that was once the most respected branch of government, Anita Hill said in a Feb. 20 speech at Dartmouth.
“The presumption always had been that politics should not invade the court, because the courts really have to review the politicians. We are just at a very different time and a different approach to filling Supreme Court seats, and if we continue in this way, we’re not necessarily going to have voices on the court that the public feels either trust or confidence in,” Hill, a lawyer, author, and a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University, told the 200 attendees at the Hanover Inn, with another 150 watching the livestream.
The event, co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Center and Dartmouth Dialogues and moderated by former Montgomery Fellow Anna Deveare Smith, was the last of the 2024 Election Speaker Series, which brought to campus a range of public officials, journalists and analysts.
Hill, who grew up in Oklahoma, first rose to national prominence in 1991 during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. She had worked for Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and testified that she had endured persistent sexual harassment by Thomas. Despite Hill’s testimony, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52-48.
“People like to think that it was about the politics of the left, and that was how they were framing it—as a political event. They were not taking into account the question of sexual harassment, which was really what the conversation should have been about, and whether that kind of behavior disqualified an individual from sitting on the court,” Hill said.
One of the questions for Hill, she said, is how to make the nomination process to the Supreme Court more fair and transparent, rather than a process “fraught with mistakes and anger and innuendo.”
She pointed to the 2022 confirmation hearings for now-Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had been nominated by President Joe Biden. Some Republican senators accused Jackson of being lenient on the issue of child pornography, and stated that she was in favor of “court packing”—expanding the number of justices on the court so that more liberals could be appointed. Conservatives currently enjoy a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
The charges were misleading, The New York Times reported, and were based on recommendations from a bipartisan sentencing commission on which Jackson served.
“It was not a hearing at all. It was an attempt to actually convict her, based on false information. It cheated the public out of having a fair hearing and understanding of the judicial thinking of a nominee,” Hill said.
The challenge now, Hill added, is how to shift the nomination process for the Supreme Court away from largely political considerations to one that makes “clear to the American public that it is not just a political position, but something that is a measure of our commitment to our laws, more than our commitment to policies and preferences that politicians may have.”
Nearly 34 years have passed since the Thomas confirmation hearings, and the issues of sexual harassment and violence have a much higher profile in the national consciousness, Hill said. However, there is still no cohesive national policy to address them, she said.
“It’s not embedded in our policies. That’s what we need to have, so that it doesn’t change from president to president. That’s what we should be moving for. But right now, it’s just piecemeal,” she said. It was not until Biden’s election in 2020 that there was a national plan to end gender-based violence, she said.
Hill added that she tires of being told that sexual harassment and violence are not among the top issues facing the U.S. when the country’s lack of a national policy has consequences for the economy, the health care system, and housing. These issues are at the core of her most recent book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence, published in 2021.
“This is not an individual problem; this is a social problem,” Hill observed, adding that there is a high likelihood that everyone has a family member or friend who will experience harassment or sexual violence over their lifetime.
Prompted by Smith, who asked how the efforts of the Trump administration to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives affected higher education, Hill replied, “I don’t know of a time where there was an open effort to push for a shift in terms of the kind of knowledge that we can produce, the kind of research that we can do, and the kinds of topics that we can teach in our classrooms. I think this is really a dangerous moment for us.”
This led to a discussion of how citizens can both address this moment in time and act on their core beliefs. Hill looked back to the 1974 Congressional debate over whether to bring articles of impeachment against then-President Richard Nixon; and the now-famous speech by U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, D-Texas, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South. Jordan, who sat on the Judiciary Committee, declared that she would not be an “idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
Even with all of the Constitution’s embedded flaws when it came to race and equality, Jordan “understood that we needed to understand that we are all part of ‘we the people,’ written in the Constitution,” Hill said.
Jordan’s eloquent speech galvanized both the Judiciary Committee and the country, and the committee then voted to bring three articles of impeachment, acting as a significant check on the executive branch.
Hill said she didn’t know that such a moment was now possible because the times and influences are so different.
But Smith, an award-winning playwright and actor who is now a professor at New York University, closed the discussion by emphasizing the importance of dissent and public speech. “I think we shouldn’t say that we can’t have it,” she said. “Courage. Be ready, right? Because you never know, like Professor Hill, when you will be called to speak.”
After the talk, Eleanor Jacob ’25 said it was “a really interesting discussion” and good way to end the election series.
“There’s going to need to be a lot of people to have the courage to stand up and take these positions,” Jacob said.
And English professor Kimberly Juanita Brown, the director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, said Hill exemplifies and represents a model of courage who we can all emulate.
“It’s nice to be reminded that history often repeats itself, or rhymes,” Brown said.