Save Your Freedom - 英语演讲
by Helping Others Find It
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Commencement Address
at Stanford University
President Hennessey, graduating students,
and my fellow citizens in a world
that must seek to come ever closer
to the idea and reality of freedom under law.
Thank you for inviting me to your Commencement.
There is now clear evidence that,
with President Hennessey,
I have become a willing accomplice
in the wacky walk.
Each of you graduates has your own story
of the years at Stanford.
Your story is bound up with your parents,
your family and the loved ones
who sustained you here.
You-indeed all of us and the entire Nation-
owe them warmest thanks.
Freedom must remain a central part of your story.
From the beginning of our Republic,
Americans have defined freedom by a moral principle.
It is this: With our own freedom
comes the duty to secure it for others.
Freedom is the birthright of all.
When we help others find freedom,
we save our own.
Now, two people or two million people
or two billion people cannot
enjoy freedom without rules.
So freedom goes hand in hand with law.
This is just high school civics stuff.
No surprise here. But the principles
are so fundamental that it seems appropriate
to discuss them at your commencement,
as you consider how best to
shape your life and your work.
Americans have the responsibility to
try to advance law and freedom in other places.
The task is daunting.
For the stark truth is this:
more than half the world lacks
either the will or the power to embrace law
and freedom as we know it.
In the long run our last,
best security is in the realm of ideas.
It is urgent for our Nation
and for you as young people to strive to
make the case for the idea of law and freedom.
We must make that case to a doubting world.
On this question, the world must
not be in search of two different destinies.
When lawyers make their case to a jury,
they sometimes have a few hours.
Attorneys in our Court have thirty minutes a side.
Today, in order not to trespass upon
your patience or delay your celebration,
I shall take but eleven minutes more to
make the case about your duties
as the newest trustees of freedom.
You must prepare to take some risks
to make the case. You may enter a realm of ideas
or a real world place where freedom
is not just in doubt but opposed.
You must find inventive,
new ways to make the case for freedom.
And to be prepared for this role,
to be prepared to confront the reality
of half a world without law and freedom,
you must know what is at stake.
You must know that in Sri Lanka over
a thousand people a year go to jail for
three hundred sixty-five days for
want of a one dollar fine.
You must know that there is an African country
where a woman who is raped must
pay five dollars to file a complaint with the police.
You must know that each year eight hundred thousand people -
mostly women and children -
are the subject of capture and trafficking
for slavery and sexual exploitation.
Human trafficking is one of
the world’s most profitable businesses.
All of these failings come from
the absence of the rule of law.
You would think this would be clear to everyone
. It is surprising, though,
that the concept escapes so many.
In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement speech.
It was puzzling at first that,
in a speech moving in so many other ways,
he attacked the West for being too devoted to the law.
After a few days I reached this conclusion:
his understanding of law was simply different from our own.
For him the concept, the history,
the meaning of law made it a diktat,
a ukase, a cold threat, a decree.
We believe otherwise.
For us the law is not an obstacle
but the instrument of progress;
not a command to be feared but a hope to be embraced;
not a threat but a promise.
The chance to build and own a small business
is an essential part of any economy
that seeks to establish law and freedom.
That is why we want many of you to
have economic success.
A certain economic self sufficiency is necessary
if we are to have some voice
in planning our own destiny.
This is essential in a world where governments
are always waiting in the wings,
all too eager to plan our destiny for us.
And, the legal infrastructure in over half
the world cannot or will not allow
the dream or the hope of owning a small business.
And in those same parts of the world neither
can the legal infrastructure support basic
improvements that engineers and builders otherwise
could construct in short order.
But you cannot build, say,
a modern water system if there is
no honest legal system to maintain it.
Consider the water crisis in the sub-Sahara.
You have seen pictures of a stately,
dignified woman in a flowing gown with
a water jug on her head. That jug weighs more
than the luggage allowance at the airport.
The hours, the human hours, the toilsome hours,
the heart-wrenching, backbreaking hours a woman
spends just trying to bring water
to the family are staggering.
By cautious estimates, on the African continent
alone it takes over sixteen billion hours
each year to bring water to the family.
That is sixteen billion with a B.
But new water systems cannot be built
and maintained where corruption holds sway.
This is not just because of the lack of money;
it is because of the lack of law and property rights.
There are some who say your generation has
less power than previous ones
because a more interdependent world
reduces our power to make unilateral policy choices.
In my view this understates your capacity and potential.
You are among a new generation of university graduates
who see an interconnectedness in our world
and its universe that far surpasses
what previous generations could understand.
An interconnected universe is manifested
in all fields of learning and endeavors.
The earth sciences teach this in a concrete,
formal way. Science, and in particular quantum physics
and astrophysics, may soon yield stunning explanations
of dark matter and of our common link to the universe.
As is evident in the new communications technology,
this more interconnected world touches
all of our work and culture, over the whole range
of the sciences, law and business,
and the arts and letters. Legally blonde
in a law school a half a world away.
The new awareness gives you new power.
You have a potential to design and to create
and to define and to project your own life and work,
a potential far greater than given to your predecessors.
As you think how best to advance the idea of law
and the freedom that it secures,
please remember that you must understand
our own heritage of freedom.
This brings us back to the point of beginning.
When the Americans rebelled,
the world was puzzled. We said we wanted freedom,
but it seemed to England and Europe
that we were already the freest people the world knew.
So we had to act at once to send a fax
or an e-mail explaining our case.
This was the Declaration of Independence,
and then, some eleven years later,
came the Constitution of the United States.
The result was, and has been this:
As Americans we look to the Declaration of Independence,
to the Constitution, to our heritage of freedom
to define who we are. And let there be no doubt:
This dynamic, by which the documents of liberty
are part of our self identity,
part of our self image, is the envy of oppressed peoples.
But this linkage, this connection between
the history of freedom and who we are can disappear
if we ignore its dynamic force.
So it follows that the Constitution does not
belong just to judges and attorneys.
It is yours. And with this possession
come serious responsibilities.
It is not just the President who must preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution.
All of us must do so. But you cannot preserve
what you do not revere; you cannot protect
what you have not learned;
you cannot defend what you do not know.
If we are conscious of the heritage
that defines us we are empowered in a special way.
We come to this inevitable conclusion:
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