On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurance… - Neil Gorsuch

Courage has been essential to the rule of law in this country from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence itself was, at heart, a complaint that the king had denied colonists the rule of law. As justification for their rebellion, colonists cited the fact that the king had withheld assent to duly enacted legislation, refused trial by jury, and prevented colonists from playing a significant role in their own governance. About half of the fifty-six colonists who signed the Declaration were lawyers. They quite literally put their lives on the line to secure a representative government and one of just laws: By signing the declaration, they became marked men who faced certain death if their cause failed.

The self-defining nature of intended actions can be illustrated by the case, developed earlier in this chapter, of the drivers who hit the child in the street. In one instance, we considered the driver who comes upon a child darting into the street. The driver hits and kills the child by accident. In doing so, the driver indubitably effects an awful result- the consequences he brings about are terrible and, as a result, we may censure and punish the driver. But we may very well treat him differently from another driver who intentionally hunts down the child with her car. For this latter driver, we may say that no punishment is harsh enough. What undergirds the difference in our reaction to the two drivers? It is the difference in their self-definition, volition, choice. The hunting driver expresses herself to the world through her actions, defines who she is and what she believes, in a very different way than the accidental driver. Thus, what really illuminates the darting child hypothetical and ones like it are not arguments over causation but an assessment of human intentions.

I ask my kids every semester when I teach ethics. I finish the semester by asking them to spend five minutes writing their obituary. They hate it. They think it is corny, and it might be a little corny. And then I ask them if they will volunteer to read some of them, and when they do, it always becomes clear people want to be remembered for the kindnesses they showed other people. And what I point out to them- what I try to point out- is that it is not how big your bank account balance is. Nobody ever puts that in their draft obituary, or that they billed the most hours, or that they won the most cases. It is how you treated other people along the way that matters. And for me, it is the words I read yesterday from Increase Sumner's tombstone [see page 321]. And that means as a person I would like to be remembered as a good dad, a good husband, kind and mild in private life, dignified and firm in public life. I have no illusions that I will be remembered for very long. If Byron White is nearly forgotten, as he is now and said he would be, I have no illusions that I will last five minutes. That is as it should be.