May it please the Courts.

Thank you Mr. Chief Justice; thank you my Marthas.

Thank you for being here.

I am honored by your presence. Justices should, nay must, live out ordinary days in a perfect dance of honor. Justices should, nay must, honor the great laws of right. Imagine what could happen on a court with a majority of unusually able Justices or Judges, without an agenda, devoting themselves month after month, year after year, to fair-minded, top-caliber decision-making using superior craftsmanship in taking contested issues seriously and working through them with the utmost intellectual discipline. I pledge to you, Justices and Judges, and you honorable men and women, boys and girls, that in hopes that this can be a reality on the Supreme Court of Alabama, I will do all in my power during this my last term on the Supreme Court of Alabama to be the best Supreme Court Justice that I am capable of becoming.

During these six years, I will work to restore the individual citizen's sense of duty and to expand the concept of judicial responsibility. I wrote on these subjects; but try as I may, I could not improve upon those two paragraphs written by one of my three all-time favorite judges, Judge Learned Hand, and delivered by him at an "I am an American Day" in the midst of the second World War. Judge Hand wrote:

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What the is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirity of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, nearly two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

May God bless us everyone!