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TI: After... I'm going to jump around a little bit. But I just wanted to ask you, because later on, you went to law school, which I think is important to what we talk about later. And first, you took your constitutional law course from Anthony Kennedy, who later on became a Supreme Court Justice.

JS: Right.

TI: And I just wanted to ask you about that experience. I mean, he's such a legal scholar, and I just wanted your impressions of taking a course from...

JS: It was fantastic. I mean, it was very, very interesting in his approach to constitutional law and his approach to the law was, I found to be very much aligned with mine. And, in fact, I'd guess how he voted on cases before the Supreme Court all the time. I said, "Oh, Kennedy's not going to vote for that," or, "He will vote for that."

TI: Oh, because you could just tell from the lectures that you, the way he thought, how he framed the issues, and how he would vote on various cases?

JS: Well, how he taught constitutional law.

TI: So what would be an example? I mean, what would be something that would be, would help you understand how he would do that?

JS: Well, I don't know other than studying him and learning from him. In fact, the first exam that I had when he taught constitutional law, and I just happened to have been the number one student in the class at the time. And I got the exam, the blue books back, and I had a C+ and I was devastated. I thought, oh my god, how could I get a C+? I mean, that's the worst grade I'd had up to that time, and I don't remember if that was the second or third year, but that was the worst grade I'd had. And we got to the class and we were sitting there and I was really feeling bad and everything like that. And he said, "I want you to know," that the best grade in his class was a C+. Everybody else had a bummer, so I figured I must have written the way he thought I ought to right it. Actually then, after I left the government, I was on the board of visitors for (University of the Pacific), McGeorge School of Law. And it was an interesting group. It was myself, Anthony Kennedy, the chief justice of the Nevada supreme court who also happened to be a professional boxer originally and then turned into a referee. Raymond Burr, who was not an attorney, and he was the guy who played Perry Mason on television. It was an interesting group.

TI: That's interesting that you had Raymond Burr, he's an actor and he was part of that group.

JS: He's Perry Mason.

TI: [Laughs] Well, he's an actor playing... yeah.

JS: He always won his cases.

TI: Well, Anthony Kennedy, when he was with that group, was he a Supreme Court Justice at that time?

JS: Yeah, he was still on the Court.

TI: Wow, that's a pretty esteemed group to be with.

JS: Yeah, I looked around and wondered what I was doing there. I did that a lot. But he continued to teach at McGeorge even when he was on the Court, and he would do, when the court would recess for the summer, he would do the McGeorge, I forget whether it was in Belgium or Germany. They had a foreign campus, and he would go over there and teach there.

TI: So I'm going to have to plead some ignorance. When I think of Supreme Court Justices, where they get them, the type of schools they would come from, I think of Harvard Law School, Yale, Georgetown, I mean, places like that, I'm not really familiar with McGeorge Law School. So I'll plead ignorance, I mean, tell me more why, how a Supreme Court Justice comes from this school?

JS: Well, you mean, from being a professor?

TI: Being a professor, yeah, being a professor. It feels like not a well-known law school.

JS: Well, no, it's not. [Laughs] Not at all.

TI: I mean, I'm fairly well-read, I have not really heard of this law school before.

JS: Well, actually it started, it was a dream of one superior court judge in California, and it started as a night law school. It was in Sacramento, so you had all those people who were working for the government, working for the state, and they could go to law school at night like I did for three years.

TI: So it was a very pragmatic way of getting your law degree then?

JS: It was a bar school.

TI: Yeah, a bar school.

JS: I don't know now.

TI: Thank you for doing this. I just wanted to do this because you're not like this high falutin Ivy League lawyer, I mean, you were a state worker going to night school.

JS: By the way, I'm not a lawyer.

TI: Right, yeah. I understand that

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