Celebrating Civics Learning Week 2026
On June 29, 2011, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke to students at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She wasn't there to discuss a case or a legal principle. She was there to describe something she had watched deteriorate across her decades in public life, and to argue that it mattered more than most people realized.
"The discourse among public figures and in the legislature and so forth is not even courteous," she told them. "It's loud and raucous—raucous—and often insulting."
She wasn't offended by the noise. She was alarmed by what it meant for the country's ability to solve problems. Her standard was simple and practical: "You have to treat each other with respect and decency and try to talk it out."
Civility Is Not Softness: It's Strategy
Justice O'Connor made this argument not just as a matter of tone but as a matter of effectiveness. Speaking at the dedication of the University of Oregon Law School in 1999, she pushed back directly on the idea that aggressive, combative behavior produces better results. She had received a letter after making public remarks about civility in the legal profession from someone who wrote that he wanted a lawyer "capable of hating my opponents"—someone willing to "stomp them into the dirt."
Her response was blunt: incivility wastes time, wastes money, and is counterproductive. When people in a disagreement turn their energy toward attacking each other rather than engaging the actual issue, nothing gets resolved. The conflict escalates, trust erodes, and the original problem remains.
The argument she was making—in courtrooms and in legislatures and in public life—was that civility isn't a concession. It's how you actually win.
Civil Discourse Is a Democratic Skill
What Justice O'Connor understood was that the ability to disagree well is not a personality trait that people either have or don't. It's a skill. It can be learned, practiced, and modeled.
That insight is built into the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute's approach to civil discourse. The Public Square—part of the Institute's Civics for Life initiative—is a virtual forum that brings participants from across the country together to discuss difficult, contested civic questions: political polarization, the Electoral College, and the future of civic education. These are not lectures. They are open conversations structured to model exactly what Justice O'Connor described: people with different views, engaging one another with respect, working through complexity together.
That's what better disagreement looks like in practice.
The Goal Is Not Agreement, It's Function
Justice O'Connor was not naive about the difficulty of public debate. She didn't think the raucousness would disappear, or that Americans would suddenly stop disagreeing about hard things. She thought something more achievable and more important: that Americans could learn to argue better.
That means engaging the actual issue rather than attacking the person raising it. It means listening long enough to understand what's being claimed before responding to it. It means staying in the conversation—and staying in a relationship with fellow citizens—even when agreement isn't possible.
Democracy doesn't require consensus. It requires the capacity to work through disagreement without destroying the conditions that make disagreement productive. Justice O'Connor believed that capacity could be built. The Institute exists to build it.
