The Nine [100]
The Berlin Wall fell a year after Kennedy joined the Court, and the political developments that followed from the collapse of Communism had a profound effect on his approach to interpreting the Constitution. Suddenly, dozens of countries around the world decided to adopt meaningful written constitutions. These aspiring democracies initially consisted of former components and satellites of the Soviet Union, but eventually countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa also sought democratic legal expertise. Virtually all of these nations looked to the United States for inspiration—and more specifically, to its Supreme Court.
Kennedy was eager to answer the call, and he began to advise emerging democracies—including Czechoslovakia and Russia—on their constitutional law. In the early nineties, dozens of projects were created to export American legal concepts. Most of the justices participated in some of these exchanges, but Kennedy and O’Connor were by far the most active. In 1990, O’Connor helped create what would become the biggest of these institution-building organizations, the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI) of the American Bar Association. The first meeting of CEELI was going to take place in Salzburg, and since Kennedy was going to be there anyway, O’Connor invited him to come along.
Kennedy enjoyed his summers in the city where many of the most important international judicial conferences took place. The activity was centered in an institution known as the Salzburg Seminar, which was founded in 1947 by three young Harvard graduates who thought that Europe needed a place for the study of American ideals. They raised a few thousand dollars and rented the Schloss Leopoldskron, an eighteenth-century palace that had fallen into disrepair after being seized by the Nazis. The seminar became known as the “Marshall Plan of the mind,” and it remained a meeting place for scholars and judges. Since 1971, nine Supreme Court justices have attended sessions at the Schloss, many of them several times. Kennedy participated in four seminars, and even during summers when he was not officially involved, he visited the Schloss frequently to meet with foreign colleagues.
The Schloss Leopoldskron has tight security by Salzburg’s relaxed standards, but not because of the jurists. The palace was the setting for several scenes in The Sound of Music, the 1965 movie, and has endured more or less constant traffic from fans. The setting for two key romantic scenes, one between Liesl and Rolf (featuring the song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”) and the other between Maria and the Captain (“Something Good”), was a glass gazebo originally situated in the garden. When the crowds became unmanageable, the gazebo was moved to a more central location in Salzburg. (Outside the Schloss, a sign on the wall closest to the street reads, in English, “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted—Including Tour Groups.”) For Kennedy, the Schloss was a second home in Salzburg, one of the few places in the world where a Supreme Court justice could mingle easily with peers.
In Europe, from the moment he took office, George W. Bush was disdained for his unilateralist approach to foreign policy, his contempt for international institutions, and, especially, his cowboy swagger. Starting