An Unlikely Champion — a former Supreme Court Justice — Promotes Computer Games as a Way to Change Society

Sandra Day O’Connor does not play video games. But she believes in their potential.

In her keynote speech at the Games for Change conference in New York on Wednesday, the retired Supreme Court justice discussed her latest project, “Our Courts,” an online interactive digital game and civics curriculum designed for seventh to ninth graders.

At the age of 78, Justice O’Connor is, by her own admission, an unlikely game developer.

“If you had told me when I retired from the Supreme Court two years ago that I would be speaking at a digital game conference, I would have been very skeptical. I’d maybe think you had one drink too many,” she said, to appreciative laughter. “I have not had much exposure to this world.”

In fact, she considers herself “relatively illiterate as a computer user,” and got into the games industry in a way that most developers do not.

In September 2006, about eight months after Justice O’Connor retired from the court, she, along with Justice Stephen Breyer, organized a two-day conference on the state of the judiciary at the Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington.

“In recent years I became concerned about vitriolic attacks on judges,” she said, attacks that came from members of Congress and other interest groups.

“These attacks have come with various attempts to try to influence judicial decision making,” she added. “On the federal level, we have seen troubling calls by members of the U.S. Senate to require a judicial nominee to state how they will rule on particular cases during the confirmation process. On the state level, powerful interest groups are pouring more and more money into those states that require partisan election of state judges. With partisan attacks and political pressure mounting, it’s much more difficult to achieve fair and impartial judgments.”

The Georgetown conference tackled these issues, and the outcome was a consensus that “public education was the only long-term solution to preserving an independent judiciary, and more importantly, to preserving a robust constitutional democracy,” said Justice O’Connor.

Citing a statistic that young people spend more time consuming media than they do in school or with their parents, she added that if the goal is “to engage young people and show them that that the government does have a real impact on their lives, and they can have a real impact on government, then we need to impart what we know via a media they’re comfortable with: a computer screen.”

Arguing Cases

The primary result of the conference was “Our Courts” a partnership between Arizona State University, and Georgetown via the Sandra Day O’Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary.

The project has two parts: the first is an interactive civics curriculum to be used in schools, and the second a game for students to play in their free time. “Our Courts” is intended to allow players to tackle real legal issues by applying actual laws, arguing against each other and against the computer.

As an example, Justice O’Connor cited a First Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court in 2007, Morse v. Frederick, in which an Alaska, teenager was suspended for hanging a banner that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school sanctioned and supervised event. (The Supreme Court sided with the school.)

“I know from my own children and grandchildren that children are inherently interested in fairness and problems, we just need to present it in the language of youth in a way that engages them,” said Justice O’Connor. “We are going to use what we know about young people’s enthusiasm for arguing things, and for problem solving, to get them into the game.”

The interactive curriculum is expected to be made available to schools this fall, and the game the following year.

“All we can do is help tomorrow’s leaders to be well informed,” said Justice O’Connor. “That’s why I care about bringing ‘Our Courts’ to life and have as many young people as possible use it.”

She concluded, “Civics education is just a fraction of what can be done to engage young people in real-world problems using digital media.”