Circuit Court of Appeals Judge David Tatel “never” once talked about his blindness during a 30-year career in the second-highest court in the United States, he said at a Sept. 30 event hosted by the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy.
The event kicked off the “Law and Democracy: The United States at 250” speaker series and marked the recent publication of Tatel’s memoir, “Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice.”
The Law and Democracy series is set to commemorate the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary. The series will explore “the nation’s founding ideals by focusing on the laws, policies, and institutions in which those ideals are embedded,” according to an email statement from Rockefeller Center assistant director for public programs Dvora Greenberg Koelling.
Tatel opened the series by speaking about his journey from hiding his blindness to publicly acknowledging it and on his career as a civil rights lawyer and federal judge. Institute for Writing and Rhetoric professor Julie Kalish ’91 and Kami Arabian ’24 joined Tatel onstage as moderators, as well as by his guide dog, Vixen.
Tatel said the memoir was a decisive factor in his decision to be public about his blindness.
“When I decided to write about the courts and about blindness, I knew that if I was going to be honest about my ideas about the courts, I had to be honest about my own vision and why I hid it for so long,” Tatel said.
Tatel said technology helped him throughout his career.
“Technology has been a big thing in my life,” he said. “It's not easy being blind, but it's a lot easier now than it was 50 years ago.”
Since his book’s publication in June 2024, Tatel said he’s had “hundreds” of conversations with others who had similar experiences disguising various disabilities. He says he “didn’t know” how common it was for people to hide their disabilities until writing the book.
Tatel also discussed his legal expertise alongside his wife Dr. Edith Tatel, Kalish and Arabian at a lunch before the event with about 15 students, including Jude Poirier ’28. Poirier said he was intrigued by the opportunity to hear from somebody with “almost as successful a legal career as you could ask for.”
At one point in the lunch, a student asked Tatel if he felt the United States was in a constitutional crisis.
“In kind of a blasé way, Tatel said that we’d been in a constitutional crisis since the year that the Constitution was drafted,” Poirier said.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, however, Tatel also shared that he is “deeply worried about the integrity of our constitutional system,” highlighting two reasons for the Supreme Court’s historically low public approval ratings.
The first was that the Supreme Court is deciding more cases involving “hot-button issues,” such as “religion and abortion and the First Amendment,” than it has historically.
“Because the Congress is dysfunctional, many issues that should be decided by Congress end up in the courts,” Tatel said. “But the Supreme Court itself often decides questions it doesn’t have to in order to resolve the case before it.”
The second threat Tatel pointed to was that “so many of [the Court’s] decisions are divided ideologically, six to three.”
“Judges have to explain themselves, especially when they’re divided ideologically,” Tatel said. “This court isn’t doing that.”
When asked about his own judicial philosophy, Tatel emphasized “personal skepticism.”
“If you’re a judge and things look easy, you’re doing something wrong,” Tatel said. “You have to retain a level of skepticism throughout the process to be sure that you aren’t allowing your own personal views to affect your judgement.”
In a chapter of his memoir titled “The Art of Judging,” Tatel recounts a case where he and a colleague, despite disagreeing, exchanged 16 drafts of their opposing opinions. Though they never reached consensus, the back-and-forth sharpened both arguments by forcing each to grapple with the other’s perspective.
“Your views will be stronger if you re-evaluate them,” Tatel said.
Danny Babashak ’29, an audience member, said he found Tatel’s emphasis on personal skepticism the “most inspiring” part of the talk.
“I thought that was very admirable when he said that personal skepticism is a virtue in everything in your life, whether you wake up in the day and you’re going to decide what you’re going to do or you’re interpreting the law,” Babashak said. “I think that’s something that facilitates improvement throughout all aspects of your life.”
Tatel’s “belief in skepticism and challenging yourself to be better every day is really admirable,” Babashak added.
Tatel ended the event by reminding students that political problems are solved through the political process, highlighting the power of individual action as well as voting.
“People have to vote. It’s the most important constitutional power we have. We have to protect the right to vote,” Tatel said.
“We may not change the world,” he continued, paraphrasing Bobby Kennedy. “We can all individually join the small things that in their entirety can make a big difference.”
