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What Really Won the Trillion-Dollar Supreme Court Case | Neal Kumar Katyal | TED - Video học tiếng Anh
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What Really Won the Trillion-Dollar Supreme Court Case | Neal Kumar Katyal | TED
What Really Won the Trillion-Dollar Supreme Court Case | Neal Kumar Katyal | TED
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0:04
There is a mahogany podium
0:06
at the Supreme Court of the United States.
0:10
One person died there,
0:12
mid-argument,
0:14
a stroke.
0:16
Another collapsed there, dying soon thereafter.
0:21
That's the podium.
0:23
It also happens to be where I practice law.
0:26
The most powerful court on earth.
0:29
Nine minds ready to attack --
0:32
and you stand 10 feet away from them.
0:35
There are no prepared speeches in this court.
0:38
Instead, 50 questions thrown at you in 30 minutes.
0:42
I'm making hundreds of decisions in real time.
0:46
Every argument I choose to make
0:49
or not make,
0:50
every word, every pause, every tone.
0:55
There are no rewinds.
0:57
Flinch and the justices pounce.
1:00
That's my courtroom.
1:02
But each of you has something like that.
1:05
A place in which words matter.
1:08
The right words can win
1:10
and the wrong words [make a] huge difference.
1:13
Five months ago, I stood before that podium
1:16
asking the Supreme Court to do something
1:19
it had never done in its history:
1:21
declare a president’s four-trillion-dollar signature initiative unconstitutional.
1:28
(Applause)
1:34
And I had a secret.
1:37
April 2, 2025.
1:39
The president dusts off a 1977 law
1:43
and imposes tariffs on virtually every country on earth.
1:47
No congressional vote --
1:49
nothing like that whatsoever --
1:51
just his word.
1:52
And here’s what’s at stake:
1:54
if the president can command the global economy by yelling emergency,
2:00
what can't he do?
2:01
Checks and balances don't just bend, they break.
2:06
I was hired to kill it.
2:09
Legal scholars, commentators [and] my own colleagues said it was impossible.
2:15
They said the president has nominated three of the justices on the court,
2:20
and three others were appointed by Republican presidents.
2:23
They're not going to go against their president, they said.
2:27
I thought that was wrong.
2:29
But the real problem
2:30
was that the Supreme Court never in its history,
2:33
in 237 years,
2:35
has declared a signature initiative of the president unconstitutional.
2:41
I was hired to do what no lawyer had done in 237 years.
2:46
My first thought?
2:48
"Hell yes."
2:49
(Laughter)
2:51
My second thought?
2:52
“What in the world is wrong with me?”
2:55
People have died at that podium,
2:57
and I'm about to tell the world's most powerful man
3:00
he can't do what he just did?"
3:04
I had the self-preservation instincts of a moth near a bug zapper.
3:08
(Laughter)
3:12
So for months, I prepared for the argument of my life.
3:16
Three weeks before that argument,
3:18
one of my own teammates decided to try and take me down
3:23
so that he could argue the case.
3:25
He campaigned, he lobbied, he made calls.
3:31
Just a few days before the argument,
3:34
about two weeks,
3:35
The Washington Post runs an editorial somehow,
3:39
and I’m going to read this to you word for word:
3:41
"Strategic mistake."
3:44
I read it over breakfast.
3:47
Look, I don't begrudge the guy.
3:49
I mean, whatever.
3:52
(Laughter)
3:55
I had more important things to do because I wasn't replaced.
3:59
Up I walked to that mahogany podium,
4:01
and I won.
4:03
The President's tariffs declared unconstitutional.
4:06
(Applause)
4:10
OK, look, I know how this sounds.
4:13
Lawyer wins big case, gets a fancy TED talk invitation,
4:18
talks for 14 minutes about how great he is.
4:20
I’ve seen that guy at dinner parties --
4:22
nobody stays for dessert.
4:24
So that's not what this is.
4:27
This is the behind-the-scenes story of four teachers that helped me connect.
4:33
And it's also about one secret that I've never told anyone about
4:38
when I walked out of that courtroom.
4:40
[The] first connection I needed was with myself.
4:43
I was terrified of blowing the case.
4:45
And that Washington Post editorial didn’t help matters.
4:49
A month before the argument, I met Ben.
4:52
Ben coaches sports legends,
4:54
Andre Agassi, Olympians and the like.
4:57
His whole thing is about “game day.”
4:59
That moment when everything you’ve been preparing for either shows up,
5:04
or it doesn't.
5:05
Ben's first question to me:
5:08
"What are you afraid of?"
5:09
Now look, at that point, I’d argued 52 cases.
5:11
I’d saved the Voting Rights Act.
5:13
I'd struck down the Guantanamo military tribunals.
5:16
But Ben forced me to admit a truth I'd buried from myself.
5:22
Every time I walked into the court,
5:24
I looked at those portraits on the walls and thought:
5:28
they don’t look like me,
5:30
I don't belong here.
5:32
Imposter syndrome doesn't care about how many cases you won.
5:35
It cares about only your doubts.
5:38
Ben didn’t dismiss this.
5:40
He worked with it.
5:41
He had me write down five adjectives
5:44
and visualize them every day before our pretend court.
5:48
About 18 hours before the argument,
5:51
Ben calls and says, “How are you feeling?”
5:54
And I say, "Honestly, I'm terrified.
5:57
I've got to do a great job.
6:00
I've got to remember 500 things.
6:04
I've got to deliver an argument for history."
6:07
Ben says, “You know, change the vowel, use an ‘e’ instead of an ‘o.’”
6:12
He says, "What do you get to do?"
6:13
And instantly it pours out of me:
6:15
"I get to defend the Constitution of the United States.
6:18
I get to, the son of immigrants,
6:20
remind the country of what it's about.
6:23
I get to defend my parents' vision of America."
6:27
(Cheers and applause)
6:33
One letter.
6:34
The terror didn't disappear, but it transformed into joy.
6:40
So was Ben the secret,
6:42
an elite sports coach, who teaches people about mindset?
6:46
No.
6:47
But he got me ready.
6:48
The second thing I needed was connection to information at scale.
6:53
I assembled the most relentless legal team in the country.
6:56
They stress-tested every argument until only the best ones survived.
7:02
But I needed more.
7:03
I needed someone who was absolutely relentless.
7:07
I found Harvey.
7:09
Harvey reads the 200th tariff case
7:11
the same way as he reads the first.
7:16
Shoot.
7:17
Honestly, this is my first time using PowerPoint.
7:19
I've given hundreds of speeches --
7:21
(Laughter)
7:22
I didn't want to use it,
7:25
but they told me to.
7:26
So anyway --
7:27
(Laughter)
7:29
The picture's not coming up, but that's fine.
7:31
Don't worry about it.
7:32
So let's see.
7:36
OK, fine, good, we're good.
7:38
You know, a month before the argument,
7:40
Harvey told me that I should expect a question from Justice Barrett
7:44
about license fees.
7:45
And the yellow is what Harvey told me to predict,
7:48
and blue is what Justice Barrett actually said at the argument.
7:51
It's almost verbatim.
7:53
So Harvey taught me peripheral vision:
7:55
the idea [that] if you read a lot,
7:57
you can see patterns and come up with stuff
8:00
and anticipate the angles of attack before it arrived.
8:03
So was this secret a team of relentless lawyers who never slept,
8:08
who pressure-tested everything?
8:10
Closer, but that's not it either.
8:12
The third thing I needed was the hardest.
8:14
And it’s something we’ve been talking about today:
8:17
connection.
8:18
Here, I needed to connect with nine very skeptical legal minds
8:23
and to do so in real time.
8:25
Enter Liz, my improv coach.
8:29
What does improv have to do
8:32
with the Supreme Court of the United States?
8:35
Everything.
8:37
Liz's secret:
8:39
“Neal, you need to actually listen.
8:43
Actually listen.”
8:45
She taught me to quiet my own thoughts
8:47
and to trust myself to come up with the words
8:50
after the other person had spoken.
8:52
That’s the essence of “yes, and.”
8:55
Absorb the question and then build on it.
8:58
When the justices attacked,
8:59
I validated their concerns and then bridged back.
9:03
The interrogation became a dialogue.
9:05
The room's energy flipped.
9:08
(Audio) NKK: This power, as Justice Gorsuch said,
9:11
as Justice Barrett said,
9:12
is going to be stuck with us forever.
9:15
Justice Alito, I think you've said many times,
9:17
the purpose isn't what you look at,
9:18
you look to actually what the government is doing.
9:21
Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh.
9:23
So, five answers on the Nixon precedent.
9:25
Tariffs are constitutionally special
9:27
because our Founders feared revenue raising,
9:30
unlike embargoes.
9:31
There was no Boston Embargo Party,
9:34
but there was certainly a Boston Tea Party.
9:37
Justice Sotomayor, I wish I had an hour to talk about this with you,
9:40
because this argument by the government is wrong every which way.
9:44
Justice Alito: I wonder if you ever thought
9:46
that your legacy as a constitutional advocate
9:48
would be "the man who revived the non-delegation argument?"
9:54
NKK: Heck, yes, Justice Alito.
9:55
So was the secret an improv coach
9:59
who taught a lawyer to “yes, and” the justices?
10:02
That would be a hell of a TED talk.
10:04
But no, that's not it either.
10:07
(Laughter)
10:08
Liz taught me the power of connection.
10:12
And the fourth teacher,
10:14
the fourth teacher,
10:15
the one who taught me the most important thing.
10:18
The thing we forget: to connect with yourself.
10:21
Enter Bob, my meditation coach.
10:24
Now I am just about the last person to meditate.
10:28
I thought meditation was for people who own crystals.
10:32
I do not own crystals.
10:33
(Laughter)
10:35
But --
10:37
(Laughter)
10:38
Way before, way before the tariffs argument,
10:41
I started working with Bob,
10:43
and he had me, 20 minutes a day, focus on a single word.
10:47
He didn't send an app.
10:48
He actually rented an apartment a block from the court.
10:51
And we worked together every day, focusing on that word.
10:56
Bob didn't just give me a mantra, he gave me a weapon.
11:01
When I walked into court that day, the static was cleared.
11:05
I was calm. I was dangerous.
11:08
Was Bob the secret, the crystal-free meditation coach?
11:12
No.
11:14
But close.
11:16
Because Bob, like Ben,
11:20
like Liz,
11:21
are human.
11:24
That fourth teacher
11:26
is not.
11:29
Harvey is an AI.
11:32
A bespoke system I'd been building with a legal AI company for the last year.
11:39
And I trained it on every question asked by a Supreme Court justice
11:44
in the last 25 years
11:45
and everything they've written, every opinion, every concurrence,
11:49
every dissent, every separate opinion.
11:52
And in that, patterns emerged.
11:56
It predicted the contours of the very argument I would face.
12:01
It knew that Justice Gorsuch would ask me about the taxing power.
12:07
It knew Justice Kavanaugh was going to grill me
12:10
on tariffs versus embargoes.
12:13
It nailed Justice Barrett's worry about tariff refunds.
12:18
And the Chief Justice?
12:20
It didn’t just predict his question,
12:22
it predicted a possible escape route.
12:25
How the Chief Justice could vote for us
12:28
and at the same time protect the institution
12:31
he had spent his entire career defending.
12:35
Harvey glimpsed that narrow door,
12:38
I held the door open,
12:40
the Chief Justice walked through it,
12:42
riding a six-to-three opinion,
12:44
striking down the tariffs.
12:46
Harvey even predicted Justice Gorsuch's separate opinion,
12:50
striking down the tariffs, almost verbatim.
12:53
Now I want to be precise about something.
12:55
I'm a lawyer, precision really matters.
12:58
What we were doing was not some trick.
13:01
We weren't pulling some fast one over on the court
13:04
when we predicted these things.
13:07
Because predictability is what we want,
13:10
especially in courts.
13:13
A justice who returns to the same principles
13:17
case after case, year after year,
13:20
is a justice with character.
13:22
Predictability is just consistency made visible.
13:26
It is, in every sense, a compliment.
13:29
What Harvey found in these justices was not weakness.
13:33
It was integrity.
13:34
But if I had just parroted Harvey's output,
13:38
I would have lost the case 10-zero,
13:40
and there aren’t even 10 justices.
13:42
(Laughter)
13:43
Because AI has a shadow side.
13:46
When a tool is powerful,
13:49
when a tool is powerful, you've all seen it,
13:51
people stop thinking.
13:52
"The computer says so."
13:54
Four words, human judgment ends,
13:57
then people just fold like a cheap lawn chair.
14:00
The machine thinks, the human just nods,
14:03
and in that nod somewhere, we disappear.
14:05
My legal team never nodded.
14:07
Harvey was not some god,
14:09
it was our sparring partner --
14:11
brilliant, tireless, occasionally insufferable --
14:15
but not a god.
14:16
Harvey asked the questions,
14:18
we found the answer[s].
14:20
Now this is bigger than just law.
14:22
It's about all of us.
14:24
For centuries, the expert was the person who read the most,
14:28
who remembered the most, who'd seen the most,
14:30
the seasoned doctor, the experienced lawyer.
14:33
Their edge was accumulated knowledge.
14:36
AI is making that edge nearly worthless.
14:41
Not because humans no longer matter,
14:43
but because that particular advantage,
14:46
pattern recognition across vast data and breadth of knowledge,
14:49
is now available to anyone.
14:52
AI can analyze, AI can predict.
14:57
But the one thing AI can't do
14:59
is the thing that actually won that argument.
15:03
Connect.
15:05
That's the last irreplaceable human skill.
15:08
Persuade one person to change their mind
15:11
by appealing to something beneath the surface.
15:14
Adjust not just the argument,
15:16
but the delivery, the pause, the tone,
15:18
the look that says, "I hear you.
15:20
And here is my answer."
15:23
You know, at one moment in the argument,
15:25
Justice Barrett asked a question that Harvey hadn't predicted.
15:29
And I remember it felt like
15:31
she and I were the only two people in that marble and mahogany room.
15:36
And in the half-second before I answered,
15:39
I did something no algorithm can do.
15:42
I looked at her.
15:44
I really looked.
15:45
I wanted to understand her worry.
15:48
And I answered the worry.
15:51
That lesson is true for all of us.
15:55
You don't just got to do it, you get to do it,
15:57
in an interview, in a negotiation,
16:00
in a conversation that could save a marriage or end one.
16:04
Any place in which you need to reach another human
16:07
and actually connect.
16:09
The question AI poses to every one of us is not will you be replaced?
16:15
The question is,
16:16
what is the irreducibly human thing that you do?
16:21
Go deeper into it.
16:23
Not to "survive AI,"
16:26
but to come home to yourself.
16:29
That's where your edge lives.
16:31
So Ben taught me to reframe,
16:35
Harvey gave me foresight,
16:37
Liz taught me to listen and Bob taught me stillness.
16:42
Four teachers,
16:44
four connections,
16:46
one argument.
16:48
An argument that some have called
16:50
the most important decision the Supreme Court has made in a century.
16:55
When I walked into the court that day,
16:58
I never felt more like I was exactly where I was meant to be.
17:04
I brought to the podium no mountain of legal notes,
17:07
just an email from Liz about the power of connection.
17:10
And on the top of that,
17:12
in my own handwriting, scrawled my parents' names,
17:16
my children's names, my wife's name.
17:19
The people I was fighting for.
17:22
My father was my first audience.
17:27
He didn't get to live to see this argument,
17:29
but as I walked out of the courtroom afterwards,
17:33
past those marble walls,
17:35
past the portraits of people who didn't look like me,
17:39
I got a text on my phone,
17:41
an email from Ben.
17:44
"So happy for you, Neal!
17:46
I think your dad was watching over you too."
17:50
The newest technology,
17:52
the oldest human wisdom,
17:55
the most powerful court.
17:57
I get to do that.
18:03
(Applause and cheers)
