(Editor's Note: The Barristers Club held its annual luncheon honoring the members of the California Supreme Court on February 4. Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, the dean of the McGeorge School of Law, served as the keynote speaker. Dean Parker, who formerly served as general counsel for the CIA and the National Security Agency, addressed the role that the American legal system can play in shaping our nation's foreign policy in the post-Cold War and post-September 11th world. For those of you who missed Dean Parker's interesting and timely address, her prepared remarks are reprinted below.)

I considered what I might usefully say to you today, my mind went blank. It all seemed so complicated. You know, I speak frequently and with pleasure. Indeed my family would say that I am proof of the adage that we lawyers "talk for a living". And so, to confess that I suddenly felt I had nothing I could add to the debate on this topic -- that I had said it all before -- was a signal.

And I gave thought to what it might mean that someone who talks ad infinitum -- my husband would say ad nauseum -- could suddenly draw a blank, come up empty if you will.

Let me share with you some of the thoughts and my diagnosis.

First a story or two. Earlier this week, my office had a call from a colleague in the Vice President's office who was searching for a report I had co-authored around 1993-94 on Law Enforcement and Intelligence. Actually, the report was not published until May of 1995, presumably because its recommendations were significant enough that the then Clinton Administration wanted to have addressed some of them -- thereby avoiding criticism -- before the report was actually released.

That report revealed many of the problems in coordination among government agencies that are now being addressed in the aftermath of 9-11. Yet the recommendations in that 1995 report were ones that built on concerns going back to the mid-l980's, concerns I had observed as General Counsel of NSA beginning in 1984. Almost two decades later, we are still grappling with the issue of how to organize our government to confront matters like the current war on terrorism. In fact, like the White House, were you to read the 1995 report -- the first of its type -- I am sure you would see a number of points that are familiar from the national debate today.

You know the questions: what are the limits and relationship between law enforcement, traditionally a domestic function, and intelligence gathering, a secret enterprise that we have, as a nation, felt must only be exercised abroad?

What should the proper role of our government institutions be? Is there something we have to gain from observing a model such as our British friends have? MI6 collects foreign intelligence abroad; MI5 collects intelligence against threats to national security that might be carried out domestically, such as sedition and terrorism; and Scotland Yard manages the law enforcement function at home. Looking at the British structure, in fact, provided one of the inspirations behind our own Homeland Defense initiative. I had an epiphany in the early 1990's when I came to know my opposite number, the Legal Adviser at MI5 and MI6. This relationship was an eye-opening experience in comparative law -- comparative intelligence law. One so profound that I expended considerable effort in introducing him to a broad range of my colleagues in the United States.

Why does Britain have this three part structure?

Britain is a civilized nation, one with significant respect for civil and individual rights; why do the British permit wire taps with only the approval of a minister of the same party, without requiring review by a member of the judiciary? What are the distinctions in constitutional governance and press freedoms that permitted Britain to withhold press publication of sensitive information with the infamous "D Notice"--an anathema to our constitutional structures and the First Amendment?

And I also recalled conversations over the years that had perplexed me. For example:

Why was it that Les Aspin and Bob Gates, two of the most informed, creative thinkers about national security, failed to respond in 1992 when I expressed interest in understanding their view of the evolving relationship between intelligence and law enforcement?

And why, for example, shortly after 9/11, would I dismiss, as unworthy of serious attention, a student's offer to brief the CIA on relationships and activities related to the Al Qaeda threat that he had learned about while living in Indonesia?

And so, these are some of the questions that occurred to me as I reflected on what I might say today.

And as I did so, I realized why identifying a topic for you today was proving so difficult.

The fact is that the world as we know it is shifting so dramatically, profoundly and quickly that a single topic is difficult to select.

With cataclysmic changes going on around us, there is a temptation to simply "shut down"--to hide and ignore what is happening around us. As Lady MacBeth said, "Things without all remedy should be without regard."

That, however, would be exactly the wrong reaction.

Particularly for a group of lawyers.

Why? Because I believe that law is at the heart of the solution to many of our problems.

But, to address the needs of a post-September 11 world, we may need new laws and new ways to think about how law, foreign policy and national security work together.

Let me offer several observations about the role of law in our national security structure. First, on the international level, there has been a fundamental change in the system of law that was based on ordered relationships among states providing the basis of peace and stability necessary for a productive world. Many states no longer fully control their internal territories. An international set of legal principles that would govern inter-state relations is not sufficient. Already we have seen NGO's become far more active on the international legal stage. It remains to be seen how the international community will deal with other individuals -- outlaw actors, such as Al Qaeda, armed with existential level force. Facts drive the law. What is important here is that the facts do not fit existing legal structures, and to remain relevant and effective, these structures will have to change.

This does not mean that law is currently irrelevant. To the contrary, it may never have been more relevant. If boundaries are not sufficient to contain the negative forces, we need to consider how to augment the force of national boundaries with multilateral legal structures. More, not less, law will be needed.

It is not that globalization in the post-Cold War world has rendered nation states and their borders irrelevant. A better description would be that it has rendered them insufficient.

There are other changes that I believe we must confront by involving law and lawyers. One of the challenges of world affairs today is, of course, the dramatic change in the balance of power since the end of the Cold War. We have been slow to grasp the significance of this new world order.

In our euphoria at the demise of the Soviet Union, we were naïve about what might follow next. Some experts were even declaring that it marked "the end of history." A lawyer colleague of mine once quipped that all fairy stories end "and they lived happily ever after" because what follows is too complicated to be part of a fairy story. Our reactions to the end of the Soviet Union have had something of that fairy story response in them.

Now that the threat of terrorism, in part unleashed by the end of the Soviet Empire, is upon us, we find ourselves ill prepared to respond in a way that can both adequately and effectively deal with the threat, while simultaneously providing the foundation on which to build a lasting peace and a just world order.
What do I mean by this?

There are essentially three things we can do in the face of the world-wide terrorist threat that we now confront.

First, we can respond militarily. This we are clearly doing. And in many respects, it the easiest way for us to respond. Our military is superbly well prepared and trained; in that we are lucky. But this is not a complete solution. At best, use of force will buy us time.

Second, we can do far more to organize our domestic structures to protect us here at home. One of the major changes since the Cold War is that we can no longer protect ourselves with "force projection"--that is, keeping danger away from our shores. Our modern way of life, with its ever-increasing freedom of movement and access to information, has created borders that are far too porous for that response to be effective. If we wish to preserve our way of life without losing the freedoms that we have come to take for granted, we must look for new responses. The Homeland Security initiative is a start in this direction, but it will be developed over a long period of time. A massive realignment in the roles of state, local and federal governments, not to mention a redefinition of the role of the private sector, may become the largest domestic works initiative of our time.

Third, we can begin the long and painful process of rethinking our foreign policy. This is a project even greater than the first two. And here, I fear, our work has barely begun.

We speak of the "war on terrorism", but in fact we must confront the need to revolutionize our foreign policy, in a way that will enable us to change hearts and minds globally. The dichotomy of the Cold War is over and with it, the ability to tolerate a foreign policy that was, of necessity, often based on hypocrisy. In the past, U.S. policy was based on the assumption that we must choose between control and chaos. During the Cold War period we chose stability and supported those governments that agreed to work with us in fashioning a bulwark against the over arching, all-encompassing threat of communism.

In some respects, this was a bargain with the devil. The end of the Cold War forces us to reexamine this bargain.

Briefly, we must confront our tendency to "bend the rules" in order to lend support to corrupt governments.

We must also learn about and come to better understand other cultures and other legal systems. It is unlikely that we will be successful by simply trying to impose American legal norms on others. Rather, we will need to develop the ability to distinguish what is valuable in other systems from areas in which the adoption of American legal ideas and values might be both possible and beneficial.

And finally, we must better train and educate all parts of our society on international issues. It will no longer be acceptable to fail to correctly interpret intelligence data because we lack analysts who are sufficiently trained to be able to understand foreign cultures and languages. After all, if we cannot understand the world, we will not be able to lead it.

Let me return to my earlier question: why say these things to a group of lawyers and judges?

U.S. culture, as I appreciate it, is defined, sustained, knit together by law--and therefore by lawyers. We are the leaders, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted over two hundred years ago, of our society and our country. But we cannot lead unless we also understand, and unless we use that understanding to form new solutions -- all of which will increasingly be based on the rule of law. Still the question we must ask and answer is: "what will that law be?"

As the newly appointed dean of a law school, I am pleased to be able to help in this important process. And I look forward to working with you as lawyers, and as citizens, to encourage better understanding and implementation of what our foreign policy of the future, centered on our legal culture, will be.

Thank you for your attention.