Who is on the horizon? At the 2025 Alumni Forum, Chief Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson ’79 challenged the more than 700 attendees not to look for heroes to enact change. “Nobody’s coming. We’re it. All of us are it,” the alumna said at the Mazzocchi Alumni Dinner in Chapel Hill on October 18, 2025. Speaking from her experience on the federal bench in Los Angeles, Karen shared her thoughts on current challenges facing American institutions, connected them to historical struggles for civil rights, and issued a direct challenge: the responsibility to build a more perfect union falls on each of us. She called on the Morehead-Cain community to lead with courage, kindness, and generosity. Karen is a member of the first class of women Morehead-Cain Scholars. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and co-author of Rutter Group Practice Guide: Federal Civil Procedure Before Trial.
Who is on the horizon?
At the 2025 Alumni Forum, Chief Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson ’79 challenged the more than 700 attendees not to look for heroes to enact change.
“Nobody’s coming. We’re it. All of us are it,” the alumna said at the Mazzocchi Alumni Dinner in Chapel Hill on October 18, 2025.
Speaking from her experience on the federal bench in Los Angeles, Karen shared her thoughts on current challenges facing American institutions, connected them to historical struggles for civil rights, and issued a direct challenge: the responsibility to build a more perfect union falls on each of us. She called on the Morehead-Cain community to lead with courage, kindness, and generosity.
“I dare to say no one is coming to extricate us from this existential moment,” the judge said. “This one is on us to lead, to act with integrity, to care for our neighbors, to move with compassion in the world, and take right action.”
Watch the keynote address on Morehead-Cain’s YouTube channel.
Karen is a member of the first class of women Morehead-Cain Scholars. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and co-author of Rutter Group Practice Guide: Federal Civil Procedure Before Trial.
The judge was honored at the 2024 Morehead-Cain Black Alumni Reunionin Chapel Hill, alongside the first Black graduate of the Program, Harvey Kennedy ’74.
Karen and Harvey were also honored at the Forum by the unveiling of a commissioned portrait of the pair on October 17, 2025. The painting, by Durham-based artist William Paul Thomas, is on display at the Morehead-Cain Foundation.
Thank you, guys. Thank you. It is such an honor, and I’m so moved to have the privilege of being with you all tonight. But I didn’t come to Carolina alone. I came with a group of extraordinary other young women in that first class of women Morehead-Cain Scholars. They called us the Dirty Dozen. We have lost one, and we hold her in our hearts. But if you are here and are one of those first women in the class of ‘79, part of the Dirty Dozen, please stand up. Anybody? I know there’s some out there. Yes. All right. I live in L.A. now, but I came to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the August of 1975, having never lived in the South. And Carolina will always feel like home, even though I live in California now. What a weekend this has been. So many friends, old and new, gathered here in this special place we love called Carolina. And it is a special honor for me to share this particular season in this particular place with all of you who are in this room. I want to express my deep appreciation to the foundation, not the least for the outstanding education I received at this University, the trustees, Chris, and the Morehead-Cain team, and all of the current and alumni scholars who are gathered here this weekend and those who could not be with us this weekend.
This is a powerful community of vision, leadership, and service that expresses itself not only around the country but around the globe. So many Morehead-Cain Alumni and current scholars are doing impactful work in so many areas, all towards building community, expanding opportunities for others, supporting philanthropy, and doing the work of building a more perfect union. And in preparing for these remarks—and I promise it won’t be long—I thought I’d talk about something not that’s not too controversial. I promise not to say anything about Carolina football. Right? That’s for another day. But what I did do was I looked at the preamble of the United States Constitution, and it reads as follows: We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. We are in a moment, you all. We are in a moment. I speak a lot. I speak to many people on different occasions. I’m in court every day with lawyers and litigants.
But tonight feels hard. Tonight feels hard because of what we are all enduring and going through. In the fifty years since I came to Carolina, there have been challenging, difficult, contentious times for us as a country and as a society. But I’ve always understood that this great experiment that is the United States is a society that is moving, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes impatiently, sometimes painfully, toward the promise of a more perfect union. But we’ve never been here before. I was born in 1956, just two years after Brown v. Board of Education. And during this past summer, I had the chance to host a group of high school students at our courthouse who are interested in careers in the law at our federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Part of that day was introducing these fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds to all possibilities—not, of course, lawyers or judges, but maybe they want to work for probation and pretrial. Maybe they want to be a social worker, helping people, postconviction, transition back into their lives. Maybe they want to be in law enforcement. They might want to work for the United States Marshal Service. They might want to work for the Federal Protective Service, all honorable and important professions.
But part of that day, what we did in order to introduce them to the full panoply of opportunities, if you want to work in the judicial system in some way—we took them up to the second floor of our federal courthouse where the United States Marshal has their offices. It’s a pretty cool place, I have to say. They have all these trinkets and tchotchkes from the Marshal Service, pictures of Al Capone getting arrested, Bonnie and Clyde. They’ve got a big old safe from the bank robber era in their offices. We took them there to show them what the United States marshals do. But that very week—and I’ve shown some of you the picture on my phone—we had 130 United States Marines bunked in the lobby of the federal courthouse with weapons. In the lobby, you all, not outside, not on the parking deck, in the lobby, so that people coming to do business at the federal court had to walk around cots and guns and backpacks of the United States Marines. People coming to do bankruptcy work. People, parents, coming to maybe post a bond for their child. This was the United States courthouse, the federal courthouse, on the sixteenth of June this year.
The same day we were taking fourteen- and seventeen-year-olds to expose them to the honor and the duty and the responsibility of an opportunity to be a part of the federal judiciary. Part of what we did in the marshals’ office, there’s a picture in the United States marshals’ office at our courthouse of Ruby Bridges. Do you remember Ruby Bridges? She was that lovely little girl who integrated the William Frantz Elementary School, a previously all-white school that was desegregated by the Brown decision. There’s a picture of her in the United States marshals’ office. And on that afternoon, when we had these teenagers with us, she is surrounded in that picture by National Guard. We had to explain to them that in that picture, they were there to protect her from the crowd. They were there to make sure she got safely to school that day. And as a parent myself, my kids are way grown now, thankfully, but as a parent myself, I cannot imagine—I can imagine, sending my six-year-old daughter into that circumstance. Her parents believed in this country, and they believed that this country would protect their young baby girl to get safely to school.
When I reflect on that first day of school for little Ruby Bridges, I don’t know if I would have had the courage of her parents to send their precious little one into the maelstrom of anger and hate that she was met with. But they did, and all of us are the beneficiaries of their courage. Since I was a history major, let’s do a little history. In 1957, nine African American students who would become known as the Little Rock Nine were escorted into Little Rock Central High School by the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division through a hateful crowd of white folks as they desegregated that high school for the first time. Fast-forward—how history is serendipitous. My freshman roommate in Granville Towers East, freshman year in Carolina, was from Little Rock, Arkansas, and she had been the student body president of Little Rock High School, and she is to this day one of my dearest friends. In 1963, the Supreme Court decided Gideon v. Wainwright, holding that the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees an accused the right to representation by counsel in all criminal prosecutions and that that right is made obligatory on the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.
As a result—I mean, if you throw a rock, you’ll hit a lawyer in this crowd, right? As a result, as many people in this room know, we have not only federal public defenders, but we have what are called Criminal Justice Act lawyers. In 1964, Congress created the Criminal Justice Act Panel, the CJA. They are qualified private attorneys who offer to represent indigent defendants when a federal public defender, at least in the federal system, is either not available or is conflicted out. Because all the lawyers in the room know you can’t represent two clients on the same case. There may be a conflict of interest. Well, the CJA was enacted to establish a comprehensive system for appointing and compensating lawyers to represent defendants who are financially unable to retain counsel in criminal proceedings. The CJA authorized reimbursement of reasonable out-of-pocket expenses and payment of expert investigative services that are necessary for a defendant’s adequate defense. It provides for some compensation for appointed CJA panel attorneys, but not at the same rates that they would receive in private practice, substantially less than what they would receive from privately retained counsel. Currently, the funds for CJA Panel expired on July the third. They didn’t stop arresting people on July the third, but they stopped paying.
They have not been paid, and they’re not getting paid during the shutdown either, you all. They have not been paid since July the third. Last Friday in my courthouse, we had twenty-one people on the afternoon criminal duty calendar who had been arrested for various federal allegations. We were seriously concerned whether we’d have enough lawyers to be able to represent them. Because the CJA panel provides funds for those lawyers, not just for the lawyer. It allows them to pay their paralegals, to pay their investigators, to pay their secretaries who help them prepare the papers that need to be filed in court. Trust me, criminal lawyering—for those in the room who don’t do it—is a team sport. It is essential, and these folks are not getting paid. We’ve had about 30 percent of the lawyers who are usually on our panel—you have to apply to be on the panel; you have to be screened and accepted—about 30 percent of the panel just can’t do it anymore. They can’t keep their own doors open by being available to indigent clients. We have lawyers . . . How many people have been to Los Angeles? So you know the traffic in Los Angeles, right?
We have lawyers coming from as far away as San Diego to help us with representation. If you’ve been to Southern California, from San Diego to LA, it could be a Southwest flight. It is honestly with the LA freeways—it’s difficult. Several hours each way from San Diego to LA, and then they have to go back. And if they’re appointed as trial counsel, they have to come. The trial is in Los Angeles. By the way, San Diego is in a different district. San Diego is the Southern District of California, so you have to appear where the defendant is charged. In our court right now, we face difficult decisions when we have to decide if a defendant must spend a longer time in federal custody before making an initial appearance because we don’t have a lawyer available to represent them. I have done this myself. I’ve had to put a matter over for someone and spend an extra night in federal custody because I don’t have a lawyer in the courtroom that I can appoint to represent them and make an argument that they should not be detained for that period of time. At least give them a shot to make that argument.
Moving forward from the Criminal Justice Act, that’s where we are now. And with the government shutdown, it’s not getting better. In August of 1965, sixty years ago, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. And at that time, President Johnson himself described the 1965 Voting Rights Act as “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” close quote. And if you’re following the news, you know that there was an argument before the United States Supreme Court this past week about whether the last standing piece of the Voting Rights Act should be set aside because all this integration stuff, all this voting rights stuff, all of this, that was only supposed to be temporary. There’s time to limit it. We’re past that right now. On June the twelfth, 1967, the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, holding that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated while supporting a strike by garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee. I lived in Washington, DC, and there was rioting across the city. I remember we lived across the street from a liquor store where I grew up, owned by a lovely Greek man.
He boarded up his liquor store and spray-painted “Soul Brother” all over it so it wouldn’t get looted. True story. In June of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic nomination for presidency. I remember my mom waking me up that night, in the middle of the night after the results were in, and we were amongst the folks—I and my sister and my mom—waiting along the streets of Washington to see the caisson bearing his casket make its way through the streets of the nation’s capital. It was a summer of funerals. And one of the most moving experiences I’ve been able to have as a part of this Morehead-Cain community was traveling with the civil rights tour last year. Jessie was with us. There are several in the room tonight who were on that amazing experience. From Montgomery to Birmingham to Memphis, we were hosted by the remarkable Barbara Hyde at her home in Memphis after we had visited the Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum. And we were accompanied on that journey by Taylor Branch, Carolina alum, class of ‘68, and the author of the extraordinary trilogy Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.
We had a private two-hour meeting with Dr. Carolyn McKinstry, who was present at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning when it was bombed by the Klan. She talked about her experience of being in that building and losing her friends. These are not in the dim and distant past. This is the mighty struggle of this country in our living memory. I mentioned these events not to be a Debbie Downer, honestly. If I wanted to be a Debbie Downer, I would talk about Carolina football. But to remind us of where we have been together as Americans, how difficult and dangerous and violent at times the efforts for social progress have been and still are. In the panel this afternoon on the rule of law, our judicial colleagues talked about the hundreds of threats against federal judges, their lives, their persons. When I drive out of our federal courthouse every evening, I look out the window because I need to know if the people who are out there photographing the judges’ license plates are there that night. And then I decide to go out a different part of the building. It is easy to look back at our history and yearn for the hopeful, youthful leadership, for a grand rallying personality to inspire us and move us forward together.
Right now, there appears to be no one really on the horizon, right? Many will recall John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, who passed away just a few years ago. He was the subject of the photograph showing law enforcement using billy clubs and dogs and hoses to keep marchers from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Shortly before his passing, he wrote an op-ed piece that was entitled “Together We Can Save the Soul of America.” I have a copy of that article framed on the wall in my living room. So the downer part. I dare to say no one is coming to extricate us from this existential moment. That’s the bad news. Nobody’s coming, you all. We’re it. We are it. All of us are it. This one is on us to lead, to act with integrity, to care for our neighbors, to move with compassion in the world, and take right action. I think of the Tina Turner song, “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” We have to be our own heroes wherever we find ourselves with acts of integrity, kindness, compassion, generosity, and faith. Yes, faith. Faith in the grand purpose that created this amazing experiment that is our country.
We got work to do, you all. Together, all of us together, nobody’s coming. This one is on us. We got next. And I say that this community as a family of committed people, of passionate people, of talented people, of blessed people. One of my favorite quotes, because I’m a historian, is from Eleanor Roosevelt. She said, “Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the end, it is easier.” Let us meet this moment with courage. Thank you so much.