Why I Don't Dumb Down My Supreme Court Talks for High School Students

People are often surprised that I give essentially the same caliber of talk to federal judges and attorneys at continuing legal education conferences as I do to high school students, but they shouldn't be.

Students are living through a critical moment in civic life, right alongside the rest of us. Plenty can name more functions of government and recall more U.S. history than the average adult. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's classic 1968 study on teacher expectations, often called the Pygmalion effect, found that students expected to perform better tended to do exactly that. The finding has been argued over for decades since, but the underlying intuition matches everything I've observed on stages across the country. Students rise to meet the level you bring into the room. They notice, more than any attorney I've ever met, when you're not bringing your full self to it.

Earlier in my speaking career, I thought my job was to translate a complicated legal case into something students could understand. Over time, I realized I'd misunderstood the assignment: students didn't need translation nearly as often as adults assumed. What they needed was permission to wrestle with difficult questions without being underestimated.

No talk I give is identical to any other, regardless of audience. The general arc stays the same (the same principles, the same central story) but the contours shift for every room.

At the FICPI World Congress in 2023 (an international gathering of lawyers), organizers asked me to weave their conference theme of "cooperation" into the keynote. So I leaned harder into that thread throughout, because that context allowed for a continuous conversation for the audience.

A high school audience gets the same kind of attention. At Flintridge Preparatory School in early 2025, I spoke to students in grades seven through twelve only weeks after the Los Angeles wildfires tore through their community. Many had passed the ashes of their own neighborhoods on the way to school that very week. I spent the morning in classrooms before the assembly, listening as students described organizing donation drives, checking in on displaced friends, and finding small ways to help their community recover. By the time I stepped onto the stage to talk about connecting with community and making a difference in hopeless-feeling situations through art, volunteering, and advocacy, I wasn't asking them to imagine resilience as an abstract virtue. We were talking about choices they were already making in real time. Afterward, students who had spent the hour singing, laughing, and occasionally crying could explain parts of the appellate process back to their teachers without prompting. Rigor and relevance aren't opposites. Students engage more deeply when the material respects both their intelligence and the reality of their lives.

One of the things teachers and I connect on afterward is how quickly adolescents can tell whether an adult genuinely expects something of them, or has already decided who they are.

When I tell the story of why I named my band The Slants, I tell students the actual words I heard as a kid getting beaten up at my school: jap, chink, gook. Words harsher than the one we eventually fought for in court. I don't soften this for younger audiences unless a school specifically asks me to. Students already encounter these realities; discussing them honestly provides context and agency. Naming them plainly tells the room I'm not protecting myself from the conversation we're actually having. It's also a quiet legal point: all three of those harsher words were, at various points, registered as trademarks without incident. The only documented denials under that same provision of law were against Asian Americans trying to reclaim a word for ourselves, which tells you what the government was actually screening for, and it wasn't offensiveness.

I don't usually use the word "reappropriation" in my talks. I don't need to. Every student in the room understands instinctively what it means to take a word that's been used as a weapon and put it back in different hands.

The legal substance doesn't get simplified either. Most journalists, and a fair number of practicing attorneys, can't accurately describe what Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act actually says. On that specific question, adult audiences and teenage audiences usually start from roughly the same place. Several high school debate and government classes have studied Matal v. Tam directly over the years; fewer now that the case has settled into history, but I still meet students who know the disparagement clause cold and ask the kind of layered questions about civil liberties I'd expect from a law school audience, because functionally, that's what they are.

Sometimes students reach out directly, asking for help on a homework assignment about The Slants or Asian American history. More often than people expect, I say yes and hop on a quick video call, or drop into a classroom over Zoom when I have the capacity. The questions are always sharp: on free expression, race and identity, policy. The only place anyone has ever asked about my "favorite band" instead is a law conference. I think that's part of why I love education events: the students treat me with the same mutual respect I'm trying to bring into the room.

Education isn't preparation for participation in democracy someday. It's one of the few places students can rehearse what participation looks like right now. They're already making ethical decisions, navigating institutions, testing their own voices. The classroom isn't a waiting room for civic life. It's one of the first places they actually get to practice it.

Most of the students I speak to can't vote yet, but they already live with the consequences of decisions made entirely without them: policy landing on their communities, their families, their schools, in real time. Plenty of them are looking for some lever they're allowed to pull. I think that's part of why they connect with the arc of my own story: an awkward kid who got beat up for being different, who somehow ends up fighting for everyone, the bullies and the bullied, at the Supreme Court. They can draw a straight line from where I started to where the story goes, because it isn't that different from where they're standing now.

My story actually begins and ends with students. After oral arguments at the Supreme Court, before I could reach the press conference with our attorneys, two high schoolers stopped me. They'd flown in from California and waited outside all night in the cold. Their parents had let them skip school on the condition that they write a report about it afterward.

"For our whole lives, we heard about you," one of them said. "Ever since elementary school, we learned about the band who was willing to fight for our community, for the dignity of being able to choose for ourselves. When we graduate, we want to go into public policy because of you."

I didn't know yet whether we'd win. Standing on those steps, it mattered less than it should have. Gloria Steinem once said power can be taken but not given, and that the act of taking it is the empowerment itself. Those two students had already taken it, regardless of what eight justices were about to decide for all of us.

I speak at law schools, universities, and K-12 schools on First Amendment law, identity, and civic engagement, and I bring the same expectations to every room regardless of the audience's age. More on that approach in Show, Don't Tell. If this philosophy resonates with the kind of learning community you're trying to build, I'd love to continue the conversation — simontam.org/for-educators is the place to start.