Good evening, everybody. I have to confess I’m a little daunted to be surrounded by so much legal expertise. I’m slightly fearful that I’ll do something wrong, but I’m very confident that if I do I will be well-defended.

Let me thank you, Judge, for your kind introduction, for your leadership. To Paulette Brown and the ABA Board of Governors for your longtime partnership with USAID, and it’s one that we intend to continue and we cherish.

And I’d like to take a special moment to thank Elizabeth Andersen, who I will call Betsy. It turns out we are two halves of the same person. We’ve actually known each other very well over these last few years and I know we’re all deeply appreciative of your leadership and the new vigor and inspiration you bring to the job.

Also I have to echo the shout-out to the team in the field. I think we all know that that’s where it happens, and that’s where the real knowledge lies. So we’d like to thank all of you for helping continue the slow-moving but worthwhile efforts to strengthen independent, accountable, effective justice systems that uphold the rule of law.

I think all of you know, and especially those of you in the field, that that’s not easy, especially in today’s world. But as governments limit their ability to operate, you as champions of the rule of law don’t give up; you look for whatever openings they can find. As corruption dilutes your hard-earned progress, you don’t chalk it up to a loss. You take stock of what worked and what didn’t, and you fight on. And we salute you for that.

I like to think that on their toughest days, all of us can look to our own country and find some measure of strength in the example we have set. Not of a perfect system, but of a people always striving to be better. Of leaders and public servants working honestly to build a more perfect union.

Of course, anyone looking for that kind of strength and inspiration doesn’t have to look any further than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

To many in this country, she is known as a fierce advocate for women, someone who envisioned a world where dated notions about gender could no longer limit a person’s ability to prosper and succeed, and set out with a hammer and chisel to shape that world for herself.

Later, she exchanged the hammer for a gavel and became known as one of the nation’s sharpest judicial minds, a brilliant jurist with grace, integrity, and pluck. At the Washington National Opera, she’s known as a regular. On the internet, she’s Notorious RBG. And in my staff meeting this afternoon, she was the subject of a T-shirt that says “there is no truth without Ruth.”

But what I think many people don’t know is that in countries like South Africa, Egypt, and Vietnam, she is known as an advisor and as a guide, as someone willing to share her experience and expertise to advance rule of law around the world. I can think of no better ambassador for our nation’s legal and judicial system. With every visit, and in every conversation, she draws crucial attention to the role an independent judiciary plays in effective democratic governance and in promoting rule of law, sending a clear signal to governments and citizens alike.

Those are just a few reasons that I am beyond honored to help recognize Justice Ginsburg’s contributions tonight. But as a non-lawyer – and perhaps one of the few or the only one here – I’m a little out of my element. So what I’d like to turn to is how we can continue to work together in pursuit of sustainable and inclusive development, which as your video rightly points out, rests on the backbone of rule of law.

Much of what we strive to do in international development is to help economies and institutions deliver for everyone. And time and time again we find that when the conditions are right, we can achieve great – and lasting – progress. But we have to put in the work on the front-end to help build the right conditions. And, as President Obama said at the UN General Assembly meeting last year, that means “governments and institutions that care about their people, that are accountable, that respect human rights and deliver justice for everybody and not just some.”

At that same meeting, the global community agreed to a new set of goals to guide international development work for the next fifteen years. Importantly, the new framework includes a goal –Goal 16 – that is focused on the promotion of just, peaceful, and inclusive societies. Goal 16 explicitly recognizes that effective and accountable governments, rule of law, and access to justice are all prerequisites for sustained development progress. I know many in this room and others around the world fought hard to see the rule of law included in the SDGs, and I want to thank you for your persistence.

Your efforts have helped build a global consensus around the importance of strengthening democratic governance. And that consensus presents us with a huge opportunity for our community, but also a lot of work.

That’s why we at USAID and you at ABA/ROLI have emphasized capacity building, and are working to strengthen institutions, processes, and professional communities to better uphold the rule of law. USAID is proud to be a global leader in the promotion of rule of law, with a long history of supporting justice system reforms in every region of the world. And we’re proud to continue this legacy with our partners.

Currently, we have more than 50 rule of law programs worldwide, many of them in partnership with you. For example, in the Balkans, we have partnered with ABA/ROLI to help facilitate greater cooperation among lawyers, civil society organizations, and bar associations. In Egypt, we worked to strengthen the judiciary by helping improve judicial education. In Mexico, we have helped the next generation of lawyers enhance their skills with hands-on experience at legal aid clinics.

And in the Philippines, we are working on a major reform effort to improve judicial efficiency. And when Maria Lourdes Sereno – the Philippines’ first woman Chief Justice – came to the United States last year, she emphasized how important that partnership was to addressing congested court dockets and delayed processes. As you can imagine, the Chief Justice was especially eager to meet with Justice Ginsburg, who took time out of an extremely busy schedule to describe the Supreme Court’s process for assigning and taking cases.

USAID is proud to support all of this work, but we have to think even bigger. Going forward, our challenge is to marshal the resources and political buy-in that can generate scale, build the body of evidence, and model success.

We know how to go about that. As a community, we have made significant advancements in how we measure progress; we understand what works and what doesn’t better than we ever have before. And we can take a lesson from our work in global health, where we have mobilized the global community – and leveraged resources in very big numbers – around shared challenges, from fighting HIV/AIDS to ending malaria. Imagine the same level of focus and attention on combating corruption or strengthening ministries of justice.

At the same time, we have to embrace the fact – as Goal 16 does – that effective and accountable governance underwrite progress in every sector. So rule of law efforts are a priority – for which we’re thankful – for the ABA and other democracy and rights specialists, but it also needs to be a priority for public health experts, educational experts, and others across the development spectrum.

We also need to recognize that success in this area will not happen overnight. Some of the countries we work with are building institutions from scratch, while others have incompletely evolved or are compromised by corruption. Many are still dealing with the fundamentals, like judicial independence. So we have to be ready to play the long game by continuing to invest in evidence-based approaches and trusting that results will follow.

Read any of Justice Ginsburg’s dissents, and you’ll see that she understands this notion quite well. Even though she knows it will not change the decision in the present, she shares her reasoning with the world, I imagine in part so that future generations can learn, and also to clearly signal that a healthy democracy has plenty of room for dissent.

Those of us who have worked in development for a long time understand it as well. I spoke to a Foreign Service Officer the other day who worked on democracy and governance challenges in Guatemala in the mid 1990’s, when corruption and impunity were a way of life there. Today, she runs our bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, and says that if you told her twenty years ago that Guatemala would have a legal and judicial system capable of arresting a President and much of his Cabinet, she would have thought you were crazy.

But that’s what happened last year, and it was the result of years of hard work, plenty of strategic patience, and, of course, the unyielding efforts of the Guatemalan people.

As we continue to build evidence for our approach over time, we also need to learn to present with it. It can be dangerously easy to get in the habit of asserting our views as opposed to making the evidence-based case for them. I can’t believe I just said that to a room full of lawyers. We too often say “this is how it should be” instead of “this is how it works. This is what we know we want to share.”

Justice Ginsburg and her colleagues across the judiciary are our nation’s most credible voices on what works and why, and a continued partnership with the U.S. judiciary will be essential to our success going forward. That’s why I am thrilled that USAID has recently renewed our agreement with the International Judicial Relations Committee so we can continue to tap into the extraordinary wealth of knowledge and experience of American judges.

The last thing I want to emphasize is the importance of leading but letting others own. Chief Justice Sereno emphasized this when she was here last year as well, noting that she knew that “in order for reform to take root, it had to be first embraced and owned by those who were going to implement it and would be the front-liners in delivering justice to [their] people.”

And this is yet another area where we can take a lesson from Justice Ginsburg. Her work with ABA/ROLI has taken her all across the globe, and into countless meetings with other judges, legal scholars, and young people. Through these conversations she offers insights honed over years of experience, but she is also ready to listen, always recognizing that, ultimately, it must be the people leading the march to justice.

I cannot stress enough how important that is. For countries in transition – the countries doing the hard work of building or rebuilding their institutions – simply putting the right things down on paper is not enough. The people must demand what they deserve from their governments: accountability, transparency, and fairness for everyone.

Justice Ginsburg embodies these principles in everything she does, and I want to say again how thrilled I am to help honor you tonight. I’d also like to give a big and very warm and sincere thank you to ABA/ROLI for allowing me to be a small part of this occasion, and for providing such an important ingredient to our own success, which is your partnership.

Justice Ginsburg, thank you for your incredible career of service. I know I speak for everyone at USAID when I say we will continue to look to you for inspiration, strength, and leadership as we work to advance the rule of law in countries around the world.

Thank you very, very much.