John Kroger (CA' 87) is the Attorney General of Oregon. He has devoted his entire life to public service as a United States Marine, federal prosecutor, public policy expert, and professor. As a federal criminal prosecutor, John won major cases against mafia killers, drug kingpins and corrupt government officials. He helped prosecute crooked Enron executives and served on the emergency response team to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. John wrote about his experiences as a prosecutor in his book Convictions, which won the Oregon Book Award in 2009. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from Yale University and his law degree with honors from Harvard Law School.

Caitlin Schoenfelder (OR ’08) is currently a Princeton in Latin America fellow working for Convivencia Educativa, A.C., an NGO that specializes in teacher on-site coaching to restructure classrooms and transform instructional practice in marginalized public schools in Mexico. Last year she worked for DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee as an advocate for families with children in special education. Caitlin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Whitman College in 2009 with a major in Politics and a minor in Latin American Studies.

CS: Why did you originally commit yourself to public service? Have your reasons for committing to public service changed throughout the course of your career?

JK: My commitment to public service has never changed. As you can tell from my career path, I’m constantly assessing how I can do the most good. My ideas about what kind of public service would be most productive for me to do has changed over time. The reason I do public service has a lot to do with my time in the Marine Corps. I must have been vaguely patriotic and committed to public service when I enlisted – but I don’t really remember. What I do remember, though, is coming out of three years in the Marines with an extremely deep commitment to public service. The Marine Corps tells you ever single day that your country is more important than yourself. I mean, right now everyday in Afghanistan and Iraq Marines are giving up their lives to protect our country. That is something the Marine Corps tells you everyday: that your country is more important than your own selfish interests, and that you should be willing to give up everything to serve your country – including the ultimate sacrifice. So I left the Marine Corps with the belief that we’re each given one life and that we need to make the most of it. I thought that the way I could do the most good with the life I have is by committing to public service.

CS: Did your time in the Marines also influence your decision to focus on criminal law and become a federal prosecutor?

JK: No, not really. When I got out of college I was considering becoming a high school teacher or going into politics because they were the two things that I thought would be really useful. [I decided to go into politics because] I really believe that you make positive social change through politics. After college I actually decided to go work on Capitol Hill for Senator Chuck Schumer who was a congressman then, and then for Speaker of the House Thomas Foley, and then for Bill Clinton on his ’92 campaign. It was interesting. I enjoyed all those jobs and I learned a lot. When I left politics I wanted a very concrete job with very real, measurable results where I knew I was doing something good for the public interest every single day. And that is why I became a prosecutor. Being a prosecutor is a great job. When you convict a murderer you go home at the end of the day knowing you took someone really dangerous off the streets and you don’t have any doubts about whether you are doing something really valuable. You know you are. What pushed me to being a prosecutor is that I’m really not a fan of violence. I spent a lot of my time as a prosecutor fighting violent crimes. For me that is an important statement, that in our society violence is not how we resolve our disputes.

CS: Why did you eventually decide to teach? Did being a career lawyer deter you?

JK: It was a combination of things. One is that I really believe in teaching. I never have any doubts that when I’m spending my time teaching I’m making a positive impact on our community. Part of it was that I was really burned out with being a prosecutor. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week year after year in very intense cases — I was a mafia prosecutor in New York. When you’re in a job like that you just don’t have any time to think. You don’t have time to think about the big picture. You don’t have time to really assess your career to think about whether you’re doing what you think is important. Going into teaching – in addition to being important in its own right – was personally a time to sort of recharge my batteries, and to get a little more critical self-reflection on my own career and whether I was living up to my own values or not. I can already see that being Attorney General is a very intense job and that after doing this for a certain number of years it will be great to go back to teaching again to sort of think about the big picture…. For me teaching is extraordinarily rewarding. If I can produce more thoughtful ethical lawyers who are really deeply committed to fighting for justice that is just priceless and tangible as a contribution to our society.

CS: Changing the subject a bit, I’m interested in hearing more about your time as a federal prosecutor. Did you ever have to deal with moral ambiguities? And if so, what did you do professionally as well as personally to resolve these ambiguities?

JK: It is funny you ask that – and maybe this motivated the question – but I have written an entire book about the moral ambiguities of my life as a federal prosecutor. My book, Convictions, which was published in 2008 and won the Oregon book award in 2009, is all about the moral quandaries and difficult positions that one finds oneself in as a federal prosecutor. I took the job thinking that it would be really ethically straightforward. You know, there are the “bad guys” and you put them in prison. It turned out that the job was actually an ethical minefield. Sometimes it’s very difficult to find out what actually happened. Sometimes you think you know what happened in a case and it turns out the witness was lying to you. You are given immense power and to use that responsibly and ethically is a great challenge. Another part of the reason I took the years to teach was to think about and write about those questions.

CS: I did read a review of your book and the title struck me: Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. What were some of the main differences in prosecuting corporate executives and street criminals?

JK: The simple thing to say is that it’s easier to prosecute the mafia than a company like Enron because the mafia members know they’re criminals. The mafia is pretty rational when they’re investigated and charged with a crime. They are pretty rational about making a decision to plead guilty or not. They sort of look at all the evidence and they have no problem going into court and admitting to being a crook – in fact they like to think of themselves as criminals. Most white-collar defendants don’t view themselves as criminals in any way. They’re shocked at being treated like criminals. Whether it makes sense or not, they fight very aggressively. They often have millions of dollars to pay for very high-end legal defense. And it’s difficult to convince them to plead guilty because they have a very hard time admitting publicly that they did anything wrong. With Enron we started the case with roughly 10-12 million documents to look at and originally we had a team of five prosecutors. Five prosecutors trying to look at, examine, and assess 10-12 million documents is an immense challenge. White-collar cases are very hard. Quite honestly, I prefer violence cases to white-collar cases as a prosecutor.

CS: I’m currently living in Mexico and the drug war is the biggest policy issue affecting every level of government here. Based on your experience prosecuting major drug cartel leaders, I’d love to hear what sort of policy advice you might have regarding the current “war on drugs”?

JK: The Mexican government really needs to get its arms around corruption within its own government to be able to protect its judges and to make sure its prosecutors and police are not corrupt. The United States has put Mexico in a very difficult position. We are the drug market that fuels their drug wars. That is just a fact. We have not done a good job in the United States decreasing our demand for illegal drugs. My experience is that you can prosecute drug cartels, you can disrupt drug cartels, but as long as the market is still there someone will always pop up to meet that market demand. Narcotics are a commodity just like sugar, tobacco, or anything else. If there is a demand, someone will meet it with a supply. In the long term, Mexico will have a very hard time weeding out the drug trade unless the United States has a better national strategy for decreasing its demand for drugs. I think the Mexican government is correctly and reasonably frustrated that it is our guns and our demand that fuels the trouble that it has to deal with.

CS: What inspired you to sit down and begin writing about your experiences as a prosecutor?

JK: Initially it was that I just had fascinating stories to tell. I was a mafia prosecutor in New York and I had these crazy stories of what it was like to prosecute the mob… As I kept writing it became a way for me to put my own career under an ethical microscope and really relive what I had spent six years doing and try and learn from it. The book is filled with the lessons I learned as a prosecutor, but most of those lessons weren’t immediately clear to me. They were lessons learned by reflecting and writing about that experience. So I’m a huge fan of having enough time in your life to have time to reflect in a self-critical way. The book was a really important vehicle to do that.

CS: From the law school classrooms of Lewis and Clark, why did you decide that running for Attorney General in 2008 was your next career step?

JK: Hardy Myers, who was my predecessor, had served 12 years so I knew that he was going to step down. I’m very familiar with what AGs do and I knew it was both a position that I was very well prepared for and also a position where I could do an incredible amount of good if I ran and won. I had very specific goals when I ran for the office. They are the same issues I’ve worked on my entire career, which are: fighting crime, protecting the environment, and helping consumers. So it was the perfect opportunity to accomplish a lot of the things that I hold very dear. And, frankly, as a law professor I am constantly telling students to go into public service so it was a “put your money where your mouth is” kind of moment. My students said, well why don’t you run for that! And so there was also a sense of practicing what you preach.

CS: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments so far as Attorney General?

JK: First of all, when I got into office we had no attorneys investigating mortgage fraud and we’re obviously in the biggest mortgage crisis in our country’s history. So, we created a new mortgage fraud task force, which is in part putting some people behind bars, but also investigating and closing down, or banning from doing business in Oregon, some unethical foreclosure relief companies. I’m happy with that as an achievement. We created Oregon’s first environmental crimes enforcement unit. So we’re taking on polluters and charging them with crimes. For me, if you’re not properly enforcing environmental laws you’re not going to be able to properly protect the environment. We’ve also been very aggressive about consumer protection. We’ve taken legal action against a very large number of America’s biggest companies – big Wall Street firms, big pharmaceutical companies. We’re trying to hold them accountable for breaking the law. I think we’ve done a great job in that area.

CS: Have there been unexpected challenges you’ve encountered in this position?

JK: There has really only been one surprise. I’ve increased investigation and prosecution of official misconduct by government officials by somewhere between 400 and 500 percent over my predecessor. We’ve removed a judge from office. We’ve removed prosecuted a couple of sheriffs. We’ve charged a sitting elected district attorney with crimes. The biggest surprise for me is that we spend a considerable amount of time investigating people within government who aren’t living up to expectations.

CS: There are a lot of Trumans who go to law school – and even more who consider it. What advice would you give to Trumans considering law school?

JK: I think law school is a great preparation for a career in public service … I think there are two things really powerful about it. One is that it gives you a very specific set of skills that you can use in the public interest and that is valuable – whether you are a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a judge or a legislator. Second, it gives you a lot of flexibility. If you value public service and you’re an education expert, at a certain point you’re only going to be able to get jobs as an education expert. Careers are so long now that you really can have a 40 to 45 or 50-year career. Having the flexibility to move around and do different things in public service is great. I really liked being a prosecutor. But I also like the flexibility of having other options of public service that aren’t just that

CS: Has your concept of justice, or relationship towards justice, shifted over the course of your career – from the time you were studying philosophy at Yale to now serving as Oregon’s Attorney General?

JK: I don’t think it has changed, I think it has deepened. I started studying justice as a philosophical concern back in college before I knew I was going to be a lawyer. And a lot of my work in philosophy as a college student has really influenced my career. My ideas about justice first started taking hold reading Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls in college. I teach all those texts now. I’m still an adjunct law professor and teach one night a week and I focus on theories of justice. So I don’t think there has been a radical shift, but I think I see justice as being both more important and harder to achieve the longer I work at it.