Lizz and several other students from the University of Puget Sound had left Seattle at 2 a.m., and arrived two days later. “There was just this moment of elation, of everything materializing and becoming real that we were actually there, but also feeling very unreal,” she says.

The 17 students, variously clad in busted-knee jeans, leggings, hiking boots, puffer jackets, and a lone plaid flannel shirt, were pretty quiet for the first 25 minutes as two Washington Supreme Court justices talked about their work to the class Thinking Ethically: What Is Justice? Then it was question time. A hand popped up.