There are two very fascinating stories out at the moment that involve one of my favorite subjects, the judiciary. The first is in the New York Observer and it's about the "Little Supremes" - 30 something whiz kids, all of them former law clerks and now either tenure-track law profs or government counsels or high-powered litigators, who likely form the potential Supreme Court short list in 20-30 years from now. It's an intensely interesting article, at least to me, because the personality type is so easily recognized. Anyone who has coached high school debate at a national level has known the type, to be sure. They're hardcore achievers, brilliant and driven and unstoppable. Long paste below the fold.
Thirty-three years is a long time to wait for something you want that bad.But to hear some tell it, 35-year-old Noah Feldman has wanted the same thing for just about that long.
"I think Noah got tenure when he was about 2 years old," said Burt Neuborne, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, which has offered Mr. Feldman tenure. He has offers from Harvard and Yale as well; in addition to three books already published, he has also advised on the Iraqi interim constitution.
Mr. Feldman is a "Little Supreme," one of a handful of earnest, platinum-résumé'd law geeks whose prospects for the Big Bench are the source of constant speculation among friends and colleagues.
"You fantasize about it, of course. That's almost part of the fun of it, to fantasize about it," Mr. Feldman said recently from his Greenwich Village office, when asked whether he'd ever dreamed of warming a seat one day. "That's just part of the Walter Mitty inner life of someone who loves doing something .... If you're someone who likes the law, then you've got to be someone who imagines that you got a chance to write a Supreme Court opinion."
Mr. Feldman is hardly the only Little Supreme in town. There are at least a few other young lawyers--professors, assistant U.S. Attorneys, corporate litigators--who have that early Supreme Court buzz about them. Also at N.Y.U., visiting from the University of Michigan, is Richard Primus, 36, an intellectual purebred and constitutional scholar with a pensive, deliberate manner. There is David Schizer, also 36: He's the youngest dean in the 147-year history of Columbia Law School, an amiable former professor who fell in love with tax law in his early 20's. And Samuel Rascoff, a vivacious 32-year-old litigation associate at über-firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, who clerked for Justice David Souter and worked as an assistant to L. Paul Bremer in Iraq. There's Jennifer Newstead, 36, a thoughtful litigator at Davis, Polk and Wardwell who developed deep Republican ties during her four and a half years working for the administration, most recently as general counsel of the White House's Office of Management and Budget.
It's a long, slow, quiet trip to the top. They're doing all the right things, whether they admit it to themselves or not. And if, like Judge Alito, they're confiding their fondest dreams to their mothers, they do so to few others.
Really a fascinating look at this group of folks and how they rise to the top by clerking for "feeder judges" and steadily move up the ladder. Equally worth reading is Jeffrey Toobin's expose of Article III Groupie (A3G), the genius behind Underneath Their Robes, one of my favorite blogs and one that has linked to mine for a long time. When I read it this morning I almost felt like yelling "A3G is a guy!" the way they yelled "it's people!" in Soylent Green. Article III Groupie was, everyone thought, a woman. The "About Me" section of Underneath Their Robes began:
Article III Groupie ("A3G") graduated from an Ivy League college in the mid-1990s and a top five law school in the late-1990s, with nearly perfect transcripts at both institutions. During law school, she served on the board of the law review, and after graduation, she clerked for a highly respected federal appeals court judge. She had multiple Supreme Court clerkship interviews, but they ended in tragedy (i.e., with her not getting a job with the Supremes).
UTR reads like a 50s era gossip column, but it's all devoted to the judiciary. Breathless tales of "judicial divas" and "superhotties of the federal bench" abound, but it's also incredibly packed with information about the legal system. If you want to know something about this year's clerks for an appeals court judge, A3G has probably written at length about them, including pictures and snarky comments about the way they dress. Just a fun blog to read. Alas, A3G is a guy and he's come out of the closet and revealed himself as David Lat, a 30 year old assistant US attorney in New Jersey. I'll be curious to see how this affects his career.
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