Supreme Ambitions

by David Lat

  “Even if her position is going to lose?”

  “She’ll lose in the three-judge panel. But Deleuze thinks she might win if the case gets reheard en banc. Or if it goes to the Supreme Court. She’s super-liberal and super-brilliant, so she can’t imagine how her position might lose—even if it does all the time at SCOTUS, because the conservative justices are hacks. Speaking of conservative hacks, all ready for the Keegan interview?”

  “I guess. I’ve been cramming like crazy—it’s like the bar exam all over again. But I’m so nervous. I’ve never wanted anything this badly.”

  “I don’t blame you. Signing bonuses for SCOTUS clerks when they go to firms afterward are around $300,000.”

  “I’d love that kind of money,” I said. “I could pay off my huge student loans and help out my family too. But it’s less about the money and more about …”

  “The prestige? The status? The love?”

  “And other things too. Like the chance to be part of history.”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy agreed. “Former SCOTUS clerks have the best war stories. They love to brag about the famous opinions they wrote—er, drafted …”

  “It’s a great learning opportunity—a chance to work closely with the finest legal minds of our time, drafting and editing opinions on the most important issues.”

  “I hate the man and his politics, but Aidan Keegan is brilliant. And he works closely with his clerks on revising his opinions line by line, just like my boss. You’ll get the experience you didn’t get with Christina ‘Rubber Stamp’ Stinson.”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

  “Okay. But I’m just agreeing with you that a SCOTUS clerkship with Keegan would be tremendous. And to think: it’s yours to lose!”

  “Don’t say that! You’ll jinx me.”

  “I know the Filipino half of you is superstitious, but rumor has it that your main competition, Lesbia Aroldi, flubbed her interview. Some speculate she was hungover. Or distracted.”

  “Oh really,” I said.

  “Coyne, you’re a terrible actress. You already knew about Lucia messing up her interview?”

  “I heard about it from Judge Stinson. I don’t know where the judge heard about it from, though.”

  “I can’t believe Lucia didn’t kick ass. I wonder what she’ll do now.”

  “Lucia graduated at the top of her class from Harvard Law, and she’s clerking for one of the most respected judges in the entire federal judiciary. If she doesn’t get a clerkship with Justice Keegan, she won’t wind up homeless.”

  “Fine. But you have to admit that it’s still pretty surprising.”

  “Surprising, yes. But if Lucia had the poor judgment to get drunk the night before her interview, she probably shouldn’t be entrusted with the responsibilities of a Supreme Court clerk, don’t you think?”

  “Well hello there, Ms. Self-Righteous! What did you do with my friend Audrey?”

  I laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to get carried away. But I’m not going to shed tears for Lucia. So she had one bad interview. She’ll be fine in the end.”

  “True,” Jeremy said. “Okay, I have to get back to work, but if I don’t talk to you before you fly out, good luck!”

  “Thanks Jer.”

  I returned to reading—or, more accurately, rereading—my favorite opinions of Justice Keegan. His fiery dissents, full of vivid, vigorous, sometimes almost colloquial language, were my favorites. I thought about how much fun it would be to work together with him on polishing these opinions to a high gloss.

  Before too long, I found my mind wandering again. When my iPhone lit up with an incoming text, I was glad for the distraction.

  It was from Harvetta: “Oh baby, so sorry about Keegan.”

  What did she mean by that? I hadn’t bombed my interview; that was Lucia. Or, speaking of Lucia, maybe he had hired her, filling his last opening and shutting me out? But how would Harvetta know that? Maybe from the network of Wilson clerks?

  I did what any puzzled person would do. I hopped onto Google and entered “Justice Aidan Keegan” into the search box. And there it was, from the Associated Press:

  “Justice Aidan Keegan Dies at 79.”

  I cycled through news websites—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post—in disbelief. It was true. The legendary Justice Keegan—one of the most brilliant minds on the current Court, its finest writer, and a huge personality and great storyteller, which he chalked up to his Irish American heritage—had died, of a ruptured brain aneurysm. It came as a shock, but the news reports did point out that he had multiple risk factors: he was elderly, had high blood pressure, and was a longtime smoker.

  I wanted to cry—partly for him, and partly for myself. I would never even get to meet Justice Keegan, much less clerk for him. It seemed like a cruel joke by the universe to take him away at this precise point in time. Part of me wanted to cry, but I was determined not to. I thought of how pathetic Amit looked when he cried in front of me over Beneath Their Robes, and I thought of Judge Stinson’s words to me from just the other day: “There is no more potent weapon in any profession than a woman with a feminine exterior and a will of steel.”

  “Audrey.”

  I turned around. It was the judge. She wasn’t crying, but I could tell she was distraught. I stood up, and we hugged.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Justice Keegan,” I said. “I know he was your friend.”

  “A great friend, and a great judge,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “And he would have been a great boss. I’m sorry too, Audrey.”

  32

  Eating Häagen-Dazs chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream straight from the pint requires skill. You need to strategically dig in your spoon to capture the optimal balance of ice cream and cookie dough chunks. The chunks are unevenly sized and distributed, so you can’t just eat blindly; you need to canvass and calculate as you go along. This was how I was spending my Tuesday evening, after Judge Stinson told me to go home early for the first time during the clerkship, and I was happy to accept her offer. I planned to finish the entire pint.

  I was watching a rerun of The Bachelor. The death of Justice Keegan was all over the news, but I had no desire to watch the coverage. Nor did I want to talk to anyone about the news—which was why I had not responded to the numerous text messages and phone calls I had received from James, Harvetta, Jeremy, Lucia, or my mother. Not even my mother. I would have more than enough time to contemplate my future after getting to the bottom of this pint and the end of this episode of The Bachelor.

  In my sugar-induced stupor, I took a while to realize: someone was knocking at my door. The doorbell hadn’t worked since I moved in, and I hadn’t bothered to get it fixed, since I spent so little time at home and rarely had visitors.

  I ignored the knocking. Whoever it was could wait until tomorrow. I’d finish this pint of ice cream, get an obscene amount of sleep, and start with a clean slate tomorrow morning.

  My caller would not be ignored. The polite knocking turned into insistent banging.

  “Girl, I know you’re in there. Get your skinny white ass to this door!”

  Harvetta. Attention must be paid. I got up to answer the door because otherwise she’d break it down with her bare hands.

  “My half-white ass, for the record,” I said. “I’m proud of my Asian heritage too.”

  “White or black or purple, your ass will be as big as mine if you keep eating like that,” said Harvetta, looking down at the pint of Häagen-Dazs I still held in my hand.

  I walked across my small studio, defiantly eating an extra-large spoonful of ice cream as I returned to my spot on the couch. Harvetta sat down next to me.

  “It doesn’t help to eat your feelings,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t eat my feelings if they didn’t taste so good.”

  “You’ll get over this. You’ll make it through.”

  “I’m still in s
hock. I can’t believe it. I was supposed to be interviewing with him this Friday. I had a really good shot at getting it.”

  “It’s just a job. There are other jobs.”

  “Easy for you to say—you already have your Supreme Court clerkship. And you know as well as I do that it’s not just a job. It means so much more than that.”

  “Does it? I want to do it because I love the law, I love Justice Wilson’s jurisprudence, and I want to help him turn that mother out. But even if he hadn’t hired me, there are other jobs out there that would let me get my law groove on.”

  Harvetta wanted to clerk for the Court because it would be intellectually stimulating and fun. Her view of the world seemed so … naïve. But I didn’t want to get into another argument with her over the importance of prestige, of which she seemed blissfully ignorant.

  “Cravath, here I come. While you’re drafting Supreme Court opinions, I’ll be reviewing documents, sitting in front of a computer and clicking a mouse until my hand falls off.”

  “It’s not over yet. The president has to nominate a replacement for Keegan. And that new justice might end up hiring you.”

  Strangely enough, that obvious proposition had not occurred to me—I was so caught up in the death of Justice Keegan that I hadn’t entertained thoughts of what would happen next. But the consolation it provided was fleeting.

  “It’s such a long shot,” I said. “Whoever replaces Justice Keegan will probably have different criteria for hiring clerks. Or people he already knows that he wants to hire. With Keegan, I was close, so close. It’s like the universe conspired to deny me a Supreme Court clerkship.”

  Harvetta grabbed a throw pillow and slapped my thigh with it.

  “Listen to yourself! One of the great justices of our time just died—not a perfect judge, but definitely a major figure in the history of the Supreme Court—and all you can think of is yourself, and how you lost out on a fucking job. What is wrong with you, girl?”

  I put down my pint of ice cream and placed my head in my hands.

  “You’re right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’m so ashamed.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so hard on you. I came by tonight to support you, not to whoop your ass.”

  Harvetta reached out to hug me. I gave in to her embrace.

  “Trust me,” she said. “Everything’s going to turn out fine in the end.” I had my doubts. But I knew better than to argue with the indomitable Harvetta Chambers.

  33

  The next morning, shortly before noon, Judge Stinson summoned everyone into her office for a meeting.

  “What do you think this is about?” Larry asked, as we walked across chambers from the clerks’ side to the judge’s domain.

  “I’m guessing it has to do with the passing of Justice Keegan,” I said.

  “Thanks for the brilliant insights,” Amit said. “You’re real SCOTUS clerkship material.”

  I glared at him, my tolerance for snark running low that morning.

  The judge didn’t waste any time, starting to speak before we were all even seated.

  “As you know, my good friend Justice Keegan passed away very suddenly yesterday. I am leaving immediately for Washington, to attend the funeral this Friday. I expect to remain in D.C. through the entirety of the following week, possibly longer. The reason for my extended stay must not leave this chambers.”

  She looked around the conference table slowly, making eye contact with each of us. All of us, the four clerks and Brenda, nodded solemnly.

  “I have been informally advised by a contact in the White House counsel’s office that I am on President LaFount’s shortlist for the vacancy created by Justice Keegan’s passing. The president does not plan to start interviewing his candidates until next week, and he will not announce his nominee until the week after that, out of respect for Justice Keegan. It would not make sense for me to fly out to Washington for the funeral, return to the West Coast, and then fly back again to meet with the president. So I will remain on the East Coast and work remotely.”

  “I have an urgent project for all of you,” she continued. “Around the holidays, each of you—well, except for you, Larry—prepared detailed dossiers on different aspects of my judicial track record. I need that research updated, with all of the mentioned cases printed out, highlighted and tabbed, and put into binders. Then FedEx the binders to me in Washington—Brenda has the address—for delivery by Friday. I’m going to spend this weekend poring over them.”

  “Judge,” Brenda asked, “what should I say to people who call and ask about your whereabouts?”

  “If anyone happens to inquire, please advise them that I went to Washington to attend the services for Justice Keegan and then decided to stay on the East Coast for a few days on personal business. If anyone should ask about the nature of that ‘personal business,’ please say you don’t know. If anyone, including anyone from the media, asks about rumors that I am being considered for a seat on the Court, please decline comment.”

  Judge Stinson looked around the table sternly once again, like a mother about to leave on a trip and telling the kids not to throw a party in her absence.

  “If this news somehow gets leaked, I will immediately fire the party responsible. That’s all.”

  We filed out, silently. Once we returned to the clerks’ side of the office, we grabbed our lunches and repaired to the chambers library to discuss—well, to gossip about—what we had just learned.

  “So does she have a real chance?” asked Larry, while munching on his turkey sandwich.

  I remained silent, not wanting to be mocked by Amit for my “brilliant insights.”

  “Definitely,” Amit said. “She has the prestige, the pedigree, and the politics. And she has demographics on her side, as an Asian American woman. President LaFount would love to see the Democrats try to vote against a conservative woman of color. It would be just as futile as when they tried to shoot down Justice Wilson.”

  “Does she have the right pedigree?” James asked. “She graduated from Boalt Hall. I’m very proud of my alma mater, but I feel that when it comes to SCOTUS, they’re always looking for Ivy Leaguers.”

  “Boalt’s perfect,” Amit said. “It’s an elite law school, but it’s not an Ivy. That’s a plus factor—there’s been a lot of bitching lately about how there are too many Harvard and Yale grads on the Court. And the fact that Berkeley is a public law school is great. It plays into Stinson’s up-from-the-bootstraps narrative—modest upbringing, immigrant heritage, daughter of a taxi driver from China, blah blah.”

  “What happens to us if she makes it to the Court?” Larry asked. “I’m kind of over this whole ‘clerking’ thing. I don’t want to have to do it all over again.”

  As if Justice Stinson would even hire you, I thought to myself. Maybe a Ninth Circuit clerkship can be given away to further a personal relationship, but not a Supreme Court clerkship.

  “It depends on whether the judge would take us with her to the Court,” James said. “Would she?”

  Amit laughed. “I doubt it. The judges who take their clerks with them after becoming justices tend to be the nice ones, the loyal ones, the less status-conscious ones. The more status-conscious judges try to ‘trade up’ and hire even ‘better’ clerks after getting elevated. Our boss is not particularly nice, and she’s very status-conscious.”

  I tended to agree with Amit. It wasn’t impossible that Judge Stinson would hire one of us to clerk for her on the Court, but it seemed unlikely. Unlike, say, Judge Polanski, Judge Stinson wasn’t getting the best of the best as a circuit judge; but as Justice Stinson, she’d have access to the nation’s most brilliant young lawyers.

  Not long after I returned to my desk after lunch, one of those brilliant young lawyers called me.

  “Hey,” Lucia said.

  “Hey yourself. What’s going on?”

  “My boss is off to D.C. for the Keegan funeral. I’m guessing yours is too?”

 
“Yup. She just left.”

  “And how long will she be in Washington for, if I might ask?”

  “A while. And what about Judge Polanski?”

  “A while too. What’s keeping Judge Stinson in D.C.?”

  “She’s staying there on … personal business. And what about Judge Polanski?”

  “Personal business too.”

  We both laughed. We understood each other perfectly.

  “Speaking of personal business, have you given more thought to … our situation?”

  Ugh. I had too much on my mind to be dealing with this. It made me almost angry.

  “Lucia, there’s no ‘situation’ between us.”

  “It happened very recently, so I doubt you could have forgotten it. We kissed.”

  “We were drunk. Very, very drunk.”

  “The alcohol might have lowered our inhibitions, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. I could tell you were into it—and into me.”

  “I’m sorry if you got the wrong impression, but this is nothing personal against you. I’m straight.”

  Silence.

  “Lucia, I really value our friendship …”

  “Audrey, fuck you.”

  Click.

  Was I at all attracted to Lucia? No; of that I was certain. At the same time, when I agreed to meet Lucia for drinks that night at Bodega Wine Bar, it wasn’t my plan to sabotage her Keegan interview. It happened organically, maybe opportunistically—I saw an opening, and I took it—but it wasn’t premeditated.

  But even if it had been premeditated … so what? As Judge Stinson had told me, it was my duty to rise as far and as fast as I could, using everything in my power to get ahead. And I also remembered this other advice from my boss, quite possibly the next Supreme Court justice: “To be a successful professional woman, you need to be a little monstrous.”

  34

  Not long after Justice Keegan’s funeral on Friday, news articles started appearing about the search for his successor. President LaFount had reportedly drawn up his shortlist of possible nominees and would be interviewing a half-dozen contenders. Journalists covering the Supreme Court—Robert Barnes, Emily Bazelon, Joan Biskupic, Jess Bravin, Jan Crawford, Tom Goldstein, Linda Greenhouse, Ken Jost, Dahlia Lithwick, Adam Liptak, Tony Mauro, Jeffrey Toobin, Nina Totenberg—floated their own shortlists. Bloggers started dissecting the lists, arguing over the respective strengths and weaknesses of the contenders, and commenters on message boards dug into the blog posts. It was the legal world’s version of Oscar season, full of speculation by pundits and campaigning by partisans (including former clerks to the possible nominees).