For the chief.

• Author: Morris, Brian
• Position: Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Legacy of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor - Testimonial

By the summer of 1992, I had interviewed with numerous prospective employers, including partners in law firms, career prosecutors, and federal appellate judges. Each interview generally included a moment when the interviewer would ask something along the lines of "What do you want to do in your legal career?" I occasionally stumbled over my response as I sought to tailor my answer to what I assumed would impress the potential job-giver. So I was not surprised in the summer of 1992 when Chief Justice Rehnquist posed his version of the question about halfway through my interview for a clerkship position.

I paused momentarily, cleared my throat, and announced that I wanted to return to Montana to practice law and someday start my own law firm. The Chief immediately perked up and described his years of private practice in Phoenix in the 1950s and 1960s. He had chosen this unconventional route after completing his clerkship with Justice Jackson in 1952 when he bypassed the big law firms of Washington, D.C., and New York and instead headed west with his wife.

He initially worked for an established firm, he explained, but eventually branched out to start a new firm with a few colleagues. The fact that lawyers at larger law firms in bigger cities may have worked on higher-profile cases did not faze him. He derived much satisfaction from being in charge of his own cases and clients and from developing strategies to win cases as opposed to simply executing the strategies developed by some senior partner. He relished the intellectual challenge of figuring out how to present or defend a case. And his natural competitiveness spurred him to win more often than not. He took any client who walked through the door and could pay a retainer. Such clients were not always plentiful, he said, and he and his partners sometimes played poker to while away the dead time in the early days of his law firm venture.

The Chief must have liked my answer because his secretary, Janet Barnes, called me the next day to inform me that the Chief was offering me a job. I learned later how much he liked the answer. My two co-clerks and I were sitting down one day for our daily morning meeting with the Chief. We normally discussed pending cases, Court scuttlebutt, and geography--the Chief's pet hobby. On this occasion, however, my co-clerks were discussing their recent job interviews and possible career options. One of them asked me what I planned to do after my clerkship. I...