Judge stories.

• Author: Gerken, Heather K.
• Position: By clerks of US Supreme Court Justice Stephen R.Reinhardt

Whenever Judge Reinhardt's clerks are asked about the clerkship, they tell "Judge stories." There are an infinite number of wry stories about how hard he worked and how hard he worked us. Inevitably, the clerks try to best each other with increasingly over-the-top tales about the Judge's legendary eating habits or his shockingly funny bluntness. An outsider might think we tell "Judge stories" simply because they are entertaining, or perhaps because they are veiled complaints in a culture in which it's considered bad form to speak ill of your clerkship.

That's not it. We tell these stories because we are trying to avoid bragging. We tell these stories because it's not polite to say, "I clerked for one of the Great Ones, a judge who is larger than life, a Warren Court judge in the Age of John Roberts. And how was your clerkship?"

Needless to say, clerking for the man who wears the Warren Court's mantle can be intimidating. I sometimes wondered whether the Judge cultivated his eccentricities just so his puny law clerks could relate to him. Hollywood would cast the Judge as a six-foot, square-jawed hero with gentleness and idealism shining in his eyes--Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Readers can consult the web to assess the physical likeness. But I will say that he always looked rumpled and disheveled, more like a trial lawyer from a Grisham potboiler than a soft-spoken knight of the Warren Court. He writes rip-roaring opinions and is even blunter in person. He eats steak, drinks Scotch, and would smoke cigars if his doctors would let him.

Judge Reinhardt's reputation has taken on heroic proportions in some circles and made him the bete noire in others. There is a simple reason for this: the Judge has devoted his life to doing justice. For the Judge, that means working tirelessly to battle the death penalty, promote equality, and protect the vulnerable. He is one of the rare judges to pay attention to social security cases and immigration claims, devoting as much time to those cases as to ones involving big money, big litigants, and Big Law. Over the years he has steadily built up protections for immigrants, criminal defendants, and the poor. While the Judge is best known for high-profile decisions on the Pledge of Allegiance and assisted suicide, his real legacy lies in the small cases, the ones involving people who are almost invisible to most of us ... but not to him.

The Judge is open about his disdain for the path the Supreme Court has charted during the last few decades. He scathingly repeats the claim that judges are supposed to do law, not justice, (1) shaking his head as if the statement alone...