Learning life's lessons.

• Author: Tenpas, Ronald J.
• Position: Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Legacy of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connorp - Testimonial

Halfway through my clerkship with the Chief Justice, I committed a significant blunder. In an opinion for the Court authored by the Chief and for which I had prepared a draft of the section on procedural history, I had made an error. In describing the lower court's holding (on a matter not at issue when it arrived at the Court), I had described the appellate court as having reversed, when, in fact, it had affirmed the trial court. Because that portion of the procedural history was not significant to the Court's judgment, that portion of the draft opinion received little attention in the subsequent vetting within the Chief's chambers or, I imagine, in any of the other chambers. Thus, the opinion issued with the mistake incorporated, including directions for a remand back to the appellate court for further proceedings. While the error in the procedural history did not matter to the issue the Court was deciding, it was of real concern to the litigants, who feared that the remaining proceedings below could be prejudiced by the error in the Court's description. Thus, they filed a motion for rehearing.

When the petition came to my attention, I was, of course, mortified. I prepared a memo to the Chief, explaining the error and confessing my embarrassment at having confused "reversed" with "affirmed." I got it to him late in the afternoon and then had a sleepless night. Early the next morning, he called me into his office. Two things of consequence--at least for me--then happened. First, he indicated that he would circulate a memo to his fellow Justices, describing the mistake and suggesting that the most efficient way to fix it would be to convey to the counsel of record that the matter would be treated as a typographical error and corrected before the opinion was memorialized in the official reporters. He had thus found an efficient solution to a mistake I had caused.

More remarkably for me, he then went on to observe that, having himself once clerked for Justice Jackson, he imagined that I was feeling pretty low about the error. To say that he had read my mind on this point would have been an understatement, and I agreed that I was. He then told me a story about his early practice life in Phoenix, which had included working on land matters as a young associate in a firm. He relayed an incident in which he had erred in describing the plat information for a transfer, a mistake later caught by the senior partner. The point, he made clear, was that...