A LIBERTARIAN LITIGATOR DONS THE JUDGE'S ROBES.

• Author: Root, Damon
• Position: LAW - Arizona Supreme Court associate justice Clint Bolick

CLINT BOLICK, A co-founder of the Institute for Justice, was for years one of the libertarian movement's most successful trial lawyers. In 2002, his advocacy for school choice culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which Cleveland's pioneering school voucher program was upheld. Three years later, he argued and won Granholm v. Heald, in which the Court struck down protectionist state laws that banned the direct sale of wine to consumers from out-of-state wineries.

In 2007, he joined the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, as vice president for litigation. But now Bolick is shaping the law from the other side of the bench.

In 2016, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed him to the state Supreme Court. Under the terms of the Arizona Constitution, a justice must stand in a judicial retention election two years after being appointed, and then stand again every six years after that. In November 2018, Bolick kept his seat with 71 percent of the vote.

The libertarian litigator has already distinguished himself as a justice. In Arizona v. Maestas (2018), for instance, he wrote a significant concurring opinion in the case of a valid medical marijuana card holder arrested by Arizona State University police for having a small amount of pot in his dorm room. The case turned on whether a 2012 law forbidding the possession of marijuana on state college campuses could be squared with the Arizona Medical...