Word: clerkes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ruff. Ruff transferred him to the military operator so that Bennett could tell the President himself. And while Bennett was waiting for a line to the President in Senegal, it occurred to him that he had better check and make sure someone wasn't pretending to be Wright's clerk for an April Fools' joke. He put his hand over the phone and asked his associate Amy Sabrin to call the judge's chambers and make sure about the ruling. She did, and by the time Bruce Lindsey answered and handed the phone to the President, Bennett was ready...
Then the phone rang. It was a clerk from Judge Wright's office, saying that in 30 minutes the judge would issue her ruling in the case. She was granting the motion for summary judgment. It was all over. Bennett had taken a lot of criticism for not settling earlier and avoiding the entire Circus of 1998. But he was convinced all the dirt would have found its way out anyway, and any settlement that included an apology, which Jones' husband had insisted on, would have been seen as an admission of guilt that Clinton would never escape...
When Missouri put George ("Tiny") Mercer to death in January 1989, a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist told his Supreme Court colleagues it was time to allow more executions. "In case anyone hadn't noticed, we had a successful execution last night," Robert Giuffra exhorted. "We need to get our numbers up after only 11 in 1988 and five since July." Giuffra was one of an influential "cabal" of conservative law clerks who used their proximity to the Justices to work against abortion rights and affirmative action and to try to cut back on the court's review...
These are among the claims of Closed Chambers (Times Books; $27.50), the first insider's account of the workings of the Supreme Court. Written by Edward Lazarus, who was a clerk for former Justice Harry Blackmun, it features frank, behind-the-scenes assessments of the Justices and quotes from E-mail sent over the court's computers. The book discusses legal history and doctrines, but it is the tales out of school that will no doubt attract the most attention. Lazarus repeats accounts that Thurgood Marshall, the court's legendary first black Justice, watched soap operas during the workday...
Lazarus' description of the role of a cabal of conservative law clerks in swaying the court ideologically should sound alarms. In 1988-89, the period of Lazarus' clerkship, liberal Justices who had for decades won the major ideological battles suddenly began losing. One case that year about on-the-job racial harassment so dramatically set back civil rights law that Congress passed a new statute that reversed the ruling. Not infrequently, Lazarus contends, it was the clerks--highly credentialed recent law-school graduates hired by individual Justices to help research cases and draft opinions--who helped manipulate the results...