Supreme Ambitions by David Lat Read Free Book Online Page A

exchanged contact info and agreed to hang out sometime.
    As I headed back to my apartment, I continued to think about Harvetta. I would have expected someone who liked to read law review articles for pleasure to have attended a higher-ranked law school than McGeorge (whose rank I looked up on my iPhone almost immediately after we parted ways; it wasn’t even in the U.S. News top 100). And I wondered about where her whole “street talk” thing came from. If I had to guess, she was from an upper-middle-class African American family but was trying to “keep it real” by sounding like someone from a more modest background.
    Based on the fact that she had landed a clerkship with Justice Lin, Harvetta must have done fairly well in law school. But even a clerkship on the California Supreme Court, the highest court of the largest state, was less prestigious than most federal court clerkships. As for U.S. Supreme Court clerkships, I wondered: did Harvetta even know about them?

4
    I was nervous when I arrived at the Ninth Circuit courthouse for my first day at work. My pale gray Theory skirt suit, a pricey splurge from my summer at Cravath, wasn’t giving me the usual jolt of confidence. I don’t sweat very much, but by the time I arrived at work, I was sweating—and not from the seven-minute walk from my apartment to the courthouse, in a still-cool California morning.
    This Monday marked the start of my Legal Career. And because I went straight though to law school from college, this was also the first day of my first Real Job. This was a Big Deal.
    When I reached the door to Judge Stinson’s chambers on the fifth floor, I pressed the buzzer tentatively, just as I had when I came for my interview. Instead of being buzzed in, the door flew open before me.
    â€œAudrey! So wonderful to see you! Welcome!”
    Before I knew what was going on, I was being hugged by the judge’s secretary, Brenda Lindsey— all of Brenda Lindsey. I tried my best to return the hug, although I feared I was doing so too stiffly. Brenda and I had met just once, but as the outgoing clerks had told me, Brenda viewed the clerks like her children.
    â€œThe judge is out of town this week for a conference,” Brenda said, “but let me show you to your office and introduce you to the other clerks.”
    I was the last of my clerk class to arrive, a position I had chosen to give myself time to decompress after taking the bar exam in late July. The downside of arriving last meant I got the one windowless office, whilemy co-clerks enjoyed views of the Arroyo Seco valley and the Colorado Street Bridge. I consoled myself by telling myself this would be an advantage: a windowless office meant fewer distractions from work. (And I could always go work in the chambers library—yes, the chambers had its own private library, in addition to the main courthouse library on the first floor—if I wanted sunlight and a view.)
    As for my co-clerks, we had already met each other online—i.e., over email and Facebook—but meeting them in person still felt momentous. Would we become fast friends, foxhole buddies in the Ninth Circuit’s jurisprudential war? Would we wind up as rivals for the favor of Judge Stinson, constantly trying to outdo and one-up each other? Or maybe a bit of both? The legal profession, stocked with competitive overachievers, was rife with such “frenemy” relationships.
    Something made me uncomfortable about Amit Gupta, a graduate of Columbia Law, where he had served as executive managing editor of the Columbia Law Review . (He didn’t mention that when we met, but of course I had looked up all my co-clerks on Google prior to arriving in chambers.) Amit seemed intense, energetic, and high-strung; he bowed slightly when he shook my hand and said, in a manner that bordered on fake, “It is a pleasure to meet you!”
    We had some things in common—minorities, both from