John Sexton Interview (page: 3 / 6) Education & Law	Print Interview

As the debate coach?

John Sexton: Yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Yes. In 1972 I turned 30, and I was the single parent of a wonderful three-year-old boy, and a group of my friends got me together and said, "Look," you know, "You've always wanted to go to law school. Twelve years with the girls is enough. You'd better do it." So I applied to five law schools -- four in New York, including NYU. And I applied to Harvard because a friend of mine -- now he's a very, very famous law professor, but then he was just a recently-tenured member of the Harvard Law School faculty, and we were buddies. His name is Larry Tribe -- and I thought that gave me kind of an edge up; Larry would write a letter for me. And I was denied at all five schools, because -- they were right to deny me; 2.1 grade point average, Ph.D. in religion. I'm leaving a tenured position. Why am I abandoning my discipline? This preposterous story about the girls that no one could understand on paper. So, Larry and this group of friends -- there's a group -- I'm blessed with great friends that go back over 40 years. Larry's one of them. A man named Bob Schrumm is one of them. A man named Lee Heubner who was, at that point, I think still in the Nixon White House with Buchanan and Safire heading the speech-writing team. And the three of them went in to the Harvard Admissions Committee and said, "You've got to reconsider this." And a woman named Molly Garrity called me. She died in 1999, but I called her every year to thank her, because it changed my life -- and she said, "You've been accepted on reconsideration." And I said to her, "I can't come." And she said, "What do you mean you can't come?" And I said, "Well, if I'm going to go to Harvard Law School," I said -- you know when I was growing up, my dad, whenever I got sassy, he would say, "What, you gonna be a Harvard lawyer?" You know, it was kind of an epithet. I didn't don't know what it meant. But here I was, about to go -- I'd done my doctoral dissertation in religion on Charles Eliot, who had been President of Harvard for 40 years. I said, "If I'm going to do this," I said, "I can't do this commuting from New York. And that means, since I won't leave the girls -- now, I cannot accept new kids in the program, but some of the kids have given me a commitment, I've given them a commitment, are just becoming sophomores. So, would you consider taking me three years from now?" And she said, "I now believe what you wrote about the girls." She said, "You're the first person accepted for the class of 1975" -- entering class of '75. And I got up there in '75, and I met my wife in Harvard Law School, and it took me two months to persuade her to marry me. So, it was a very good kind of coming together of everything.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

What was it like to clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger on the Supreme Court?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sexton: Well, you know, I have to say -- you get these blessings in life. Harvard, of course -- Harvard did me two great favors. They accepted me, which was this transformative experience I just spoke about. And then, of course, they graduated me -- and with all that that required. And they made me a hot prospect in the teaching market, and enabled me to get wonderful clerkships, first at the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, and then with Chief Justice Burger. Every day I walked up the steps of the Court I felt blessed. I mean, for a lawyer to be in that institution, to see its operations from the inside, to see the Justices at work was quite remarkable. It also was quite special for me to clerk for Burger. You know, when I first applied -- nah, you would have thought I would have been more mature. I was 37 years old when I'm graduating from law school. And I was very lucky. The Court of Appeals clerkship I got was my dream -- it was every prospective law professor's dream. That was with a man named Harold Leventhal, who was just a brilliant -- some would say the most brilliant judge of the last century. He died on November the 20th, playing tennis with my co-clerk, who is actually here today. We clerked together for two years, starting with Judge Leventhal. And I got the call from the tennis court that Judge Leventhal had collapsed playing tennis with Elliot. And within a week, I became law clerk to David Bazelon -- David Bazelon, the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, and perhaps the most activist liberal judge of the 20th century. There have been plenty of activist conservative judges now, to counterpoint him -- Judge, now Justice, Scalia for example, among them. And then, I went from Bazelon to Burger, which was quite interesting, because I'm probably the only living Bazelon-Burger connection. They had a deep animosity for each other. In fact, Judge Bazelon, when Warren Burger was named to the Supreme Court of the United States, was quoted in The Washington Post, when asked, "What's your reaction to this?" saying that he expected to be home sick in bed for a week. So this very visible animosity was part of my life, because I revered both these men.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. But, interestingly, when I had arrived in Judge Leventhal's chambers, I had only applied for clerkships at the United States Supreme Court with seven Justices. I had not applied to Burger, and I had not applied to Rehnquist. And Judge Leventhal found this out, and he called me in, and he said, "Do you expect me to recommend you to the Supreme Court?" And I said, "Well, I'm hopeful that my work is good enough." He said, "Your work is fine. I'm very happy to recommend you on that basis." He said, "But your arrogance is not fine." He said, "How could anybody, one year out of law school, strike two Justices of the Supreme Court from a list of applications?" He said, "I insist that you apply for all of them, or I won't support your application." So, at that point, at his insistence, I applied to Rehnquist and to Burger. It's interesting because the Judge died. I became a Bazelon clerk. And Warren Burger never interviewed his law clerks before choosing them. He had a committee interview them, and they gave him a slate of eight names, and he chose four from the eight. And when I became a Bazelon clerk -- the committee had told me that I would be their top nominee. But, of course, when I interviewed with them I was a Leventhal clerk. When I became a Bazelon clerk, I called them up and I said, "You may as well cross me off the list." And they said, "Don't underestimate the Chief Justice. See what happens."

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I got a call on December the 31st, 1979, from the head of the committee, and he said, "This is the Chief Justice's home phone number. He wants you to call him at home tomorrow between 10 and 12, because he wants to interview you. And I said, "Interview me? He never -- " They said, "You're the only person he's going to interview. And on January the 1st of 1980, I met Warren Burger at the side door to the United States Supreme Court, and we walked through the halls, turning on lights as we went. And he interviewed me for three hours. I had letters of recommendation, of course, from Larry Tribe, from Alan Dershowitz, from Derrick Fell -- I mean, it was an all-star cast of the left that had recommended me. And he probed me on: would they be disappointed, and so on? And then, I left. And he didn't offer me the job. And I got in the car -- and my wife was waiting outside, and I said, "I obviously didn't get it." Because it was not that I was competing against anyone, and he would -- and she said, "Well, let's see." And three days later he called and he said, "I haven't made up my mind on the others," he said, "but I know that" -- my mother was dying, and he knew that -- and he said, "I'd like to take this tension out of your life. Will you be my law clerk?" And I said, of course, yes. And then I called first my wife, then my mother. And then I called Judge Bazelon. And he said four times, "I can't believe it." And then he said -- I've never forgotten this -- he said, "It's the first time the son-of-a-bitch has ever exercised good judgment." And I ended up having the finest year that I could have hoped for, clerking for Warren Burger. Because it turned out that William Brennan, for whom I'd dreamt of clerking, and I would not have disagreed on a single case -- every bench memo that I wrote for the Chief Justice was the way -- when the case was decided, Justice Brennan voted.

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