“For a young lawyer who's interested in how the law shapes this country,” said Jordan Goldberg ’14, “it's an immensely exciting opportunity and a true privilege.”
Goldberg was referring to his upcoming clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which gets underway this summer. Sotomayor was appointed in 2009 after being nominated by President Barack Obama.
The highly competitive one-year position will give Goldberg the opportunity to be closely involved in the workings of the country’s highest court. “The clerk's job is to help the justice figure out the right answer in any given case,” explained the government and legal studies major, “and the work falls into three main ‘buckets.’”
First, they help the court figure out which cases to take. “The Supreme Court gets around 7,500 requests to hear a case each year, but it only actually resolves between sixty and seventy cases per year, so the clerks play a large role in advising the justices which cases merit the court's review,” said Goldberg.
The clerks’ second main task, he continued, is to help the justices decide the correct outcome in cases that the court decides to take up. “This involves reading the briefs, the case law, the record, the statutes if relevant, to figure out the important points of the case and to help the justice decide which way to vote.”
Third, if a justice is assigned to write an opinion on a case, the clerks often help them do this. “However,” said Goldberg, “as I understand it, individual justices vary as to how much they independently write their own opinions and how much they rely on their clerks.”
Goldberg knows he’ll be in for an interesting and busy time at his next job, as President Donald Trump’s moves to exert his executive power look set to come up against numerous legal challenges. “I expect there to be cases relating to the policies and priorities of the administration coming before the Supreme Court over the next months and years.”
Climbing the Legal Ladder
Goldberg’s path to a promising legal career began when he was a child, he said. “As a kid, I loved lawyer shows on TV, and then in high school I started to get involved in advocacy-type things, particularly environmental issues.” From the beginning, Goldberg said he has regarded law as a way of trying to fix the problems of the world.
He has fond memories of his classes at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾, enjoying Jean Yarbrough’s class American Political Thought and Religion and Politics with Paul Franco. “It was my sophomore year that really opened my eyes to legal studies, when I took Dick Morgan’s constitutional law classes.” In his junior year, Goldberg went on to take George Isaacson’s comparative constitutional law class, something that solidified his ambition to pursue a legal career. “George became a mentor to me, and we had some wonderful conversations.” In one of those conversations, recalled Goldberg, Isaacson (ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Class of 1970), who was also a senior partner at a Maine law firm, stressed the difference between attending a constitutional law seminar and working as a practicing lawyer.
“He said that, before making a decision about whether to go to law school, it would be good to get some experience of the actual practice of law.” So, after graduation Goldberg worked as a paralegal at Isaacson’s law firm in Lewiston, Maine, for two years. “I was not scared away from the profession—on the contrary,” said Goldberg. His next destination was Yale Law School, where, among other things, he was managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.
In the five years since law school, Goldberg has gained valuable experience as a clerk, first for a federal district court judge in Manhattan and then for a federal court of appeals judge in Bethesda, Maryland. He’s currently an associate at a Washington, DC, law firm, where he is a member of the supreme court and appellate practice.
Some Free Legal Advice
While Goldberg’s academic background and career path have been on a legal track from the outset, he said lawyers can come from a variety of backgrounds.
“I have friends who went from ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ to law school, and who have been tremendously successful lawyers, who were visual arts majors, history majors, EOS majors,” said Goldberg, who minored in English. “What unites them is they have a passion for learning.” One skill that lawyers must have and that his ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ education gave him, said Goldberg, was the ability to read and write at a high level. “Learning how to process and synthesize complex information and how to express your ideas through the written word are some of the most valuable assets you can have, in law and in life.”
