LegalReader.com  ·  Legal News, Analysis, & Commentary

News & Politics

Meet Tommy Goldstein. The Hustler.


— April 3, 2006

Check out this fantastic article about Tom Goldstein from The New Republic. Goldstein is, among other things, the proprietor of the invaluable SCOTUSblog:

[A]t 35, Goldstein has already argued an astounding 16 cases in front of the justices–making him one of the youngest nongovernment lawyers ever to reach this mark. But the important thing to know about him isn’t the number of major cases he has handled. It’s the way he has handled them. What most distinguishes Goldstein from his colleagues in the ultra-patrician world of Supreme Court advocacy is that he didn’t learn his craft at an elite law school or at the side of a Supreme Court justice. He learned it from the generation of ambulance-chasers who had already crashed the rest of the legal world. It was only seven years ago, after all, that Goldstein, not far removed from his law school days at American University (A.U.), opened a practice from his laundry room and promptly began cold-calling prospective clients.

Needless to say, this brashness has not endeared him to the inhabitants of the world’s last great bastion of elitism. Roberts, a former Supreme Court advocate himself, is on the record deriding the practice of Supreme Court cold-calling. If you needed a heart surgeon, Roberts once mused to a reporter, you wouldn’t hire the one who called you out of the blue. According to former clerks, other justices have shared Roberts’s reservations about Goldstein’s entrepreneurial style. Former Justices William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor were known to look pained when presiding over Goldstein cases. Many of the clerks themselves–some of the top legal minds in the country, who exert enormous influence behind the scenes–apparently feel the same. Each year, they perform an annual revue, in which they impersonate the justices and a small number of unofficial fixtures at the Court. It is a sign of both his status and the scorn he evokes that Goldstein has merited his own personal roasting. And yet it is Goldstein, and not his detractors, who will surely win out in the end. In fact, he already has. These days, almost all but the whitest of white-shoe Supreme Court advocates do business the Goldstein way.

Via Bashman.


Check out this fantastic article about Tom Goldstein from The New Republic. Goldstein is, among other things, the proprietor of the invaluable SCOTUSblog:

[A]t 35, Goldstein has already argued an astounding 16 cases in front of the justices–making him one of the youngest nongovernment lawyers ever to reach this mark. But the important thing to know about him isn’t the number of major cases he has handled. It’s the way he has handled them. What most distinguishes Goldstein from his colleagues in the ultra-patrician world of Supreme Court advocacy is that he didn’t learn his craft at an elite law school or at the side of a Supreme Court justice. He learned it from the generation of ambulance-chasers who had already crashed the rest of the legal world. It was only seven years ago, after all, that Goldstein, not far removed from his law school days at American University (A.U.), opened a practice from his laundry room and promptly began cold-calling prospective clients.

Needless to say, this brashness has not endeared him to the inhabitants of the world’s last great bastion of elitism. Roberts, a former Supreme Court advocate himself, is on the record deriding the practice of Supreme Court cold-calling. If you needed a heart surgeon, Roberts once mused to a reporter, you wouldn’t hire the one who called you out of the blue. According to former clerks, other justices have shared Roberts’s reservations about Goldstein’s entrepreneurial style. Former Justices William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor were known to look pained when presiding over Goldstein cases. Many of the clerks themselves–some of the top legal minds in the country, who exert enormous influence behind the scenes–apparently feel the same. Each year, they perform an annual revue, in which they impersonate the justices and a small number of unofficial fixtures at the Court. It is a sign of both his status and the scorn he evokes that Goldstein has merited his own personal roasting. And yet it is Goldstein, and not his detractors, who will surely win out in the end. In fact, he already has. These days, almost all but the whitest of white-shoe Supreme Court advocates do business the Goldstein way.

Via Bashman.

Join the conversation!