By Steven B. Duke

1. INTRODUCTION

I became a lawyer – a profession that none of my ancestors, parents, siblings, or even distant relatives had any connection with, a profession that I entered only because of an encounter I had with a magistrate when I was a senior in college.

            Because I did well in law school, I had the opportunity to clerk for Justice William O. Douglas.  As I discuss in this article, working for Justice Douglas was a rewarding and demanding experience.  Douglas probably was the most liberal Justice ever to serve on the Supreme Court.  He had a dazzling intellect and wrote many books on all manner of subjects.  As the Justice’s only law clerk, I worked long hours, assisting him on cases and with speeches, articles, and books.  He was brusque in our interactions at work.  Working for him was thankless and stressful. 

            Nevertheless, I regard my year (1959-1960) as Justice Douglas’s law clerk as the most rewarding professional experience of my life.  I learned a great deal about federal law and the Supreme Court and became more skilled and self-confident as an attorney as a result of the experience.  After the clerkship and a year of graduate studies, I became a professor at Yale Law School.  After I received tenure, I began to represent criminal defendants, mostly on a pro bono basis, which I continued to do for seven decades.  I am sure that Justice Douglas influenced my decision to become a criminal defense attorney while I also was teaching students, writing articles and books, and performing other responsibilities as a professor. 

            I have written this article to trace my journey from Arizona, where I grew up and was educated, to Washington, D.C., and then New Haven, Connecticut.  My experiences growing up instilled liberal values in me; this helped me understand and apply Justice Douglas’s views when working for him.  In certain ways, my father’s way of interacting with me and my brothers resembled the way in which Justice Douglas dealt with me at work.  As a result, it did not disturb me when he was curt or gruff with me in chambers. 

            I was born during the Great Depression and experienced World War II through the prisoners of war quartered in the Arizona village where I grew up.  My success in law school provided me the opportunity to clerk for Justice Douglas during the era of the Warren Court.  At the risk of sounding cliched, that world has vanished.  Change is inevitable, and we can debate whether the changes in law, society, and the Supreme Court since the last century have been for the better.  I have written this article to illuminate some of these changes, to provide insight into Justice Douglas, and to describe how clerking for him influenced my decision to practice criminal law while leading the privileged life of an academic.

*Steven B. Duke is a Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.  He thanks Rodger Citron, John Q. Barrett, and the editors of the Touro Law Review for their comments on earlier versions of this article.  Copyright Steven Duke (2024).

Read or download the full text of the article below.

About Steven B. Duke:

Professor Steven B. Duke teaches and writes on criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and drug policy. From 1981 until 2003, he was the Law of Science and Technology Professor. He received his B.S. degree from Arizona State University and his J.D. from the University of Arizona, where he was editor-in-chief of the first Arizona Law Review. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas after which he received an LL.M. degree from Yale Law School. Professor Duke has visited at the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall), the University of California at San Francisco (Hastings College of Law), and Arizona State University. He has submitted many briefs on criminal matters to the United States Supreme Court and has orally argued three cases in that Court. He has also briefed and argued numerous other cases in state and federal courts throughout the United States.

Summary:

Right out of law school, Joshua Perry moved to New Orleans to work as a public defender. In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when reformers were trying to fix a broken criminal justice system on the fly, Perry was thrown untrained into defending the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the next decade, Perry served as general counsel at the Orleans Public Defenders and then Executive Director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, the city’s juvenile defender.

Now, Perry’s debut novel Seraphim – about two carpetbagging public defenders who end up defending a youth accused of high-profile murder – reflects on that experience. It’s a noir legal thriller, and also a meditation on inequality, Judaism, violence, and the often complicated relationship between fathers and sons.  Perry discusses all of these subjects with Associate Dean Rodger Citron in this podcast.          

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Learn more about Joshua Perry, Esq.

Joshua Perry, Esq.:

Joshua Perry was a public defender in New Orleans for a decade, serving as General Counsel to the New Orleans Public Defenders and Executive Director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, the city’s public defender for children.

From 2019 through 2022, he served as Special Counsel for Civil Rights to the Connecticut Attorney General. Now he is the State of Connecticut’s Solicitor General, leading the team that represents the state in complex cases in the federal and state appellate courts.

Josh lives in New Haven with his wife and three children.