Judge Laurence Silberman of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals typically only hired law clerks out of Harvard Law School, with, as he puts it, the occasional Yale or University of Chicago graduate “sprinkled” in.
But one day, two professors he knew at Notre Dame Law School called him. “We have a woman, first in her class at Notre Dame, who we are convinced would be first in the class at Harvard,” Silberman recalls them telling him. “She is that good. And you have to take her.”
So he did. He hired Amy Coney Barrett to clerk for him for the 1997-1998 term, then recommended her to Scalia the following year, setting her on a path that is about to result in her becoming the youngest—and one of the most conservative— Supreme Court justices on the bench.
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