Going Home Again

Last weekend I got to spend some time in New Orleans and Jackson, MS. I gave talks to the Federalist Society student chapters at the law schools of Loyola University and Mississippi College, but, more importantly, I attended the clerks' reunion honoring Judge E. Grady Jolly's 25th anniversary on the bench.

The ranks of Jolly clerk alumni now swell at 74 (plus one deceased), with the clerks currently inhabiting chambers not having been born when the first ones assumed their station. About 55 attended some portion of the weekend's festivities, which formally consisted of a Friday evening reception in New Orleans chambers, a Saturday evening reception and dinner in Jackson, and a Sunday morning brunch at Judge Jolly's house. It was interesting spending so much time with people who have so little in common with each other beyond all being lawyers and all having spent one magical year working for and learning from this judge's judge whom we can never repay.

For me, as for most, it was a character-building year. Beyond the professional skills and knowledge I gained, I absorbed the unique personality and temperament of a man who embodies good-hearted minimalism. "Decide the case on the narrowest grounds possible in the most concise opinion possible," he declaimed, and Lord help you (or, more likely, one of his colleagues on the Fifth Circuit bench) if you strayed from that path.

The path being the one tracking down the Big Coon, of course, a.k.a. the right answer, and the straying being along those darned rabbit trails that always seemed to spring up to distract us loyal coon dogs -- with the Judge directing us as the bemused hunter. As one clerk said during the after-dinner remarks, "he taught us a lot about life and love, and a little about the law too."

It's only been three years since I left Jackson for the wider world of law firms and think tanks in Washington, but I cannot say enough good things about that year in Mississippi.