BRUCE J. BERGERWriter
Teacher

It’s been fifty years since I was a law clerk to the Honorable Judge John Minor Wisdom, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. How is it possible that so much time has passed? In many ways, my first post-law-school job seems like it could have ended only yesterday.

I remember many things about my forty-year career as a lawyer, and I was fortunate enough to have a few excellent positions, such as the thirty years I spent as a partner of Hollingsworth LLP in Washington, DC, but nothing could ever have matched the excitement of that first job with the judge, or the rewards I felt in making the transition from school to professional life, or the growing confidence in my choice of law as a career. Little in my professional life after that matched the responsibility of drafting opinions in multi-million dollar cases or in evaluating the hundreds of appeals of incarcerated individuals, most of which we disposed of fairly quickly, or in briefing Judge Wisdom as he prepared for oral arguments.

But what I recall the most – and the reason I still occasionally have dreams of returning to that clerkship long after my legal career has ended and my writing/teaching career began – is the overwhelming decency and humanity of Judge Wisdom. I can still recall his smile as we met for the first time in the hallway leading to his chambers. My co-clerk Anton had driven him to the courthouse that day and was there as well. Naturally, I was early (or maybe the judge was late), but finally here was the man whose voice I first heard over the telephone when he tracked me down in a law library the summer to offer me the position, a great honor. Here finally was the man I’d heard and read so much about, a hero judge of the civil rights movement, a Southerner who did everything in his power to advance the cause of justice even as his decisions cost him many friendships. Here finally was a man whom I must have once seen a picture of once and whose image had made its way into my dreams before I’d met him. It didn’t take more than a few minutes that first day before he’d invited me to his house – along with my girlfriend Lou and my other co-clerks – for dinner and an introduction to his wife, Bonnie.

Judge Wisdom was a mentor, and now that I teach writing at American University I try to be a mentor as well to my students. (Unlike Judge Wisdom, however, I do not offer alcoholic beverages. At that first dinner, the judge amused us all by accidentally letting Scotch slosh out of his tumbler onto the sofa cushion and then trying to hide the damage by turning the cushion over. We all saw it.) I was already a pretty good writer when I got to law school and later wouldn’t have made the Harvard Law Review if I had not been, and my work on the Review made me an even better writer, but there was still a lot to learn in New Orleans. I worked late often enough some nights, editing opinions, that I was the last one in chambers. I learned how to relax in the afternoon after a two-martini lunch. I learned to ask for extra work, particularly after the Judge was appointed to his third court during my one-year tenure: in addition to being a judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, he was a judge on the Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation and on the Special Railroad Reorganization Court. (If I could only relive one of those scores of times I drove Judge Wisdom to work and we chatted about life and politics the whole way.)

But among the important things I learned were that I could hold my own in a legal discussion with a scholar of the law, that I could make credible legal arguments to judges, and, above all, that one could have an important high position in society and yet be a down-to-earth human being, that one could manage a group of colleagues, not by fear or coercion, but by decency.

In short, I learned what it means to be real.