Supreme Ambitions Read online

  DAVID LAT

  SUPREME AMBITIONS

  A NOVEL

  For my parents and for Charlene.

  “High status is thought by many (but freely admitted by few) to be one of the finest of earthly goods.”

  —Alain de Botton

  “If nothing else, there’s applause … like waves of love pouring over the footlights.”

  —All About Eve

  “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.”

  —Madonna

  SUPREME AMBITIONS

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  1

  The walk from the law school to Yorkside was short. This was good; I wanted this to be a short conversation. As a dutiful daughter, I felt the need to update my mother on important developments, but I didn’t want to get caught up in a long argument about my life and career choices.

  “Hi Mom. What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. Waiting for your father to come home from a job so we can have dinner. And your sister is coming over from the Center. Almost done cooking—I made sinigang, one of your favorites. Too bad you’re not here. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. I just wanted to let you know—I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week. For a clerkship interview with a judge.”

  “You’re flying out to L.A.? Next week? How much is your ticket?”

  “Five hundred or so,” I said (rounding down, and excluding taxes and fees).

  “Five hundred? That’s a lot. Why aren’t they paying? Like the law firms?”

  “I had to buy on short notice. And this isn’t a law firm. It’s for a clerkship. With a federal judge. It’s the government.”

  My mother sighed, in Queens. I heard her, in New Haven.

  “Audrey, I don’t understand why you want to do this ‘clerky’ thing. Your cousin Vincent works as a clerk.”

  “At a Shoe Mart in the Philippines. This is completely different.”

  “So you went to Harvard and Yale, and your dad and I borrowed all this money, and you borrowed all this money, so you could get a job as a clerk? Like your cousin Vincent?”

  “This is a law clerk position, with Judge Christina Wong Stinson. A federal judge. A federal appeals court judge. One level below the Supreme Court. And some say Judge Stinson herself might be nominated to the Supreme Court someday.”

  “Audrey, it’s up to you—your life, your career. I’m just a nursing assistant, I don’t know anything about this law-law stuff of yours.”

  “I’ve explained this before, Mom. A clerkship with a federal appellate judge is an amazing experience for a young lawyer, a chance to see litigation from the point of view of a judge. And it’s very prestigious. Top law students from around the country would kill for a Ninth Circuit clerkship.”

  Well, maybe not any Ninth Circuit clerkship; it would have to be with the right judge. The Ninth wasn’t as uniformly prestigious as, say, the D.C. Circuit. But I wasn’t about to try and explain this to my mother.

  “So this job is prestigious,” she said. “Is prestige going to pay your rent? Or your student loans?”

  Actually, it could. But I did not feel like explaining to my mother, a nurses’ aide whose interaction with lawyers was mercifully limited, the complex process by which the legal profession generates, fetishizes, and monetizes prestige.

  “I can live on a law clerk’s salary,” I said. “I’d be making at least $60,000 a year …”

  “Ay, susmariosep! Sixty thousand a year? Why don’t you just go back to that Cravath place? You’d be making over $150,000, right? Now that’s good money. Your father and I have never made that much in a year—combined.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. Maybe I would try and enlighten my mother. I had an idea about how to put a stop to her carping.

  “Cravath pays $160,000,” I said, referring to Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where I had worked as a summer associate (and which I had an offer to return to after graduation). “But what if I could get about twice that much—just as a signing bonus, on top of a six-figure salary?”

  I could sense my mother’s ears perking up. She was not a greedy woman and did not have extravagant tastes. But as an immigrant who had come to the United States with practically nothing, who had slowly scrimped and saved her way into the bottom rung of the middle class, she did not take money for granted. She had been dazzled by my job last summer at Cravath—a job that paid me more than $3,000 a week, while wining and dining me at Manhattan’s best restaurants—and couldn’t stop bragging about it to her friends.

  “So … how does that signing bonus work?” she asked. “I thought you said this clerk thing pays about $60,000?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “But if I get this clerkship and impress Judge Stinson, she could recommend me for a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice. And Supreme Court clerks, when they leave the Court and go to law firms, get huge signing bonuses—as high as $300,000. On top of a base salary of about $200,000.”

  My mother was momentarily silent—not her usual state.

  “Well,” she said, “that sounds pretty good. That could pay off your student loans instantly. And help out with the costs of your sister’s care. And maybe send your mom and dad on a cruise, ha! You should become a Supreme Court clerk.”

  I laughed—loudly—and then immediately felt guilty. But that was my spontaneous reaction to my mother’s comment. She might as well have said, “You should become an international luge champion.”

  “Mom, these positions are almost impossible to get. Supreme Court clerks are the best and the brightest young lawyers in the country.”

  “Audrey,” said my mother, in an almost lecturing tone, “you graduated magna from Harvard for college. Now you’re at Yale for law school, and you’re on law review. You worked over the summer at Cravath. How many are better and brighter than you? How many law students get profiled in the Filipino Reporter?”

  I was touched by my mother’s pride in me. And in the Filipino Reporter, the New York–area newspaper for the Filipino American community (“Fair, Fearless, Factual”). But I had to dispel her illusions.

  “There are hundreds of law students out there with résumés just like mine. There are 40,000 new law school graduates each year—and about 40 Supreme Court clerks. It is literally a one-in-a-thousand opportunity.”

  “But you are one in a million—and so pretty, too! Mesti
za beauty, as they say back home. Of course a supreme judge will want to hire you. Like that black one, the one who likes the dirty movies. Ha!”

  My mother started to laugh at her own joke, an old habit of hers. I felt myself blushing. (Due to my Irish heritage on my father’s side, I could pass as white and was quite capable of blushing.)

  “Mom, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Okay, hija. Be a good girl!”

  When I arrived at Yorkside, a casual pizza-and-diner-type eatery just down the street from the law school, Jeremy was already standing outside. He pretended to peruse the menu, even though he’d get the same thing he always got: a cheeseburger, with Swiss and lettuce and tomato, no bun. His near-pathological aversion to carbs helped him stay extremely thin. I was a size two, in good shape, but hanging out with Jeremy made me feel fat.

  A waitress, neither surly nor friendly, seated us in a roomy booth near the back, then took our drink order. I was grateful for the relatively private table. We decided to meet at Yorkside precisely to avoid the law school cafeteria (and not just because of its hummus of dubious provenance). The Yale Law School dining hall in early September—the height of clerkship application season for third-year law students, pursuant to the Law Clerk Hiring Plan—was a hive of anxiety and competitiveness.

  My friendship with Jeremy Silverstein dated back to our first year of law school, when we were in the same 1L class section. We frequently found ourselves on opposite sides of classroom debates: I was a moderate, which passed for conservative at the law school, while Jeremy was very liberal. But we bonded over a shared love of good Indian food and bad television. Now, as 3Ls, we served together as articles editors for the Yale Law Journal, spending many late nights arguing over which pieces to accept for publication.

  The waitress brought us our Diet Cokes and took our food order: cheeseburger sans bun for Jeremy, a chicken Caesar salad (dressing on the side) for me. Jeremy and I engaged in small talk—classes, journal submissions, gossip about a potentially philandering professor—before tackling the topic we had come to Yorkside to talk about: which clerkship interviews we had scored. Due to our different political views, we were applying to different slates of judges, meaning that we weren’t competing head-to-head for the same jobs. This allowed us to discuss clerkship applications without freaking each other out.

  “So, Miss Audrey,” said Jeremy, squeezing lemon into his drink with a chemist’s precision, “tell me which judges you’re interviewing with.”

  “Well, Mr. Silverstein, why don’t you tell me about your interview schedule?”

  “I asked you first,” he said—and he was correct. The playground rule has a legal counterpart: first in time, first in right.

  I smiled flirtatiously. Jeremy was a little too skinny, but cute. I sometimes wondered what our relationship would be like if he weren’t gay.

  “Right now I have four interviews,” I said, in as matter-of-fact a way as possible. But I knew four was impressive—and so did Jeremy, whose eyes grew wide.

  “Very nice,” he said. “I kind of hate you right now. So who are you seeing?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, pretending to search my memory, when actually he could have woken me up at three in the morning and I could have blurted out these names instantly. “Barbara McDaniel.”

  “You applied to a district judge?”

  “You’re such a snob! District court clerkships are often better learning experiences than circuit court clerkships. And it’s not just any district—it’s the Southern District of New York, the best trial court bench in the country, with the best cases. Judge McDaniel handled Enron, World-Com …”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said, “but district court is district court, and circuit court is circuit court. In district court, you’ll spend all your time dealing with crap like motions practice and discovery disputes. Trust me—I interned for a district judge after 1L year. Wouldn’t you rather be clerking for an appeals court, drafting opinions on big sexy issues of law?”

  Jeremy was a good person and one of my best friends, but he could be a horrible snob. In his defense, he was a product of his environment. A clerkship with a district judge, a trial-level judge in the federal system, was enormously prestigious and hard to get. But some people at Yale, both professors and students, quietly looked down upon district-court clerkships. There were some exceptions to this rule—it was okay to go district if you really wanted to be a trial lawyer, if you clerked for the right judge on the right district, if you followed it up with an appeals-court clerkship—but it generally held true.

  “All of my other interviews are circuit,” I said. “Michael DeConcini, Third Circuit. Steven Collins, Eighth Circuit.”

  “Ugh … Isn’t Collins in, like, Iowa?”

  “It’s only a year,” I said. “I could live anywhere for a year. I’m more focused on judges than geography. Collins has a great reputation. He graduated from here, clerked for the Supreme Court, served as U.S. Attorney. I could learn so much from him. And he could become a big feeder judge in a few years. In fact, he’s already fed a few of his clerks into Supreme Court clerkships.”

  “I could not live in Iowa for a year,” Jeremy said. “Geography aside, Collins is too conservative for me. Who’s your last interview?”

  “Judge Stinson, Christina Wong Stinson. Former district judge in Los Angeles, now on the Ninth Circuit?”

  “Hello! You don’t need to say that as a question! Stinson is major. Possible SCOTUS nominee in a Republican administration. She’d be the first Asian American on the Court. Feeder judge to the Dark Side—um, I mean, the conservative justices. Is she your first choice?”

  “I feel very lucky to have these interviews, and each judge has his or her own strengths …”

  Jeremy gave me a withering look.

  “Okay,” I said, “Stinson is my top choice.”

  I didn’t want to admit how badly I wanted to clerk for Judge Stinson. Articulating a desire and pursuing it avidly makes it so much worse when you fail. I thought of the William James quotation: “With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation.” But there was no sense in hiding such things from Jeremy.

  “So,” he asked, “I assume you’ve scheduled her first? So you can bag on the others if she makes you an offer?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, feeder judges move fast, and Stinson is a feeder. Nicely done, girl.”

  Jeremy raised his Diet Coke with lemon in my direction; we clinked glasses.

  “Stinson is a feeder judge,” I said, “but not a top, top feeder. Out of her four clerks each year, she feeds maybe one of them. It’s not a done deal that her clerks go on to the Supreme Court. You have to excel.”

  “That’s fair,” Jeremy said. “You probably have to be her favorite clerk in your year. She’s no Polanski.”

  Ah yes, the Honorable M. Frank Polanski—a colleague of Stinson’s on the Ninth Circuit, an indisputably brilliant jurist, and a possible Supreme Court nominee (handicapped mainly by his white-maleness, and partly by his reputation for being difficult). He was also, far and away, the top feeder judge in the country. Landing a Polanski clerkship was tantamount to landing a Supreme Court clerkship, since he had an almost perfect record of feeding his clerks to SCOTUS (with the help of the vast network of his former clerks, the Polanski Mafia).

  “Judge Polanski, I kind of hate him sometimes,” I said. “He and his clerks hog all the Supreme Court clerkships. It’s not fair.”

  “If only you had won the editor-in-chief job,” said Jeremy. “Then you might have gotten a Polanski interview.”

  “Stop torturing me! I’d be a lock for a Supreme Court clerkship as a Yale Law Journal EIC with a Polanski clerkship. And Polanski is an amazing judge who’s written some great opinions.”

  “Great if you oppose the Ninth Circuit’s efforts to bring justice and a progressive agenda to the western United States!”

  I laughed. The Ninth Circuit was the nation’s most
left-leaning appeals court, known for issuing decisions that were embraced by the ACLU and NPR crowds (before getting overturned by the Supreme Court). And Polanski was one of a handful of conservative judges who could get in the liberals’ way (unless he happened to side with them, which he did from time to time).

  The waitress arrived with our dishes, placing them before us unceremoniously, and asked us if we needed anything else. We did not.

  “So,” I asked Jeremy, as I added trace amounts of dressing to my salad, “those are all my interviews. Now tell me all about yours.”

  “I have three interviews,” Jeremy said. “First up is James Kenote.”

  “You applied to a district court judge?”

  “I’m willing to make an exception for the first openly gay man appointed to the federal bench.”

  In addition to serving as an articles editor, Jeremy was president of OutLaws and a cheerleader for all things gay.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Who else are you interviewing with?”

  “Sheldon Gottlieb, in Pasadena.”

  “Congrats! Your hero. The liberal lion of the nation’s most far-left appeals court.”

  We toasted again. Gottlieb was too old and too liberal to ever be nominated to the Supreme Court, so he did whatever the heck he wanted—and got away with it, thanks to lifetime tenure for federal judges. Jeremy idolized Sheldon Gottlieb for his outspokenness—on the bench and off, in opinions and in speeches—on behalf of various oppressed groups. But to many others, including myself, Gottlieb was a left-wing judicial activist who used the law to achieve goals he couldn’t accomplish through the ballot box.