Intrigued by my new neighbor, I didn’t notice how much I was leaning into the white gate — which swung open with a loud creaking noise. I fell forward for a second before regaining my footing. The young woman looked up, and our eyes met.
“Girl, what you looking at?”
Her aggressive tone caught me off guard. I was momentarily speechless.
“What,” she said, “are your ears as small as your tiny white ass?”
I didn’t have much of a choice at this point, so I tried to diffuse her hostility with warmth. I walked over to her, put on a big smile, and extended my hand.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Audrey. I just moved into the building.”
“Harvetta,” she said, rising to her feet and shaking my hand. “Harvetta Chambers.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, um, startle you. I was just, well, you know…”
“Oh, I know, all right! You were just checking out my big black booty!”
She slapped her sizable thighs and laughed. I laughed too, feeling relieved; Harvetta’s belligerence was playful. Was she going to be my new Sassy African-American Friend?
“Actually,” I said, “I noticed your reading material. No offense to the Stanford Law Review, but it’s not my idea of a poolside read. It’s a bit serious, don’t you think?”
“You kidding? I love it. I love law review articles. I can get interested in almost any type of law. For my job I’m a state law kinda gal, but today I’m reading on the federal side, about the effect of the SEC’s new proxy access rule on shareholder value for small companies. Next up is a linguistic analysis of ERISA preemption. Right now I’m like a pig in shit!”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that.
“So,” I said, “did you go to Stanford Law?”
“Naw,” Harvetta said, “Stanford? That place is for rich bitches. I keep it real — I went to McGeorge. You a lawyer too?”
“Well, almost, kind of,” I said, as I frantically tried to recall what I even knew about McGeorge. Was that the law school in Sacramento? The one where a Supreme Court justice likes to teach? “I took the bar a few months ago, but I haven’t gotten the results yet, so I’m not yet a lawyer. Right now I’m clerking for a judge.”
“Get the fuck outta here! Me too. Who you clerking for?”
“Judge Stinson? Ninth Circuit? How about you?”
“Sherwin Lin, California Supreme Court.”
I didn’t know that much about state court clerkships, but I had a vague recollection of the California Supreme Court using long-term staff lawyers rather than law clerks.
“Oh,” I said, trying my best to sound politely confused, “I thought that the California justices didn’t have law clerks?”
“Yeah,” Harvetta said, “the Cal Supremes usually roll with permanent staff attorneys. But Lin is trying out the clerk thing — a mix of staff attorneys and term clerks. We’re his first clerks. It’s an experiment. Hope we don’t fuck that shit up for everybody else!”
My strict Filipina mother did not tolerate profanity, and so people who cursed a fair amount — like Jeremy, and definitely like Harvetta — sometimes threw me for a loop. My face must have betrayed my discomfort at Harvetta’s manner of speaking.
“What,” said Harvetta, “is my potty mouth freaking you out, girl?”
“Ha! Well, you see, I just….”
“I am like the president,” Harvetta said, raising her arms skyward and adopting a markedly different tone, straight out of the evening newscast. “I am extremely talented at calibrating my manner of speaking to my audience. Do you think I obtained a clerkship with the Honorable Sherwin Lin by cursing up a blue streak during the interview?”
Once again, Harvetta left me speechless. She liked to read law review articles for fun. She could oscillate seamlessly between gangster and grande dame. Who was this bizarre woman?
“So,” she asked, as I tried to collect my dropped jaw from the pool deck, “where did you go to law school? Some fancy-ass place, I bet?”
“Um, Yale?”
“Yeah, I figured,” she said, smacking my forearm — surprisingly hard. “Don’t worry, I won’t player-hate. My boss went to Yale, so I have mad respect.”
That’s right: Harvetta’s judge, Sherwin Lin, was still renowned at Yale for his brilliance. He served as executive editor of the law journal, won a slew of prizes at graduation, and clerked on the D.C. Circuit (of course) followed by the U.S. Supreme Court (of course). He was nominated to the Ninth Circuit before the age of 40, but some of his controversial speeches and academic writings as a UCLA law professor derailed his nomination. After the Republicans successfully filibustered his Ninth Circuit appointment, the governor appointed him to the California Supreme Court.
Despite (or perhaps because of?) my puzzlement at Harvetta, I felt I wanted to get to know her better. She seemed friendly, beneath the tough-talking veneer, and she was without a doubt an interesting character. We exchanged contact info and agreed to hang out sometime soon.
As I headed back to my apartment, I continued to think about Harvetta. I would have expected someone who liked to read law review articles for pleasure to have attended a higher-ranked law school than McGeorge (whose rank I looked up on my iPhone almost immediately after we parted ways; McGeorge was #101 on the U.S. News list). And I wondered about where her whole “street talk” thing came from. If I had to guess, she was from an upper-middle-class African-American family but was trying to “keep it real” by sounding like someone from a more modest background.
Based on the fact that she had landed a clerkship with Justice Lin, Harvetta must have done fairly well in law school. But even a clerkship on the California Supreme Court, the highest court of the largest state, was less prestigious than most federal court clerkships. As for U.S. Supreme Court clerkships, I wondered: did Harvetta even know about them?
<—Previously: 15: Transitions
Subsequently—>17: First Day
Yeah, Liu hiring someone from McGeorge is a little unbelievable.
I like Harvetta as a character. She’s fun, a study in contrasts, and she breaks up what’s otherwise likely to be the consistency of the clerks’ educational backgrounds. I’m less wild about the Sherwin Lin — Goodwin Liu parallel. (Although Justice Lin may be different than Justice Liu, whose hiring requirements were as elite as any circuit judge’s, given the COA clerkship quasi-prerequisite: “Associate Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court is hiring two law clerks, each for an 18- to 24-month term. One position will begin in January 2012; the other will begin in fall 2012 … Applicants who are one to five years out of law school and who have previously clerked for a federal appellate court are strongly preferred. The position is based in San Francisco. “)
Also, serious question: does the CSC station any elbow clerks down in Los Angeles? I know they hold oral arguments there for part of the year. I’d assumed that the staff was centralized in SF, but I’m realizing that might not be accurate.
Oh my. So wrong on so many levels.
Ninth Alum asked, “does the CSC station any elbow clerks down in Los Angeles?” The court does not use the term “elbow clerk” (a Ninth Circuit distinction between a judge’s own clerks and the staff attorneys of the court’s central staff), but the answer is no (although I believe one may commute back and forth). Even past justices who did not live in San Francisco full time (e.g., former Chief Justice Lucas and former Justice Moreno) had San Francisco staff entirely.
Thanks, anon. That’s what I thought. As for “elbow law clerk,” I also heard it when I was a district court clerk (to differentiate “chambers clerks” from pro se and death penalty clerks), so I’m not sure it’s exclusive to the Ninth Circuit. But thanks for letting me know that the CSC does not use the term.
Thanks for all the great comments! I’m aware I’m taking some liberties here with respect to the California Supreme Court and the location of its staff. In a subsequent chapter, there will be an explanation for why Harvetta is in Pasadena.
We should start a running list of potential cast if this were turned into a movie. My suggestions so far:
1. Audrey – Kristin Kreuk (or Lat-in-drag)
2. Jeremy Silverstein – Jense Ackels (Russell Brand would be an inspired pick)
3. Pervez Hamadani – Kal Penn (from Harold & Kumar)
4 Judge Stinson – Catherine Zeta-Jones (Lat’s pick). Although you could convert her to full Chinese and cast Michelle Yeoh.
5. Brenda Lindsey (Stinson’s secretary) – Kinna McInroe (Office Space…”Just a moment.”)
6. Harvetta Chambers – Gabourey Sidibe (Lat’s pick). I prefer Jennifer Hudson or Elie-in-drag.
HA!!! Great call on #6, Jennifer Hudson. But it would have to be the OLD J-Hud, not the skinny little thing she is today.
Also, I wasn’t familiar with her until you mentioned her, so I Googled her — Kristin Kreuk is PERFECT. She’s who I see in my mind’s eye when I imagine Audrey. Brilliant.
Fine, we’ll stick with Gabourey Sidibe until JHud goes off the wagon. I think it would be easier for you go get JHud, since she happens to be married to David Otunga, the Harvard Law-turned-WWE wrester, whom I believe you have written about on ATL.
Ninth alum: I didn’t mean to imply that “elbow clerk” was unique to the 9th, although I guess my sentence kind of did that.
I’ve heard it from appellate clerks & staff attorneys from around the country, but it’s definitely not a CSC term, and I doubt you would hear it anywhere in the California appellate system. Cheers.
“Lin is trying out the clerk thing — two staff attorneys, two term clerks.” Justices on the California Supreme Court have five attorneys on their staffs (and have had since about 1986 or so). Justice Liu is presently using two permanent staff attorneys and three term clerks. I assume Justice Lin will discover a fifth person on his staff at some point.
I based this statement on an article that appeared in the Daily Journal on November 17, 2011, regarding a new justice who planned “to hire at least two clerks in addition to two career staff attorneys.” It looks like the magic number turned out to be three. I’ll make an edit to fix this issue.
^^ It was unclear at the outset exactly how he would structure things.
But, he went with 2 & 3. Curiously, most of the justices pre-1987 had a 3 & 2 breakdown, and then the staffs gradually became all permanent with the exception of two to four annuals on the criminal central staff.