I am grateful to have started my career clerking for Chief Justice Abrahamson. She was a generous mentor and maintained incredibly good humor despite the intense demands and challenges of the job. I was inspired by her passion for reaching a fair, defensible result in every case and by her boundless commitment to serving the public. Chief Justice Abrahamson inspired me to become a judge and I was lucky to know her.
Since clerking, I have been a litigator at Quarles & Brady in Madison, where I live with my wife and three kids. And all of that actually traces to my time with the Chief. I’d originally planned to leave Madison for a job in D.C. after my clerkship ended. But a few weeks in, the Chief asked me to stay for a second year, when she’d be running for reelection. A bit after I said yes, it occurred to me that going two years without meeting anyone outside the office might be a bad idea. This resulted, unexpectedly, in my […]
I worked late with the Chief (always “the Chief” to me) 5-6 days a week, except when she was traveling. As she joked more than once, by day, she was the Chief Justice Abrahamson. At night she was Justice Abrahamson. Most of her case work gone done after hours. At least in those days, her clerk’s office had two desks. During the days, the externs from University of Wisconsin, Marquette and Northeastern would rotate sitting in the other desk because it was nicer and gave them better access to the justices than the windowless extern office upstairs, though it was […]
I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to clerk for the Chief. I didn’t have a job immediately out of law school, but Justice Bradley was gracious enough to offer me the opportunity to volunteer in her chambers while I continued my search. After a few months, the phone rang in the intern office and it was Justice Bradley on the phone. The Chief’s clerk had decided to depart and the Chief was interested in hiring Christine Remington and me to share his spot. I would interview in ten minutes. I could hardly believe it.
Most of my memories are not stories, per se. More Chief-isms: Her inability to remember anybody’s name, and thus use of the word “friend.” Waking her up from her power naps on the couch in her office. Opinion-writing weekends, seeing us sit and write in tandem at the desks in the clerk’s office, often culminating over Saturday take out dinner, where she always ordered the tenderloin salad. Her willingness to drive me home late at night, even though it was out of the way. The shag carpet throughout her house, including the bathroom. The soft and caring heart inside her […]
My clerkship year with Chief Justice Abrahamson was fascinating and challenging. It was fascinating because the Wisconsin Supreme Court has discretion over which appeals to hear. Every case the Court takes involves issues of first impression, with many important doctrinal and policy choices for the court to make. It was challenging because the workload was intense. We had around 90 cases that term, and I was the only law clerk in the Chief’s chambers. We had a lot of help from interns, though. Working for Chief Justice Abrahamson taught me the meaning of hard work. She typically worked from 9 a.m. […]
My clerkship with Shirley was both inspiring personally and foundational to my legal development. She stood as a living example of how to navigate a career dedicated to public service and built on a bedrock of ethics. To this day, I keep of photograph of her in my office that I can see from my desk as a reminder that she is both watching me, and watching over me. In addition to a foremost legal mind, Shirley was tough as nails, and all business in the courtroom, often displaying a rather stern demeanor with the litigators. For instance, during the […]
Twenty-six years after my clerkship, it’s the small things I remember, including: The power of red grapes: I didn’t know that they were Shirley’s secret manna. How many nights and weekends did we together feed on those little red things, which kept us going…
I clerked for “the Boss,” as I still call Shirley in my mind to this day, during Justice Day’s lone year as Chief (Shirley’s nickname was bestowed by her assistant during my year there: Sue Fieber). Legends (and fables) be damned: what I saw, all year, was a lovefest between Chief Justice Day and the Boss, who would become Chief upon Justice Day’s retirement. For all their disputes and differences, ideological and philosophical, these two long-serving Justices shared an abiding commitment to the Court as an institution that’s been MIA during the ensuing quarter century, during which one of the […]
This is a photo from the wedding that Shirley performed for me and my husband, Greg Boyer, in Madison on June 28, 2002. (When I suggested swapping “husband and wife” in our minimal vows for “partners,” she admonished that the statute – providing the citation off the top of her head – required “husband and wife.”)