The Washington Lawyer magazine has a very interesting interview with Georgetown lawprof Peter B. Edelman that includes reflections on clerking for Justice Goldberg in 1962-63:
What was Justice Goldberg like?
He was a wonderful person. Very warm. He treated his law clerks like family. Working for him was an eye-opening experience. His first question in approaching a case always was, “What is the just result?” Then he would work backward from the answer to that question to see how it would comport with relevant theory or precedent. It took me a while to get used to that approach. The way I had learned the law at Harvard was that you looked up the answer in a book. The law was composed of “neutral principles” that you could apply to get the proper result, and you never really asked whether it was just or not. Justice Goldberg opened my consciousness to the fact that the overarching purpose is about justice.What year were you at the Supreme Court?
I was there for the term that began in October 1962.Did you have a favorite case?
The case I remember best is Rusk v. Cort, in which the government had stripped Dr. Joseph Cort of his citizenship on the grounds that he failed to return to the United States to respond to a draft notice in 1952 during the Korean War. The question at issue was whether this was constitutional, and by a vote of 5–4, the Court ruled that it was not. Justice Goldberg wrote the opinion, which I helped draft. Six years later, my wife and I were traveling through Czechoslovakia on our honeymoon, and I looked up Dr. Cort, who resided in Prague. I thought he would be pleased with the opinion of the Court, which said that his citizenship could not be taken away. But he was not at all grateful. He told me that if he went back to the United States he could still be prosecuted for avoiding the draft. I confess I had not thought through the real-life meaning of the decision. I learned a lesson that day.
Hat tip: Ed @ Bench Memos.
UPDATE: The rest of the interview is also quite interesting, including this recollection of Justice Goldberg’s run for New York governor in 1970:
Then in 1970 Justice Goldberg decided to run for governor of New York, and I was asked to be the issues director for the campaign. My relationship with Justice Goldberg was lifelong, and he was a wonderful mentor and friend, but he was also a terrible candidate. He had been appointed to every job he’d had in his life, and running for office was an art he never mastered. Once when we were campaigning in upstate New York, someone asked him, “You’ve had all these jobs—you’ve been Secretary Goldberg, Ambassador Goldberg, Justice Goldberg—and I was wondering what’s your favorite title?” Any candidate worth his salt as a politician would say, “Oh, just call me Arthur.” But Goldberg couldn’t do that. He let the questioner know he preferred to be addressed as “Justice Goldberg.” I shook my head in disbelief. I knew then that we were in serious trouble.