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Grandmother.” (Justice Steven Breyer, who succeeded me as Goldberg’s law clerk, now sits in Goldberg’s old office.)

Before I knew I was to be selected by Justice Goldberg, I interviewed with several of the other Justices, including John Harlan, an elegant aristocrat whose grandfather had also served on the Supreme Court. He was impressed with my grades and my law review experience, but he gently asked me why I hadn’t worked during the summer for one of the “Great Wall Street firms.” I couldn’t believe that he didn’t know that the “Great Wall Street Firms” were not hiring Jewish kids from Brooklyn whose ancestors came over from Poland and who hadn’t attended an Ivy League college. Harlan had himself been the senior partner in one of those firms, and I assumed that he was familiar with their bigoted hiring policies. I later learned from one of his Jewish law clerks – he hired many Jews to work for him when he was a judge – that Justice Harlan was probably oblivious to his firms hiring practices, or at least never really thought about them. Maybe!

An interesting event marked a transition between my two clerkships. I began working for Justice Goldberg on August 1, 1963, just ___ days before Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Monument. A large rally was planned and I wanted to attend. But Justice Goldberg told me that Chief Justice Earl Warren did not want members of the judiciary—which included clerks—to be on the mall that day, because there might be violence and cases growing out of the violence might come before the courts. I really wanted to hear Martin Luther King speak and so I asked Judge Bazelon what I should do. “Come with me,” he proposed. He and another judge were planning to go to the mall and listen from the rear, and off to the side, in relative anonymity. I went with them and heard—and barely saw—that remarkable speech (following several long winded speakers representing the groups that had organized the event.) I never told Justice Goldberg that I had disobeyed the Chief Justice order.

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