SCOTUSblog on camera: Walter Dellinger (Part two)

In many ways, if you want to know what moves the Court to decide cases, listen to oral argument, which is much more like the Supreme Courts Id. Opinions are like the Supreme Courts Super Ego.

Walter Dellinger is the Douglas B. Maggs Professor of Law at Duke University and a Partner in the Washington, DC, office of OMelveny & Myers LLP, where he is a member of the Appellate Practice Group. Dellinger advised President William J. Clinton on constitutional issues in 1993 and then served in the Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1993 to 1996. He was Acting Solicitor General for the 1996-97 Term of the Supreme Court. He graduated with Honors in Political Science from the University of North Carolina and from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He served as law clerk to Justice Hugo L. Black for the Courts 1968-69 Term.

In this five-part interview, Mr. Dellinger discusses his background, including his emerging awareness of the civil rights movement growing up in North Carolina and talking his way into Yale Law School; his clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black; how the Court has changed since the Warren Court years; the importance of a Court made up of Justices with diverse experiences; the importance and experience of oral argument; life in the White House and in the Justice Department, as head of the Office of Legal Counsel and as Solicitor General; nominating a Supreme Court Justice; and the relationship between the medias coverage of the Court and public understanding of the Court.

Part Two: Consequences

The single greatest shift between the Court on which I clerked and the present Court is the degree to which the Court respects the judgment of the other branches of government.

Justice Hugo Black as a writer; hyper-technical opinions and the effect of too many Supreme Court clerks; oral argument as the way to understand the Court; the need for more diversity of experience on the Court; why Justices with political experience would benefit the Court and its judgments; the Court as a necessarily political but not partisan institution; and just how well prepared this Court really is.