Legal News

Former SG Paul Clement to Return to King & Spalding

By Dan Slater

Breaking news from Jess Bravin, the Journal’s Scotus ace in Washington:

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement’s long job search is finally over; his old firm, King & Spalding, has agreed to take him back.

Okay, perhaps it wasn’t so hard for Clement to find employment. Service in the Bush Justice Department did not always result in career enhancement — remember “Justice Alberto Gonzales”? — but Clement left the Robert F. Kennedy Building in June as one of Washington’s most respected advocates. Not only that, Clement made history as perhaps the first SG to frequent D.C.’s 9:30 Club, an outpost of alternative rock that apparently never managed to lure such esteemed previous S.G.’s as Erwin Griswold, Archibald Cox or Robert Bork.

After hanging up his morning coat, Clement spent the summer teaching at Georgetown law school, but told friends he intended to join a top-drawer, top-paying law firm in the fall. The anticlimax officially was announced today, when King & Spalding said he would “rejoin the firm’s Washington, D.C., office to establish an expanded national appellate practice and a strategic counseling practice.”

Clement, who argued 49 cases before the Supreme Court, clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Antonin Scalia, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was Supreme Court editor of the Harvard Law Review. Still, compared to at least one classmate, Clement is something of an underachiever. The Harvard Law Review’s president that year was Barack Obama, who also starts a new job soon.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 20, 2008 (boomark / email).