Scalia’s Six-Year Stint as a Big Law Associate

After Justice Antonin Scalia graduated from Harvard Law School in 1960, he eventually moved to Cleveland where he spent six years toiling away as an associate at Jones Day.

Few of the obituaries and remembrances published since his passing have mentioned Scalia’s time as a Big Law associate, but lawyers who knew him said the experience, from 1961 to 1967, at the beginning of his legal career was in some ways formative. To him, it involved representing private clients, and was different from working in government or in academia or being on the bench, several of his clerks explained.

“He wasn’t someone who hated ...