A Conversation With Peter B. Edelman
(Appeared in Washington Lawyer, May 2008)

Peter B. Edelman’s career in the law spans more than 40 years and has taken him from the Kennedy administration to the law offices of Foley & Lardner LLP and into the classrooms of the Georgetown University Law Center.

After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, Edelman worked as a special assistant to Assistant Attorney General John Douglas in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in 1963. From there, he worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign, eventually serving as Kennedy’s legislative assistant.

Following Kennedy’s assassination, Edelman spent brief periods working as deputy director for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and issues director for Goldberg’s New York gubernatorial campaign, and then served as vice president of the University of Massachusetts.

In 1975 Edelman became director of the New York State Division for Youth. Four years later, he joined Foley & Lardner as partner, during which time he served as issues director for Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid.

Edelman came to Georgetown in 1982 and now teaches constitutional, poverty, and public interest law.

In 2005 Edelman was chosen to chair the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission, which works to ensure access to high-quality civil legal assistance for low- and moderate-income District residents.

Edelman received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, following which he clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the Second Circuit and Justice Goldberg.

Where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I attended the public schools. Looking back, I would have to say it was a reasonably happy, unremarkable childhood. I did not have to deal with any great struggles or handicaps.

What did your parents do?
My father was a lawyer and my mother was a stay-at-home mom and a very gifted pianist.

What type of law did your father practice?
In the current terminology, you would say he was a complex litigation lawyer. He specialized in cases that were very complicated, often involving taxes, bankruptcy, and the pursuit of assets. His favorite case was the one he did pro bono for the Minneapolis Art Institute. The institute had purchased a bas relief purportedly done by Leonardo da Vinci’s nephew. A visiting art expert suspected it was a fake, and my father engaged in long hours of detective work to determine the true origin of the piece. Ultimately, he was able to determine it was a forgery.

In addition to his legal work, my father was quite involved in community service. He was a charter member of Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey’s Human Relations Council. He was chosen because he had some visibility in the Jewish community, and there were issues of anti-Semitism that Humphrey thought should be addressed.

Did you know Humphrey yourself?
Yes. When I was in the sixth grade the principal used to send me down to the headquarters of the board of education at city hall to pick up educational films to be shown at school. I would stop in the mayor’s office to see if Humphrey was around, and every now and then he would see me. He was a wonderful, energetic person, and he always gave me an effusive greeting. I remember one time he invited me in and asked my advice as to who he should appoint as the chief of police. So I have very fond memories of Humphrey.

Did having a father who was a lawyer influence your career decision?
Yes. My father was a great role model. I wanted to become a lawyer from an early age. By the time I was nine or ten, I was pretty much decided on that as what I wanted to do—even though I knew very little about what a lawyer actually did.

Where did you go to college?
I went to Harvard sort of by mistake. My father’s law partner, Sidney Kaplan—who served with Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials—was also a great role model for me. He had graduated from Harvard Law School. I thought, “Sidney went to Harvard, so I’ll go there, too.” But Sidney didn’t actually go to Harvard College. He went to the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate, and then to Harvard Law School. So I applied to Harvard under a bit of a misconception.

Did you enjoy your undergraduate years?
I did. At first I found Harvard to be a bit daunting. I was a public school kid and a lot of my classmates had attended prestigious prep schools and were better prepared. But it turned out all right. I majored in economics, but along the way I fell in love with literature and history, and I had the opportunity to study under some great professors. During my four years there, I received a wonderful liberal education.

Were you politically active as a college student?
Not on issues in the real world. I was quite involved in student activities. I was an undergraduate from 1954 through 1958. I remember before I left for college my father said to me, “Now don’t join anything.” This was the period of Joe McCarthy and the height of Mc- Carthyism. My father was concerned I might get my name on some list that would brand me for life. In the hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy’s Senate investigative subcommittee, people were being smeared by association with all sorts of liberal organizations. But on college campuses, those were quiet times. Students tended to focus on their own lives. There was nothing like the activism we saw in the 1960s, when idealistic young people felt they could go out and make a better world.

Did you pay attention to events such as the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas?
Not very much. My active political consciousness about the outside world didn’t develop until after I had graduated from law school. It was 1960 when incredibly courageous young people started sitting in at lunch counters throughout the South to protest the segregation laws that were still on the books. By then I was in my second year of law school, and I can remember sitting around and discussing what was taking place with my fellow law students. We had a lot of interesting debates, but I was not particularly engaged. Generally, I thought it would be a good thing if we had racial justice in our country, but it was an abstract, theoretical sort of belief. I wasn’t ready to go and sit in with the early civil rights activists. I stuck to my law books.

When you enrolled in law school did you have any idea what kind of lawyer you wanted to become?
Not in any specific way. I certainly didn’t envision the career path I eventually took. It was only after I got into law school that I began to understand how little I knew about what lawyers do and their function in our society. Many of my friends regarded law school as a necessary evil, as something they had to endure to attain a career objective. That wasn’t true for me. I enjoyed the intellectual rigor of law school, and I found law review to be very challenging. So even though I didn’t have a clear vision of where I was headed, I enjoyed the academic challenge.

What did you do after you graduated?
I was a law clerk for Judge Henry Friendly of the Second Circuit. He was a brilliant man and a superb lawyer, and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with him. The following year I was supposed to clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, but three days before I was scheduled to start, he had a stroke and retired from the Court. Arthur Goldberg was appointed to replace him, and he very graciously took me in. So I did get to clerk on the Supreme Court after all.

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