Law Commons^™

Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn

Scholarly Articles

Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form of law review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their experiences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contradistinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, …