Blackmun Had High Praise for Clerk Diane Wood

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Supreme Court short-lister Diane Wood, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, served as a law clerk to the late Justice Harry Blackmun from 1976 to 1977. If you clerked for a packrat like Blackmun, one consequence is that all your correspondence with the justice -- including post-clerkship holiday letters -- has been kept and is available for public review among his papers at the Library of Congress.

Wood's file includes her clerkship salary ($19,400 per annum) and her job application form (indicating she could speak or write with varying degrees of proficiency in French, German, Russian and Latin) and a recommendation from the acclaimed University of Texas constitutional scholar Charles Alan Wright. Wright, who died in 2000, told Blackmun in 1975, "I am confident that she will do a fine job for you." On her application, Wood offered Wright as a reference, along with Vinson & Elkins partner Henry May and Mark Yudof, then a UT law professor and now president of the University of Callifornia.

But the document that might help Wood the most now is a recommendation Blackmun himself wrote for her after her clerkship as she was being considered for a teaching position at Georgetown University Law Center in 1978. The text of the letter follows:

"Diane has an excellent mind, is industrious, performed well, and got her work out on time. She is a good analyst and writes well. I feel that she possesses scholarship ability at the highest level. She is able to take a position and to stand by it. In other words, I am confident of her ability to engage in scholarship and to teach."

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