Elliot Gaiser ’12 and Garrett West ’15 completed one-year clerkships for Associate Justice Samuel Alito in July. They returned to campus to speak to the Hillsdale College Federalist Society last week.  

Gaiser graduated from Hillsdale with a double major in political economy and speech studies. During his time at Hillsdale, Gaiser was the Opinions editor of the Collegian. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 2016. Gaiser has clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Judge Neomi Rao on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Alito during the October 2021 term. 

West majored in philosophy at Hillsdale and graduated from Yale Law School in 2018. He has clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge Thomas Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Alito during the October 2021 term. 

Did your major at Hillsdale serve you well?

Gaiser: Every component of my Hillsdale education has been helpful to me both in law school, in the practice of law, and in serving as a law clerk. With a political economy major, you take classes in history, economics, and politics — all of those disciplines are relevant to the practice of law. With rhetoric and public address, Aristotle describes rhetoric as the art of discovering every available means of persuasion in a given situation, and a good lawyer will do that. 

West: Absolutely. I don’t often use what I learned in philosophy directly, but the point of philosophy is not to use what you learned. I do think that the training in philosophy is helpful in law because you have to read hard texts, try to understand them, make rigorously logical arguments from them, and then write clearly about those arguments. That’s very good training for the practice of law.

What was it like to get a job offer from Alito?

Gaiser: I’ll never forget the phone call I got one morning as I was enjoying some coffee and reading the Bible with my wife. The Supreme Court was on the caller ID. I answered, and it was Justice Alito’s judicial assistant. She starts up, “Justice Alito wanted to apologize that he couldn’t call you personally right now, but he would like you to clerk for him this coming year. Would you be willing to serve as his law clerk?” There were several seconds where I was trying to say yes as quickly as possible. I said, “Yes, absolutely.” And she said, “You don’t want to think about it?” I said, “No, I want to clerk for Justice Alito.” She was joking, of course, because she knew that this was maybe one of the best phone calls that I would ever receive. 

West: When I had my interview with him, I was obviously nervous. The justices work very closely with their clerks, so they really need to make sure that a clerk is going to fit in with the other clerks and with the justice. I wondered, “Is he going to like me? I don’t know.” Going in, I psyched myself up by thinking, “The worst that can happen is a great man, Justice Alito, is going to spend 30 to 45 minutes of his time talking to me, and I’m going to soak that up while I get the chance.” And he offered the job to me at the end of the interview.

Was Justice Alito a good boss?

Gaiser: I’m sad that I won’t see Justice Alito as often as I did when I was his law clerk because he’s a wonderful person to talk to. I don’t think I ever quite got over how cool it was to step into his office and say, “Hello justice, how are you?” and then talk about the case that was going to be argued the next day. He’s a learned and scholarly man. As stressful as it sometimes is to be a law clerk, he did everything in his power to make the experience of the law clerks as good as possible. Going back and forth with him about a case, about a piece of writing, about how he was thinking through a given legal issue, is an experience that I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life.

West: Justice Alito is a fantastic boss, a very kind man, and a brilliant jurist. He’s humane; he’s kind; he’s generous with his clerks and his staff. A lot of people don’t know this, but he’s really funny. It was an honor to work for him.

Did you always know that you wanted to clerk on the Supreme Court one day?

Gaiser: Getting to clerk at the Supreme Court, in some respects, is like getting struck by lightning. There are many people who are qualified for the job who never get a shot at getting to clerk. I had hoped that I would get to clerk for the Supreme Court when I started law school but that feels like hoping you get to win the gold medal in your Olympic sport when you start track and field in high school. So it’s immensely humbling.

West: I knew that I wanted to clerk for a judge on a court of appeals because some Hillsdale graduates had come back to teach a one-credit class after they had just finished clerking.

I thought, “That seems like a cool job.” Maybe in the back of my mind I hoped that I could clerk for a justice. I don’t think I knew what it entailed, but I do think that it was in the back of my mind as a possibility–one that I didn’t really think would ever materialize. 

What will you remember most about working as a Supreme Court clerk? 

Gaiser: You get to hear some of the most important cases argued. You get to be a fly on the wall to the Supreme Court justices. You get to talk to your justice about the issues in these cases and you get to hear how they are analyzing a given case. That’s just exceptional and rare legal training. Also, the Supreme Court receives about 10,000 individual filings in a given year. As one of four clerks for a justice, you’re responsible for roughly a quarter of the 10,000 individual filings that get filed. These are complicated, important cases that sometimes affect hundreds of millions of people. Over the course of the year, more times than I can count, I was laying in bed at 2:30 in the morning thinking, “Oh man. Do I need to add a paragraph to my recommendation about this other issue that no one’s really brought up, but I can’t get out of my mind?” And the next morning you come in at 7:30, sitting at your desk trying to type the paragraph out while drinking your second cup of coffee for that morning. You do that for one year and then it’s done. It’s almost like, “Did that really happen?” and you think, “Yeah, I remember every detail.”

West: What makes the job unpleasant is exactly what makes the job so good. That is, it’s a demanding job in terms of the amount of time you have to dedicate to it, the amount of difficult cognitive work that you have to do, and the pressure. Clerks’ recommendations don’t really matter that much, but as a clerk you feel like they matter because the cases are a big deal. All of that makes it a very difficult job, but it wouldn’t be a great experience if it weren’t difficult. 

What are you doing now that you finished your clerkship?

Gaiser: I interviewed at a couple of different law firms, and I accepted a position at a law firm in Columbus, Ohio.

West: I worked at a law firm before I clerked for Justice Alito. I will be returning to that law firm in D.C.

What advice would you give to students who might be interested in trying to become a Supreme Court clerk?

Gaiser: Work very hard in your classes at Hillsdale. It’s such a rare opportunity to get eight semesters with the minds who teach courses here. Really enjoy that because it turns out that enjoying that fully is the best preparation you can have for law school and a legal career.

West: Do the reading now and do the reading in law school.