December 2007 Newsletter

Civil Litigation: Brian Fitzpatrick

By the time Brian Fitzpatrick graduated from Notre Dame with a degree in chemical engineering, he knew he would not pursue a career as an engineer. Although he ranked near the top of his graduating class and had spent summers working for semiconductor giant Intel, he headed instead for Harvard Law School, where he earned the Fay Diploma by graduating first in his class.

“I was good at math, but I wasn’t excited by it,” he says. “As a substantive matter, the chemistry and the math did not help me in law school. But you develop a very analytical and logical approach to learning and to understanding the world when you study the sciences, and that approach was very beneficial in law school. I found my way of thinking was very natural for law – the way engineers think things through in a logical progression, finding weaknesses and overcoming them, is much the same way you order your thoughts to analyze a case.”

Fitzpatrick entered law school intending to spend a career in legal practice. But he was inspired by several of his professors to enter the academy. “I had a great Civil Procedure professor, David Shapiro, and a wonderful Federal Courts professor, Dick Fallon,” he recalls. “Those courses excited me, and I realized then that I would probably end up a professor.”

After graduating from Harvard Law in 2000, Fitzpatrick clerked first for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. “Both of my clerkships were wonderful experiences, the Supreme Court in particular,” he says. “It’s good and bad – you probably won’t ever have a better job and you’re only 25. It’s hard to overstate how much of a privilege and honor it was to work for Justice Scalia. He’s is a wonderful boss – he’s a smart, engaging person and surprisingly laid back. He’s a former law school professor and always the teacher. He likes to spend time with his law clerks to shape their minds and careers, and he’s been a great mentor.”

Fitzpatrick, whose opinion pieces have been published in the Los Angeles Times and the National Law Journal, learned “one of the most important lessons in good writing” as a clerk. “Justice Scalia writes for the ear rather than for the eye,” he says. “He writes opinions as if they were speeches.”

Fitzpatrick was a general and commercial litigator with Sidley Austin and then served as a Special Counsel to Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), advising the senator on how to pave the way for President Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court, before joining the Vanderbilt faculty. He worked on the Roberts, Miers and Alito nominations, and frankly acknowledges that the Miers nomination came as a surprise to almost everyone. “Her name was not mentioned in the press or among people on the Hill before the weekend she was nominated,” he says.

Fizpatrick’s job was to help Senator Cornyn bolster the case for each nominee. “The time in which you have to make your case has really shrunk,” he says. “The media is so active that if you don’t have your ducks in a row at the very get-go, it’s very hard to build momentum. If your nominee gets waxed for a week, it’s too late – people have already formed their opinions.”

Fitzpatrick teaches Civil Procedure and a seminar on judges and politics. His current projects address the power of federal judges to approve class action settlements and whether judges should have the same rights to speak their minds as do other public officials.

- Grace Renshaw