Clint Bolick

Clint Bolick
January, 2014
Born	(1957-12-26) December 26, 1957 Elizabeth, New Jersey
Education	Drew University
Alma mater	University of California Davis School of Law
Occupation	Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona
Years active	1980–present

Clint Bolick (born December 26, 1957) is a current Justice on the Supreme Court of Arizona. Previously, he served as Vice President of Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, where he sued government bureaucrats on behalf of citizens rights. He co-founded the Institute for Justice, where he was the Vice President and Director of Litigation from 1991 until 2004. He led two cases that went before the Supreme Court of the United States. He has also defended state-based school choice programs in the Supreme Courts of Wisconsin and Ohio.

Early life and education

Bolick was born on December 26, 1957 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He graduated from Drew University in 1979 and received his J.D. from the University of California Davis School of Law in 1982. As a law student, he supported laws and legal rulings that knocked down racial discrimination (calling Brown v. Board of Education a "triumph of the principle of equality"), and was a vocal opponent of race-based preferences and reverse discrimination.

In 1980, he ran as a Libertarian for a seat in the California State Assembly. He lost to an incumbent Democrat but garnered 7.1 percent of the vote. (In that election, the Libertarian Presidential ticket earned about 1% of the vote nationwide.)

Career

Mountain States Legal Foundation

In 1982, he joined a pro-business public interest law firm, the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver, Colorado. He was hired by the foundation's acting president, William H. "Chip" Mellor. In 1984, Mellor left the organization over a conflict with one of the foundation's sponsors. Bolick also left, believing that the foundation was more interested in protecting business interests than in promoting economic freedom. In 2005, he said,

Chip and I discovered that there is a world of difference between an organization that is pro-business and an organization that is pro-free enterprise.

After their break with Mountain States, they began planning a free-enterprise public interest law firm that would follow a philosophy of "economic liberty." These plans would lead to the founding of the Institute for Justice in 1991.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Justice Department

Bolick joined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1985. While he only stayed at the EEOC for a year, he became friends with its chairman, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (Thomas is the godfather to Bolick's second son.) Thomas helped convince him that removing economic barriers for the poor was more important than fighting race-based "reverse discrimination." His conversations with Thomas bolstered Bolick's belief that racism was a formidable barrier to blacks and other people of color. In 1991, he would support adding punitive damages to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He explained, "It seemed to me that if you didn't want quotas, you had to have tough remedies and punitive damages against recalcitrant discriminators ... That very much came out of Thomas." Thomas also shaped his preferred remedy for inequality: removing unnecessary (and often racist) laws and regulations that prevented the poor from starting small businesses. Thomas did this in part by telling Bolick about his grandfather, who began with a hand-built pushcart and built a profitable delivery service that comfortably supported his family, only to encounter threats from regulations designed to destroy black-owned businesses.

Bolick left the EEOC to join the Justice Department in 1986. In 1988, he wrote his first book, Changing Course. In this book, he defined "civil rights" in part from the perspective of removing economic and regulatory barriers for the poor and disadvantaged.

Landmark Center for Civil Rights

In 1989, he left the Justice Department and, with a grant from the Landmark Legal Foundation, started a public advocacy law practice in Washington DC. In its first case, the Landmark Center for Civil Rights represented Washington shoeshine stand owner Ego Brown in his attempt to overturn a Jim Crow-era law against bootblack stands on public streets. The law was designed to restrict economic opportunities for African-Americans, but was still being enforced 85 years after its passage. He sued the District of Columbia on Brown's behalf, and the law was overturned in 1989.

While working for the Landmark Legal Foundation, he defended the first Wisconsin school voucher program in court.

He openly supported Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. On July 31, 1991, about 45 people from Thomas's home town of Pin Point, Georgia visited Washington to show support for the nominee. At the time, Bolick told the Washington Post that the Landmark Center for Civil Rights raised $3,000 to pay for bus rental and contributed another $1,100 for hotel charges.

Institute for Justice

In 1991, Bolick and Chip Mellor (his former boss from the Mountain States Legal Foundation) co-founded the Institute for Justice. He was the Vice President and Director of Litigation from 1991 until 2004. The organization litigates on behalf of small businesses faced with regulations that it views as unjustified or anti-competitive. It also promotes school choice, property rights, and free speech. Bolick and the institute were active in defending a Cleveland, Ohio school voucher program, which was declared constitutional in a 2002 Supreme Court case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris The court ruled in favor of a Cincinnati, Ohio school voucher program, allowing the use of public money to pay tuition at private and parochial schools. He led the case Swedenburg v. Kelly while at the institute. This case was consolidated with Granholm v. Heald and considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. Bolick argued the case before the court, along with attorney Kathleen Sullivan. The court struck down regulatory barriers to direct interstate shipment of wine to consumers.

In April 1993, he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal opposing two appointments by the Clinton administration (Lani Guinier to assistant attorney general for civil rights and Norma V. Cantu to assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education). The Journal ran the piece under the headline "Clinton's Quota Queens." After the piece was published, he distributed information about Guinier's writings and interpreted them for reporters. He also appeared on the television news shows Nightline and Crossfire to oppose her appointment. The article and Bolick's subsequent efforts were credited with helping end Guinier's appointment. On June 3, 1993, President Clinton withdrew her nomination. Clinton stated that he had not read Guinier's writings at the time of her nomination, and called some of her writings "anti-democratic." Clinton went on to describe the effort to stop Guinier's appointment as "a campaign of right-wing distortion and vilification," and according to press reports referred to Bolick's editorial with "particular scorn." Other critics accused Bolick and conservatives who opposed Guinier of racism and sexism, often citing the phrase "quota queen" as evidence.

Alliance for School Choice

In 2004, he joined the Alliance for School Choice, a national non-profit educational policy group advocating school choice programs across the United States. He was that organization's first President and General Counsel.

Goldwater Institute

In 2007, he became the Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute when that organization added a litigation group.

He helped draft model legislation known as the 'Health Care Freedom Act' that seeks to preserve the right of individuals to pay for health care directly instead of being compelled to enroll in a government-sponsored insurance plan. Arizona and Oklahoma voters approved a version of the Health Care Freedom Act in their respective November 2010 general elections. Also in November 2010, voters in Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah adopted a measure he drafted called Save Our Secret Ballot, which guarantees workers the right to a secret-ballot vote in union-organizing elections.

Appointment to Arizona Supreme Court

On January 6, 2016 Governor Doug Ducey appointed Bolick to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Writings

In 2013, he co-wrote Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution with politician Jeb Bush. Bolick is the author of Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle Over School Choice, The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision? and David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary all published by the Cato Institute. (David’s Hammer was chosen for the June 2007 Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty.) In 2012 he wrote Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court. (Hoover Institution, April 2012). His novel, Nicki’s Girl, was published in 2007.

On July 30, 2015, Donald Trump, one of Jeb Bush's opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, called for the deportation of all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Bolick called Trump's idea "impractical and opposed by a large majority of Americans." In an interview on Cable News Network, Trump said that of the illegal immigrants the "good ones" could return through a proposed "expedited" process.

Awards

In 2006, he won one of the four Bradley Prizes given that year. The Bradley Prize included a one-time $250,000 stipend. He is currently a Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. American Lawyer magazine named him one of three Lawyers of the Year in 2003. In 2009, Legal Times magazine included him in their list of the "90 greatest Washington lawyers of the past 30 years".

See also

• Libertarian theories of law

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN