Profile of SCOTUS Blog’s Tom Goldstein
posted by Daniel Solove
Today’s Washington Post has an interesting profile of SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump and founder of SCOTUSBlog. From the article:
What makes the brash and balding 38-year-old such a hot media property is Scotusblog.com, the Web site he founded six years ago to obsessively track the high court. At 7:34 a.m. last Tuesday, an hour before news of the nomination leaked, he posted an essay on the likely lines of attack if President Obama picked Sotomayor. Had he guessed wrong, Goldstein says, he would have looked like “the world’s biggest idiot. I was out there on a limb.”
Three years ago, Goldstein joined the blue-chip Washington firm of Akin Gump, which also agreed to take on Scotusblog and is listed as the site’s host. Despite the unorthodox arrangement, Goldstein says his staff, which includes veteran Supreme Court reporter Lyle Denniston, has complete independence. “Lyle could write that our clients are completely insane and evil and there’d be nothing to stop him,” Goldstein says in his 12th-floor office with a sweeping view of the Washington Monument. . . .
A graduate of American University’s law school, Goldstein founded a small firm — soon joined by his wife — in the third bedroom of their Northwest Washington home. He pursued his goal, to become a Supreme Court practitioner, by cold-calling lawyers in cases that might be headed for high court review. Goldstein was denigrated by more credentialed members of the bar as an overeager ambulance chaser, but the strategy worked: He has argued 21 cases before the Supreme Court. (Goldstein still finances his old firm, which includes his wife and remains at his home, now in Chevy Chase, a few doors down from Chief Justice John Roberts. The firm is an Akin Gump subcontractor.)
White House officials had asked to consult Goldstein on the court vacancy, but by the time he returned from a weekend in Paris, Obama had made his choice. Determined not to miss the action, Goldstein canceled a meeting in Los Angeles with a top producer about a reality series based on his life, the rights to which were bought by Sony Pictures Television. (”They must be smoking crack,” Goldstein says.) A poker fanatic who plays with pots as large as $100,000, he also delayed plans to compete in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
For more, read the article.
June 1, 2009 at 8:32 am
Posted in: Blogging, Constitutional Law, Supreme Court
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