From her dad’s killing during the crack epidemic to a Supreme Court clerkship
Tiffany Wright has one of the most coveted legal jobs in America
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox.
On the way to the most important job interview of her life, Tiffany Wright took a detour, turning up Trinidad Avenue in Northeast Washington and slowing as a brown brick rowhouse came into view.
She glanced out of her passenger-side window and thought back to the night that shaped her life. It was there — beyond the chain-link fence, up the gray steps — that her father had answered the front door and been shot to death.
Wright was 7.
Now, 26 years later, on April 8, 2015, she had awakened at 4:30 a.m. to a phone alarm labeled in bright white letters: “SCOTUS DAY!” She had put on makeup and fixed her hair, filled a thermos with cold-brew coffee and prepped her navy blue suit. Wright had prayed, too, but for what God wanted instead of what she wanted, because the latter still felt beyond possibility.
It had been three months since she had applied to serve as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two weeks since Wright had gotten the call: “The justice would like to have you come in and interview.”
“Seriously?” Wright said, succumbing to tears she almost never shed.
Like getting drafted into the NBA
- More than 30,000 law school students graduate annually, and the Supreme Court’s nine members offer just 36 clerkships each year.
- Getting chosen would be, as Wright’s husband described it, like getting drafted into the NBA.
- Those selected enter one of the most elite fraternities in the legal world, routinely receiving signing bonuses in excess of $300,000 from their first post-clerkship law firms.
Why Wright doubted she belonged
- She was an African American woman who had grown up in Southeast Washington and never traveled outside the country, trying to join a group that, historically, had been dominated by affluent, worldly white men.
- She was 33 and had an 8-year-old son.
- She had attended Georgetown Law at night, while working full time as a paralegal, because Wright and her husband couldn’t afford for her not to.
Preparing for the interview
In a sense, though, Wright also believed she’d spent her entire life preparing for that day. So much terror and upheaval, misery and loss — maybe it all had led to this.
- She had barely slept in those two weeks after the call, reading 70 court opinions, reviewing at least 20 of Sotomayor’s written decisions and scouring YouTube for interviews that the court’s first Latina had given.
- Wright outlined cases that were especially meaningful to her — about the Sixth Amendment, equal protection, voting rights — and filled 41 pages of notes.
Now, three hours before the interview, Wright was on Trinidad, in front of the rowhouse, thinking of her father. She was less than two miles from the steps that lead to the marble columns and bronze doors of the highest court in the nation.
“I hope I made you proud,” she silently told him.
A look back at Wright’s childhood
Wright had come to the nation’s capital as a toddler, after her parents’ divorce, and lived with family in an aging home across the street from a housing project in Southeast Washington. This was during the exploding crack epidemic. One of the uncles she lived with sold drugs and another aunt was hooked on crack.
Security came from her father Thomas W. Moore, a stout Army veteran who worked as a corrections officer, even when they’d been apart.
But then her father was killed one night — in a crime detectives never solved.
Climbing the education ladder
She learned that the pension and life insurance money he’d left her was being overseen by a person called an attorney. Wright expected Leonard McCants to be white, but when the second-grader met him in a fancy Silver Spring, Md., law office, he was black, like her, and in a crisp suit and tie.
“What do I have to do to be like you?” she asked.
Read a lot, McCants told her, and become a good writer.
The little girl found a library and asked for all of the “hard books,” and she came back with “Pride and Prejudice,” “The Great Gatsby,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and dozens of others that would consume her childhood.
Before ninth grade, Wright heard about Washington’s School Without Walls, a public magnet that offered one of the best educations in the region. When her mother and new stepfather neglected to write an essay required for the application, Wright did it herself and put their names on it.
She got in.
That led her in 1999 to the University of Maryland, where she met a fellow freshman named Michael who had wide shoulders and an affinity for smart women. During one of their first conversations, he recalled years later, Wright told him she wanted to become an attorney, run her own law firm and make $90,000 a year.
Her law degree
1st job: She worked at a law firm, stuffing envelopes and organizing files.
2nd job: She worked at the U.S. Parole Commission, making recommendations about what to do with convicts who violated the terms of their release.
Then she got a job as a paralegal at the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore, and immediately it renewed her passion for becoming a lawyer. Wright helped on major drug and gang cases, showing such a knack for the work that prosecutors encouraged her to reconsider pursuing a law degree.
“Early in my childhood, I realized that education would be the key to my escape,” she wrote in the personal statement that helped her earn admittance to Georgetown Law.
At Georgetown, she soared, earning all As her first semester.
In her second year, she participated on the school’s moot court team and served as an editor on its prestigious Law Journal, the only African American — male or female — to do both at the same time those semesters.
She graduated in the top 5 percent of her class.
A year later, she began a clerkship for David S. Tatel, a renowned judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
“She was magical,” Tatel recalled. “Just extraordinary.”
What impressed him most, before he knew Wright’s entire backstory, was her writing talent, nurtured by the thousands of books she’d read.
“The first piece of work I saw from Tiffany Wright,” Tatel said, “was as good as the best work I get from the best law clerks.”
Her life experience provided Wright, who stands just 5 feet tall, with a rare ability to argue with both ferocity and grace, said clerks who worked with her.
Tatel recognized it, too, once assigning her to review a police case that, at first, he thought had no merit. Wright returned with her analysis a few days later.
“Judge,” he recalled her saying, “I think I have a different view of this case than you do.”
“She was right,” he said.
The job application
By then, Wright had decided not to apply for the Supreme Court. She and her husband, who worked in I.T., would at times pay their rent with credit cards. Wright wanted to start work at a private firm.
Tatel urged her to apply. Then came the call from Sotomayor’s office.
Her palms were slick with sweat when she arrived at court. She could feel her pulse beating in her fingertips.
“The justice is here,” someone told Wright.
She stood and walked down a hallway, where a door in front of her opened. There was Sotomayor, smiling, her hand extended.
“Oh, Tiffany,” the justice said, “it’s so great to meet you.”
Eighteen months later, on October 4, 2016, in a room with red velvet drapes and a 44-foot-high coffered ceiling, Wright took a seat in a wooden chair as a Supreme Court clerk.
Bound by confidentiality, she could never speak of the work she’d do for Sotomayor during a year in which the justices would take up cases involving trademarks and free speech, racial gerrymandering and President Trump’s travel ban.
But on her first day in the nation’s most important courtroom, this is what Wright could say:
She was the only clerk who was a mother, the only one who was African American, the only one who had grown up in Southeast Washington.
And on that day, Wright knew how her father would feel.
