Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Pamela Bookman was quoted in a Vanity Fair article about U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar, the fourth-ranking person at the Department of Justice.
Speaking with a number of her former co-clerks, I learned that Prelogar stood out in other ways: that she channeled Ginsburg’s voice so well that the justice gave her more opinion assignments; and that early in her time with Kagan, who had just joined the Supreme Court after her term as President Barack Obama’s first solicitor general, Prelogar learned she was pregnant with her first child. The baby was due in April, right as things get really busy at the court. After the baby was born, she went right back to work, and she made it work: For a time, a nursery was set up in an upstairs section of the court, and her mother was in town to help. “It was clear then how extraordinary she was,” Pamela Bookman, a Ginsburg co-clerk and a law professor at Fordham University, told me, “but I think it has been made even more clear since then.”
Read “How Elizabeth Prelogar Stands Up to a Runaway Supreme Court” in Vanity Fair.