Is this a strange world, or what? I never stole even a stick of gum, and no court offered me a clerkship…
In his “Sidebar” column for the New York Times, Adam Liptak writes of the “remarkable ascent” of Shon R. Hopwood, who was convicted of bank robbery in 1999. Hopwood, now a law student at the University of Washington School of Law, has “won a glittering distinction: a clerkship for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally considered the second most important court in the nation, after the Supreme Court.” After he was sentenced for bank robbery, Hopwood “became not only a good jailhouse lawyer but also a successful Supreme Court practitioner.” The court granted the first cert petition Hopwood filed in a case “about whether the police had crossed a constitutional line in questioning a suspect in a drug conspiracy,” that “caught the attention of” former Solicitor General Seth P. Waxman, who said Hopwood’s petition “on behalf of another prisoner, was one of the best he had ever read.”
From the American Association for Justice news release.
