Joe Davis '07
Joe Davis '07: History Lesson
This is the only chance we get to say yes or no to these men and women who will sit on the Court ... I understand that the decision is huge.
- Joe Davis
Joe Davis learned of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement from the
Supreme Court while standing in the press office of his boss, Delaware Senator Joe Biden.
“I was [in the Russell building] picking up some stuff, and one of the secretaries said, ‘I can’t believe she’s retiring,’” Davis recalls, “I swung around and there’s CNN reporting that O’Connor is retiring. I remember running back to the office. I don’t know why I ran, but I felt like it was really exciting, like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s something we have to do.’”
Davis says he has always been interested in politics; as an undergraduate at Brown University, he spent a summer working for Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) and worked on local campaigns. He applied for the job with Biden at the suggestion of the senator’s former chief of staff, Visiting Lecturer Ted Kaufman, hoping it would offer a good blend of public policy and law, his focus as a joint-degree student at Duke.
Beginning in May, Davis’ work primarily involved pending legislation, assisting in the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act and helping to prepare the minority view of an asbestos litigation reform bill. He spent only a small amount of time writing memos on the legal scholars and judges seen as possible nominees for the Supreme Court. That changed when Justice O’Connor announced her retirement on July 1, opening up the first seat on the Supreme Court in 11 years.
This was new terrain for the members of Biden’s staff, says Davis; none of them had previous experience with the nomination process. They set to work augmenting the memos on possible replacements and helping to prepare statements on O’Connor’s retirement. But Davis says it was preparing for the hearings regarding the nomination of Judge John Roberts and the work that accompanied it that really linked his summer job to his legal studies.
“We had to figure out who this guy was. We got 70,000 pages of documents; we had to read all of his opinions, all of his briefs — everything he had written. From these documents we had to try to figure out where he might stand on certain issues. So everything I did in the first year — reading cases and trying to figure out what they meant — went into reading his briefs and his cases and trying to figure out what they meant and where Roberts ‘fit.’”
Not only did Davis have a hand in the Committee’s preparation for the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Roberts, but he also sat in, an experience he describes as surreal.
“The first time I was in the hearing room was the day before the hearings started. I went in with one other staffer and it was empty. I remember pictures, watching the Clarence Thomas hearings on TV, and then I was in the room. It was very humbling.”
Davis says his involvement brought home to him the importance of the process, summed up in a quote used by Sen. Biden. “‘These hearings, the advice and consent of the Senate, are the singular moment of democracy before a lifetime of independence.’ This is the only chance we get to say yes or no to these men and women who will sit on the Court, and after spending two months trying to figure out the impact of putting Roberts, or putting Alito on the Court, I understand that the decision is huge. These two justices really get to decide where [the Court] will go in the next 20 or 40 years.”
This summer, Davis will work in the government relations practice of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary in Washington, D.C.