“The water in which I swam was law,” Levi says with a laugh, acknowledging that with a father, brother, uncles, and an entire neighborhood in the legal profession, it was “just a question of time” before he joined them. He wasn’t quite ready to do so, however, after graduating from Harvard College with a major in English history and literature, and instead chose to pursue a PhD in legal history at Harvard. His thesis focused on the law reform movement in the 1840s and 1850s in England, the first time in the modern period, he explains, when the profession itself seriously tried to improve the legal system.

“One of the ways one can penetrate into the social relationships of a period is to look at how the courts were being used, who used them, and why. During this period of industrialization, [it was interesting to study] the relationship between what was going on in the economy and what was going on in the workforce, in legal theory, and in legal institutions.” Levi was doing thesis research in London’s “Dickensian” public records office when he decided to go to law school, with the goal of joining a law faculty as a legal historian.

The University of Chicago wasn’t an option for law school, he says, although its dean challenged Levi and his cousin, Daniel Meltzer (now Storey Professor of Law at Harvard), to apply. “We knew the professors too well, and didn’t want to alter that wonderful relationship.” Levi’s wife, Nancy Ranney, suggested they head west, and he settled on Stanford where, by coincidence, his father was a visiting professor during his first year. “It was wonderful to have him there and be able to share the process that I was going through, which I found very stimulating,” he says.

Mentors and models

Immediately after being elected president of the Stanford Law Review as a 2L, Levi received, unsolicited, a letter from U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell, offering him a clerkship beginning one year after his graduation. To prepare, Levi clerked for Judge Ben C. Duniway, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “He warned me at the outset that his was an ‘artisan’s shop,’ and that he really focused on writing and on each case,” Levi says. “That proved to be true. He was a wonderful teacher – everything was done very carefully, under his direct supervision.”

In Justice Powell, Levi says he found an example of the versatility of law as a profession. “When he became a justice, he had not been a scholar and he had not been a judge, but a practicing lawyer. He had the quality of ‘legal intelligence’ – he took a thoughtful approach to the law – and it translated from one endeavor in which he had been very successful, as a litigator and also as a transactional lawyer, to the bench.”

Justice Powell, who Levi says was “sweet to me his whole life,” also gave him a model of judicial comportment. “He had a quiet dignity about him that was something to aspire to – a gentleness, an unfailing courtesy and generosity of spirit, and yet a firmness. I have tried to model myself on that character in running the courtroom. Whether I have been successful or not is for others to say. But it’s rare that I have to impose myself to maintain order. I find that if I am courteous and polite, then others will be also.”