Can You Work with Someone with Whom You Have 'Profound Disagreements'?
This week, a post of ours noted U.S. Supreme Court justices’ law clerk hiring trends. Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly has the most variety when it comes to law schools—most justices stick with Harvard and Yale law grads, while Thomas has had clerks from lower-ranked schools like Creighton, George Mason and Rutgers.
Still, when hiring clerks who have previously worked for other federal judges, Thomas admittedly picks clerks who worked for Republican appointees. “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me,” he said at a Dallas luncheon 10 years ago. “It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”
Most of us don’t get to choose our supervisors or subordinates from a near-unlimited pool like a Supreme Court justice does. And it may be less important for a practicing lawyer to have similar views on constitutional law as his or her co-workers. But still, we want to ask: Can you work with someone with whom you have “profound disagreements”? If so, tell us about when you were able to work these differences out. If not, tell us what the disagreement was and why it couldn’t be overcome.
Answer in the comments.
Read the answers to last week’s question (and there were many good ones): What Was the Most Memorable Deposition You Have Been a Part Of?
Featured answer:
Posted by Jan Raymond: “Decades ago when I was a young litigator, I was one of four attorneys representing different defendants taking the deposition of a treating physician. About halfway through what appeared to be typical questioning, he had an outburst ranting about how we were trying to ‘strip him’ of his reputation, etc., and then he said: ‘You want to strip me …’ and proceeded to start to take off all his clothes. Plaintiffs counsel immediately halted the deposition and was able to remove the witness from the deposition room.”
