A Blind Item Revealed: A Judge Whose Clerks Must Cut His Grapefruit

Should a high-powered clerkship require clerks to cook?

Federal judges are… fruity! I once visited Chief Judge Alex Kozinski in chambers, where I witnessed the judge engage in a spirited argument with one of his law clerks over the proper way to peel and eat an orange. Everything is up for debate in the Kozinski chambers.

And it seems like Judge Kozinski isn’t the only judicial giant with a fruit fetish. In oral arguments yesterday for Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, concerning whether Amazon warehouse workers can get paid overtime for going through an end-of-day security screening, Justice Elena Kagan raised this fun scenario: if a federal judge orders his clerks to come into chambers early, to cut up his grapefruit and make the rest of his breakfast, should the clerks get paid for that?

As it turns out, this “hypothetical” is based on real life. Which federal judge actually does this?

Here’s the exact wording of Justice Kagan’s question to Curtis Gannon of the Solicitor General’s office: “There was a judge ages ago in the Southern District of New York who … had his clerks come early in order to cut his grapefruit and otherwise make breakfast for him. Would that be compensable?”

The grapefruit hypo got a lot of buzz on Twitter and elsewhere, but folks didn’t identify the judge. Veteran SCOTUS reporter Tony Mauro, however, figured it out:

The grapefruit-eating judge was mentioned eight more times during the argument, but without shedding any more light on his or her identity. New York legal experts asked afterward said they did not know or would not say which judge, living or dead, was on Kagan’s mind.

Kagan declined to comment, but the 1998 book Closed Chambers [affiliate link] by Edward Lazarus states that clerks for Southern District Judge Edward Weinfeld “knew they had to be in the office at 7 a.m. to cut the judge’s morning grapefruit.” After that, he added, the clerks “learned a lifetime’s worth of civil procedure and good lawyering.” Weinfeld died in 1988 at the age of 86.

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A ripe old age, especially considering that average life expectancy was even shorter back when Weinfeld was born. Moral of the story: EAT MOAR GRAPEFRUIT — especially when it’s lovingly sliced and diced by young legal geniuses.

Argument analysis: What is work, anyway? [SCOTUSblog]
Justices Split on Pay for Security Screening of Amazon Workers [Supreme Court Brief (sub. req.)]

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