#006: Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle - Federal District Court Judge (Retired)

This transcript was generated by AI.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:00:00]:

I also viewed my audience as the Court of Appeals, and I was trying to write an advocate's piece for my position, and I did it a lot like I learned to do it in private practice of using the facts and the law, because a lot of cases are fact bound.

Jonah Perlin [00:00:16]:

Welcome to How I Lawyer, a podcast where I talk to attorneys from throughout the profession about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Well, I'm your host, Jonah Perlin, a law professor in Washington, DC. Now let's get started. Hello, and welcome back. In today's episode, I speak with Judge Ellen Siegel Huvel, who recently retired as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the federal trial court located here in Washington, DC. Judge Huvelle retired late last year after more than 20 years on the federal bench and ten years serving on the DC. Superior Court. I was lucky enough to serve as a law clerk to Judge Huvelle early on in my legal career. In that year and the years since, I've learned so much from her not just about the practice of law, effective legal communication, and the life of a lawyer, but also about the importance of doing justice and strengthening our community by strengthening our profession. Judge Huvel is universally beloved by her law clerks, court staff, judicial colleagues, lawyers who practiced before her, and even the litigants that appeared in her courtroom. In fact, one criminal defendant who she sentenced wrote her the following letter from jail for what it's worth, I want you to know that I respected the decisions you made throughout my two trials. I did not agree with all of them, which you might recognize as a massive understatement, since I'm writing from prison, but I felt your decisions were arrived at. Honestly, you always seemed to think through the issues and reach conclusions that you thought were required by the facts and the law. That letter says a lot about who Judge Huvelle is and the respect she showed everyone who stepped foot in her courtroom. On a personal note, I owe so much to Judge Heavel's support and mentorship, and I'm so excited that she was willing to come on the podcast. Judge Huvelle holds a BA. From Wellesley College, go, Blue, a master's in City planning from Yale University. Go, Bulldogs. And a JD. From Boston College Law School. Go, Eagles. Upon graduation from law school, she clerked on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before moving to Washington, DC. With her husband, Jeffrey Huvel, who's also an attorney. Judge Huvelle practiced at the law firm of Williams and Connolly LLP, where she was the first woman elected to the partnership. She practiced at Williams and Connolly until 1990, when she was appointed to the DC. Superior Court. In our conversation, we discuss her pioneering career as a woman and a mother in big law at a time when that was not common. The shifts in the practice of law over the past 40 years, her path to the bench, why she loved working with juries, how she kept up with the hundreds of cases on her docket, her approach to writing opinions, conducting oral arguments, and sentencing criminal defendants, and how she selected and worked with law clerks. She also talks about the important reason why she never learned to make coffee or use a Xerox machine. Simply put, Judge Huvelle is one of the kindest, sharpest and smartest lawyer you'll ever meet. And her story is an inspiring one, whether you're just beginning your legal career or you're deciding what's next. Here's Judge Hueval.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:03:04]:

We came to Washington one, my husband took a job at Covington and Berlin. So that sort of directed my search, and I was focused on Washington. At the time that we were in Boston, actually, the economy was very bad in 74, 75, so it seemed like a wise move. And we thought we might go back to Boston, which apparently, as we can see, never happened. I started at Williams and Conley in 1976. There were six of us. That was the largest class ever at the time when I joined 35 lawyers. So it hadn't grown anywhere near what it is now, obviously. And it was very chaotic, which appealed to me. I mean, I interviewed at other law firms, and they were all very organized, and they had the truth squad here. I was lucky that if the person showed up for the interview that was on my schedule, I was doing well. And then when they offered me a job I just have to digress for a minute I called them and I asked if they paid for moving expenses. And the response was, and I'm not sure I credit this was, oh, no one's ever asked that before, and I'll call you right back. And before I put the phone back on the receiver, the answer came as no. Our salaries were quite different than they are now.

Jonah Perlin [00:04:16]:

And at the time, you were one of the only women at the law firm. Right. What was that like?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:04:20]:

When I arrived, one woman was there and one joined with me. Neither of them stayed much past a year or two. So for a period of time, I may have been the only woman, but it was short lived. Another woman joined us who was my class and my secretary, who was very good and worked with me and a partner. When the next female associate came, they assigned her to the same secretary I had. Back then, you only shared with one other person, and the woman was absolutely distraught. She cried at the idea that her status had just been put at the bottom of the barrel because she had.

Jonah Perlin [00:04:57]:

Been assigned to the two women.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:04:58]:

Two women? Yeah. We were young and we were women, and we were not anywhere on the totem pole. There were people whose spouses would not permit them to travel with a female. So there were some people, I regret to say, that would not put me on their capes. And I'd be sitting on one side, the partner would be on the other. And this was a congressman in particular, and he said to the partner, could you tell your secretary to go get me some coffee? Well, it was apparent he was talking about me. And my response has always been, I refuse to learn how to make coffee, and I refuse to learn how to Xerox. So I could say, Sorry, I'm a lawyer here, and I don't Xerox and I don't know how to make coffee. It took a long time. People did not expect women to be in the role of a lawyer. It just wasn't that common. And then there were people who didn't accept having a woman on their know, criminal law people. Their life is on the line, it's not an overstatement. And they often didn't feel comfortable having a female. So lucky for me, there were a couple of key people at the law firm who became my mentors. I got on a lot of interesting work. My first case was one of the earliest battered women cases in the country. It is now featured in many criminal law books or Women in the Law. It was a defense based on battered women, and we had an expert, and she was not allowed to testify, but we got that reversed on appeal, and it established a criteria for battered women testimony. So there were lots of opportunities, but they weren't the same as the opportunities offered to my male contemporaries.

Jonah Perlin [00:06:43]:

Right. There were challenges professionally. Were there also challenges personally, given that both you and your husband were practicing lawyers at a time when that was far less common than it is today?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:06:52]:

Well, to step back, when I first gave birth in 78, there was no insurance for the doctor. The law changed the year after the doctor cost less than $1,000. Mind you, it was a different era, but it was somewhat surprising that they didn't cover and I don't know what they did about spouses, obviously, but I was the first female lawyer to give birth, and then I had a second child in 82.

Jonah Perlin [00:07:18]:

And how did you manage that, being in a family with two big law trial lawyers?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:07:21]:

We pieced it together. You can't do it all perfectly, right? In fact, no role gets done perfectly. You just have to accept that one. You have to have a very good housekeeper, a babysitter. We had the same person from day one. She stayed after the dog died. She was very attached to us. It was, you know, my husband Jeffrey was extremely supportive, and there were times when I went trial for a couple of months, and he was sort of holding down the fort. And we had somebody who didn't have to go home right away, and we had somebody who could stay over.

Jonah Perlin [00:07:57]:

And what was the legal work like then?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:07:59]:

The work was somewhat different. I did mainly criminal. I did all litigation. I did work on behalf of Georgetown in the Malpractice area. I represented both white collar and non white collar cases. I picked up cases in Superior Court in order to get some experience trying cases. I represented Don King, the boxing promoter, who was well known back then, in a suit that was brought against the World Boxing Council. I represented for a while Leona Helmsley, but she then fired me the day before the trial. And why was you know, I couldn't say the things she wanted me to say the first time I met her. She know, don't you love me? And I said, I'm sure I'll like you more as I get to know you. She was a difficult person. I also represented three congressmen on various charges. One of them went to trial, Charles Diggs from Detroit. And I gave birth that week, so I didn't make that one.

Jonah Perlin [00:09:00]:

That must have been an experience.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:09:01]:

Well, the first time I gave birth, I was supposed to go to trial in Boston, where we had sued the people based on the book The Terminal Man written by Crichton. And we represented the terminal man. I mean, I knew at a certain point I wasn't going to get there. I was replaced on the eve of trial for that one. That was a wild case. Then I represented Harold Ford, and that one did go to trial in Memphis, and his family also owned a funeral home called the Ford and Sons. So I got to visit a fair number of funeral homes. But it was a fascinating practice. It was always something new and something different. Two to three months in Memphis, living in the client's house, commuting to the courthouse, where it was an eye opener for me. The prosecutor would start the day by saying loud and clear in front of the jury, even if it was a Wednesday, and we'd been there all week. How was your trip down from Washington, DC.

Jonah Perlin [00:10:00]:

To remind the jury that you were from out of town? Right?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:10:04]:

You bet. There was this constant theme of where we came from out of town, and we were the high paid lawyer, even though we weren't being paid very much at all. But that case landed up in a hung jury, and not surprising, and hung on racial lines. The Justice Department after that made a motion, said they, the government could not get a fair trial in Memphis. So the case by this time, I had gone to the Superior Court, but the case was tried where they brought a jury in from Jackson, Tennessee, with one African American and eleven whites, and he was acquitted. So it gives you a curious lesson on the sort of general wisdom about.

Jonah Perlin [00:10:45]:

Juries that sounds quite different than what we think of as the big law practice of today. Were you in trial a lot at that point, or were you doing what we see now, which is a lot of document discovery and motions practice?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:10:55]:

I was not in trial constantly, to say the least. Some of the trials, though, lasted for a couple of months and weren't the same number of document cases. I hate to date myself. This is before the Internet, so you didn't have emails. So the practice of law was very different. So I learned to write. The first draft was about 80% finished. I didn't have any choice because you couldn't have somebody continually retype the page. So I learned to write at a different time and place than you did. I did everything in handwriting on a pad of paper. I got up to being able to write 20 to 30 pages in a day of a brief or what have you. So we had to be very respectful of our help because these people, they are typing at 80, 90 words a minute, but they have to redo every page if there's an error.

Jonah Perlin [00:11:44]:

Do you think that changed the actual work product?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:11:47]:

I think it dramatically changed it. I did the editing on the first draft. I did it every other line, and when it went to the secretary, I wasn't going to make big changes. And I've applied that forever because I never really had to learn to compose on a computer. Now, that's easier for all of you, and it's faster, but I don't think it improves the writing considerably because then it's your anticipation. You're going to edit over and over and over again. And I just as a judge, I don't want to be part of that process. Not enough time in the day. I've always told all law clerks, don't give me your product until you're satisfied that it's as good as it can be.

Jonah Perlin [00:12:31]:

Oh, I remember that I had mentioned well, but why was it so important to you that you received drafts that were pretty far along, if not file ready?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:12:38]:

Otherwise, I get these works in progress, which to me signals problems. Don't wring your hands over it, and don't say, well, I should have done this, or I could have done that.

Jonah Perlin [00:12:48]:

Right?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:12:48]:

It's much more effective. And the same principle applies in a law firm. You don't go into the partner whomever you're giving the final product to and say, well, I could have done it this way, or I should have cited this. It's not helpful, what you want to do, you give the impression, this is great, you can send it out today. Of course I wouldn't. But you want to make sure that people have confidence in you, right?

Jonah Perlin [00:13:11]:

And it probably slows down your writing a little bit more as well.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:13:14]:

Yeah. And I made, and I still do, extensive outlines. Before I started, I knew exactly what I was going to do when I sat down with it. And in general, even as a judge, I've used outlines to tell the law clerk exactly how I wanted organized. In any case, there were a lot of things that were just different. We filed by hand, so a messenger would get on a plane and take the filing to Cleveland or wherever. And that meant that when you finished, you had a reprieve because you knew that nobody was going to look at it until the messenger got to your office in whatever city it was. Or if you sent something to the West Court, you knew you could go to sleep. Now, it's quite clear to me that people are sleep deprived talking on the phone because they have to talk at times across the dateline and they're 1213 hours difference in China. So it's really a very different kind of practice of law. We would never talk to a witness except in person, which is a much better way to get to know the person and the facts and to establish some rapport. Now, maybe zoom is OK, I need to be convinced that that's the way I could establish a rapport with somebody. I don't know how it is doing a jury trial on Zoom because they really need to see the person, right? And they need to see their facial expressions. They watch how they walk, they watch how they dress. I mean, they watch all these things that you think, who's looking at this? I met a juror in a department store once and she said, oh, I was on your jury, I remember you, you wore red shoes. I'm up there in a black robe. Who could possibly care what I was wearing? But they think about the broad brush of the ambient environment. They are sort of very important.

Jonah Perlin [00:15:09]:

I want to turn to when you became a judge on the DC Superior Court, can you talk a little bit about the process of deciding to become a judge and the process for being nominated and ultimately confirmed and put on the bench?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:15:23]:

In 1990, Congress decided to increase the number of Superior Court judges because of the crack epidemic in Washington. So they had made a conscious effort to reach out to people who were not in the typical sort of tracks, which were either prosecutors in the US Attorney's office, some people from the public defender, and some from what was then the Corporation Council. So they were adding another eight. And I was at a Christmas function when I ran into somebody and said, well, this is what they're doing, you ought to think about applying and this is Christmas and the application is due January 1. These applications are absolutely burdened. And so I filed with the application. They had a committee, which is the members are statutorily defined, some are appointed by the Bar, some of them by the Mayor, city Council, et cetera. And it's about 20 some people. They're not all lawyer. And you go and interview at the time, the committee was headed by Paul Freeman, who became a colleague in federal court, and they sound your name to the President. Now, at the time, it was George H. W. Bush was the president. But you might ask, Well, I'm not a Republican, but in the district, there aren't a lot of Republicans. So the nomination process is, you could say, stacked. They send up three names, and honestly, in my group, there was one Republican out of eight, is my recollection. It's not a partisan process, but you have to at least get through the President's interview with the White House Counsel's Office. Your name is submitted to Congress, but it's not the Judiciary Committee, it's government operations, which happened to be headed by a Joe Lieberman, who had been the senator from Connecticut, who I knew, my brother knew, and he started off and he said, this is Terry's kid's sister. That's how I know her. Wow. It was a very painless process, and it wasn't controversial. Even that's now become somewhat controversial. So I was in Superior Court for almost ten years, and I sat in civil, criminal and family, and family is juvenile delinquency. The neglect cases stay with you the entire time you're there, if you have the same children, unless they age out, and it's divorce and child support. Some of the most difficult, and from my vantage point, almost frustratingly difficult assignments.

Jonah Perlin [00:17:56]:

Has the process for becoming a judge changed a lot from your vantage point?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:18:01]:

Less so for Superior Court is my guess, but the federal court is quite a different bird altogether. Clinton became President in 92, towards the end of his second term. They had a lot of vacancies, and I was the last one to get through that process at the time. And I don't know that it's been established how it's going to be under biden, but the process for both Obama and Clinton was that our Congresswoman set up a commission. They made recommendations to the Congresswoman, congresswoman made recommendations to the Department of justice. Then you go to the White House. By the time you got through all that process, you have to wangle your way onto a hearing. And because I didn't have a senator, the Justice Department said, you should go out and create a positive buzz. How am I ever going to do this? And so I looked for everybody I knew, or anybody who had a mother in South Carolina who knew Strom Thurman. And then, of course, when the vote came, he was in the hospital, so that was all wasted. And then I met with a couple of the Democrats, and I met with Ted Kennedy because I had been a Massachusetts resident. My father knew the Kennedys. And when I went to talk with Ted Kennedy, I'm sure I had met him before, but he said, I have a letter here about said, oh, really? And he said, yeah, it came from your you know, I had to get to everybody who knew Warren Hatch or his staff, and I dug up people at Williams and Conley who played golf with his chief of staff, and then he was good friends with Kennedy. Quietly, it wasn't much different. So by the time you got to the actual hearing, it was a non event.

Jonah Perlin [00:19:41]:

It was a huge event to get to the hearing. But once you're there, you stack the deck the right way.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:19:48]:

The questions were generally softballs, except they always ask you about death penalty. And we are all prepared to say, I would follow the law. That's what we're trained to do. Apparently one of my colleagues who went to the 9th Circuit was in this hearing at the time. There was a front page article about one of the judges who hadn't complied with the code of ethics because somebody had died and he had control over the estate and he had a stock, and he shouldn't have been sitting on the case. And they said to the nominee, what would you do about this? And afterwards he said, I almost said, I'd follow the law. If he has to be executed, I'd execute him. So it was less partisan. Some of the Republicans called people I was in an inner court with the chief judge of the DC circuit. I knew through the inner court, and I know they called him and they wanted to know whether I was going to do crazy things. They call your opponents from cases in the past judges. After you spend a good deal of time creating a buzz and trying to find senators who will at least consider you favorably, then you have to alert all these people, some of whom probably weren't happy to talk about the case, especially if I won and they had lost. And it's a lengthy process, and the FBI comes in with all of their questions, and they spend a lot of time going up and down your street, talking to your neighbors, et cetera.

Jonah Perlin [00:21:15]:

Once you got there, what was your favorite part about being a judge?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:21:18]:

The best thing when you're a federal judge is you do about once or twice a year naturalization ceremony. Obviously, they're not cases, but you see people from the last time, it was 70 different countries, maybe 100 people, and they are so happy, and their families are there, and they want to take pictures with the judge, and you're posing for the family members who are in the audience. So it is one of the most heartwarming processes. And if people ever could understand how important these people were to our society, for one thing, second of all, how important we are to them, I think they might have a different point of view about a lot of issues relating to immigration. But I like trying cases, period. I always like to I like seeing the jurors, I like seeing the lawyers in action. I love interacting with jurors.

Jonah Perlin [00:22:09]:

And why is that? What about jurors get you so excited?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:22:12]:

Well, they're real people and they're very interested. They take their responsibilities very seriously. They try to do a good job. You'll have a jury, one out of ten, that you may have somebody who is not going to follow your instructions and is interested in jury nullification, or the kind of person that says, why don't we have fingerprint evidence? Why don't we have DNA and why don't we have hair analysis? And they watch too much CSI, I'm afraid. Right. But in a long case, you really get to know them. I had a case that became quite famous called Jones, and we tried it three times, but they went on for a long time. But the jurors on Valentine's Day got dressed up in red. March 17, they were all in green, and they developed a sort of rapport and that spills over to my staff, who were very good. My courtroom clerk was dynamite with jurors. But you want them to have a positive experience so that when they deliberate, among other things, they can get along and work through the problems, because if they're all at each other's throat, it'd be hard to get a verdict. And your goal here is to get a verdict and not have to do it again.

Jonah Perlin [00:23:24]:

Did you ever see lawyer who thought they were doing a really good job speaking to the jury, but in reality you knew pretty quickly that the jury was not buying what they were selling?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:23:34]:

Yeah, you see that one, there are a fair number of not very competent lawyers out there, so they will not be smooth and technology will be an even bigger problem with them. And they're not used to using it, so they can clearly stumble through it. And then I believe, some of the biggest faults among big law they haven't spent much time actually talking to the jury. They're very good at making a record and putting into evidence a lot of documents, but sometimes they forget to show the jury the documents. I had to, over time, develop procedures so that the jurors basically had their own books of documents, even if it meant four volumes of documents, because otherwise they think they're doing it solely to get things in the record, and they are forgetful of what the jury needs to know to understand the case. It's a real skill to be able to distill anything to a point that it's understandable to me as well as the jurors. My view was I'd have to step in, especially in a civil case, and try to clarify. If I couldn't follow what was going on, then I assumed that other people would be having difficulties in a civil case. We took questions from the jurors. I didn't do that in the criminal case. And it may have been a result of my own feeling as a defense lawyer that I didn't want the jury sort of telecasting their questions and their feelings about things until the end. But it is a strange process. I mean, basically we let them take notes, but you're basically saying, don't say a word about what you hear. Don't think about it, put it in the back burner, and don't deliberate until after the judge's instructions. By the way, we're not going to give you a transcript. And so we often gave portions of transcripts. It's just not doable. And if you had transcripts, I think the tendency of the jury would be to get lost in the weeds at some point. There are enough issues. It is a broad brush approach, there's no question. So you have to try it with that in mind. Every little detail is not going to stick in anybody's mind.

Jonah Perlin [00:25:41]:

And do you think it's a challenge now that there are just so many fewer trials, so lawyers are less experienced with juries?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:25:48]:

Oh, I'm sure that's true. I think their best opportunity is through either pro bono or I know certain firms send people to the US Attorney's office or the public defenders, so I think that's a good way. Or to go into the government. It's obvious to me I never had government practice, but the US attorneys get thrown into court, they get a file and they're told, Go and try it. And they don't know a whole lot, that's for sure. And so that's one of the problems. I mean, they're competent, but they're inexperienced, so you've got that kind of thing. I had somebody who'd sent from an agency to the US Attorney's office to get experience, and somebody objected to some evidence on the grounds of hearsay. And his response when I asked why it wasn't hearsay, he said, I thought we were here to find the truth.

Jonah Perlin [00:26:34]:

I mean, that's the challenge, right? Every pilot needs to land a plane for the first time, but no one wants to be on the plane when they're the ones doing it. So I want to switch from the trial world to the motions practice world. That is a big part of being a judge. As a judge, you are famous for the ability to get through hundreds of cases on your docket efficiently and effectively. Can you talk a little bit about both how you were such an efficient judge, but also why efficiency was so important to your practice?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:27:02]:

I had good law clerks like you, Jonah.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:04]:

Thank you.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:27:05]:

Don't edit that out. Anyways, obviously I've always viewed the law clerks as my right hand and my left, and if anybody is weak, I've just got a weak hand there, and that matters. But early on, I decided that I wasn't going to delegate management because, one, I like it, and two, I didn't want the law clerks to spend their time going over every case and every little motion and every little thing that was going to happen. I did all my sentencing myself. Unless there was a legal issue I needed help on. There were a lot of motions that as soon as I sort of got my sea legs, I would decide from the bench, I'd have somebody help me if I had legal issues. And I'd rule from the bench because there are a lot of things that are not that weighty and don't need a lot of careful attention. Not the summary judgment motions, but motions to amend discovery disputes. So I would do those pretty much on my own and I would issue short orders for anything. That the sizable number of things I could do with my eyes shut. But the bigger cases I wanted the law clerks to really work on and to help me because sometimes the records are so voluminous, I honestly can't go through 80,000 pieces of paper. Environmental Case so I have to rely on the law clerks to at least have read that carefully and to educate me on what's really important. Often in a complicated case where I'm having oral arguments, I will ask the council to give me a book of, say, 100 important exhibits and inevitably they can do it. And inevitably, those are the pieces of paper you need to focus on to understand the case.

Jonah Perlin [00:28:46]:

And can you talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of running chambers we had?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:28:50]:

The chambers are divided basically by even and odd cases between the two law clerks. But often if one law clerk knew more about something that person did that opinion, or alternatively, if one person was jammed up on something else, we switched so that people would keep up with the new stuff as long as it wasn't terribly burdensome. And at the same time, we'd be knocking off the old stuff. We have what's called a Civil Justice Act and that tells us what motions have been pending more than six months and tells you what cases have been pending more than three years. And it's public information. And that actually, I think, is a good organizing process. You try to make sure you're addressing anything that's over six months so that when a six month period is over, you have gotten rid of the oldest stuff. It's like weeding a garden. You have to just keep on weeding. And if you stop weeding, it will grow on you and you will be stuck. When I inherited the first calendar I had, 300 cases came from three judges because those three were backed up the most and they hadn't been really looked at for a while. And in some instances, it was because the judge had been in trial for a year. And in the other instances, there was no apparent reason why I was inheriting all these. The first year or two, I had extra interns and the law clerks worked night and day. I mean, really, it took us a long time, but once we got the thing under control, then it wasn't that difficult to keep up. I think I probably would explain to any law clerk, including you, one we're not here to write the great American novel. I think every product that went out was well written and well thought out but certainly could I have edited it or could you have edited and made it more eloquent? Perhaps?

Jonah Perlin [00:30:45]:

So what were you looking for in an opinion before you decided it was ready to publish?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:30:48]:

I always wanted to make sure I got the facts out that I needed. I viewed two audiences. One was public, so they needed to understand what I was doing and that meant the press too. So I put a lot of effort into the first paragraph and the last paragraph because that's where they're going to find their quotes or their understanding of the bottom line. But I also viewed my audience as the Court of Appeals. I was trying to write an advocate's piece for my position and I did it a lot like I learned to do it in private practice of using the facts in the law because a lot of cases are fact bound, they're not legal issues. It's rare in a way that you get straight legal issues but when it comes to anything that has a lot of facts that govern the case I and the law clerks will know those facts better than anybody else, maybe the litigants. But when I have oral argument and I don't do it as often as I should have, I plead guilty to that. But I only want oral argument. One, if it's a very important case and there's been a lot of press attention, obviously two, any big case where there are issues that I can clarify and the third instances where there may be some issue that's important to just air because of the nature of the issue.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:08]:

I get a lot of questions from my students about does oral argument matter? Are you ever actually persuaded to change your view at oral argument?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:32:16]:

Yeah, I think I have been. And what really happens mostly in oral argument is I learn something new that hadn't been considered. So I go back to reconsider based on that. I had still going up and down the Court of Appeals, but a case involving artwork that had been taken from a family in Hungary. And that was so fact intensive, we really needed them to come in and literally we had to cover about 42 pieces of artwork the historical background of how it got into the possession of the Nazis and how it got back into the possession of the hungarians, et cetera. So you really had to do historical research and we had to have some understanding of certain principles of Hungarian law. So those are the kind of things that you want. Oral argument. I think that you can make a good argument that people deserve to be heard, have their cases heard. I found that I couldn't do it. I believe that I should not be on the bench in a moral argument unless I know the record and the law as well as the people arguing in front of me. So a lot of work, I mean, I will have read the papers in the beginning, all the pleadings. I'll talk to the law clerk. The law clerk will either do a memo or a draft and then we have the argument. And I will read all the papers again. I'll read cases and anything else, but I'm on that law clerk to cover the ground and to distill the really important stuff. Luckily, they do it.

Jonah Perlin [00:33:47]:

So the other question I get all the time from students is specifically about sentencing. Can you talk a little bit about how you thought about conducting a sentencing?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:33:56]:

Yeah, I mean, I will be perfectly frank that I am on the softball, not the long ball hitters in sentencing. I really have not come to believe that lengthy sentences, especially for nonviolent people, are useful. I think a short period of time can be just as useful as long as we can give them support when they come out. So when I first started in federal court, one, we had a lot of mandatories, and they were very painful because a lot of people have petty drug histories. But three of them will put you in a mandatory life, right? And you could be the person on the street perlin the drugs because you are an addict. And I think we're getting better at providing drug treatment. But for a lot of people, they're sent back to where they were before and nothing's changed. And they can't find a job and they slip back into the same old habits with the same old people. So first, I read the presentence report carefully. That's done by the probation office. I read the pleadings by both the government and the defense counsel have generally seen this person before, once or twice, at least at a minimum, if they didn't go to trial. And I looked at factors such as have they worked? Have they had jobs, and do they have family support out there? So that if they're home and so it matters to me whether family shows up at sentencing because they need some kind of mentorship, and we provide some when people get out as part of reentry. But they definitely have to have support. And there are all kinds of factors. Have I ever come to a fair resolution of the issue of what do you do with somebody with HIV? Do you treat them differently? What do you do about somebody who's very small and very vulnerable, say, because the prisons are tough? My first experience in federal court was to send a young man to what was called the Youth Center down in Wharton, and it was for people between the ages of 18 and 21. And he came back after 60 days and he had been raped several times, and he was just a shadow of himself. It was a real wake up call to me that it is a tough place to be, and people who haven't been there before potentially suffer more than ever. I had a terrible case in Superior Court where the one guy out of eight co defendants was probably the best educated and had a nice family, but it was serious gun charges, and he went away for maybe two years. And when he came out, he went into the police station and shot policemen just randomly. But you would not have thought that was even possible when you sentenced him. I mean, I couldn't anticipate that. And some of my biggest disappointments have been people I thought could be constructive citizens and turned out that it didn't work out that way. And it's very difficult when people get on supervised release to revoke them, send them back to jail.

Jonah Perlin [00:37:09]:

I want to end with two quick questions. The first is, I think a lot of the listeners of this podcast are going to be law students or future law students, some of whom may aspire to clerk. And one of the questions we often get and don't get an answer to is what are judges looking for? What makes you stand out? How do you choose? I know there's a lot of applicants every year, and you only got to pick two. Can you just talk a little bit about what you were looking for in a law clerk?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:37:34]:

Yeah, when I came, right from the beginning, wanted people who had extra experience. So I think I set the precedent, which is not uniformly liked by the law schools, obviously. I like somebody who's either clerk in a court that does a lot of administrative law because we do a lot of administrative law. I also like to see as an alternative law firm experience, or any experience that people have had to write motions, summary judgment, oppositions or motions, and not just big document cases. It doesn't do me any good to know that you've reviewed documents at a big firm to have somebody who knows what goes on in a trial. I think that having been in private practice, I had a really good understanding of one, how to write, probably less so how to research. But that's the law clerk's job. So that's one important criteria. Sure. And if some professor I know takes the time to call, that will immediately put the resume at least in front of me.

Jonah Perlin [00:38:35]:

Right.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:38:35]:

Because that means somebody has thought enough of this person to make a telephone call. And if I know the professor, then I have a certain degree of confidence that they won't spin me, so to speak.

Jonah Perlin [00:38:48]:

Right.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:38:48]:

And you want somebody you appreciate having in chambers. So by the time I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing really people that I would like to spend time with. It's important. And they're people who have been vouched for by somebody.

Jonah Perlin [00:39:03]:

And what about students who don't have a connection like that to a professor? You know, was it enough to just apply through Oscar, the centralized application system?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:39:10]:

I generally found that Oscar was less helpful, which is probably a problem because you just couldn't keep up with it. So some days a law student, and I never minded this, would call and say, I'm out of come from out of town. Can I come by to meet you? I haven't heard from you yet. And I look at the resume and lo and behold, if I thought this was a person I want to speak to, then the person would come in. But would that resume have landed up in front of me at that point in time? Probably not.

Jonah Perlin [00:39:42]:

It's a huge challenge.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:39:44]:

So it is not a simple process. And you can never predict 100% what kind of law court you're going to get. You want people who can interact with the public because they're going to see the lawyers in particular, they'll call all the time. They can be quite annoying. So you don't want somebody to get bent out of shape. And then you want somebody who can get along with court staff because obviously, if they like you, they'll be much more helpful than the law clerk who has been rather condescending to anybody in the courtroom. So you need to worry about people's personality and the last criteria, which it's a little hard to put your finger on, but I used to say, is this a high maintenance person? Totally. This goes back to my comment about presenting something as a final product and having confidence in it. If somebody is going to worry at every step of the way and want more handholding, it just doesn't work. You lose confidence in them. So I'm looking for people who are self starters and who have done enough in life that they feel a level of confidence in themselves and they don't need to have constant feedback. I don't know. You can decide whether you got enough.

Jonah Perlin [00:40:59]:

Feedback, but I got plenty of feedback. One of the challenges is there are a lot of qualified people, and so there's a couple of challenges along the way. Right. You have to stand out enough to get your resume on the table. You have to stand out enough among those resumes to get an interview. And then in the interview you need to show the kind of person you are because you're already qualified. Otherwise you wouldn't be in the office.

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:41:21]:

Right. With Oscar, at the height, we could have gotten 1500 applicants, and I interviewed six or eight.

Jonah Perlin [00:41:29]:

We have a lot of people who have already written in and said, I'm a law student, or I'm thinking about going to law school. It's so great to hear from practicing lawyers what's one piece of advice you would leave those people who are about to enter our profession with?

Ellen Segal Huvelle [00:41:42]:

It's a hard thing. You don't want to have your life driven by debt. So how you deal with that obviously is extremely difficult. I mean, I was very lucky. Obviously. I took a major pay cut for a job that is to die for, but I couldn't have done it if Jeffrey hadn't been working at a law firm. It really would not have been feasible. So there's that problem. I think there's endless opportunities in the law, and a lot of people don't even actually people teach, but they also get out in the business side of things, so they should never be risk adverse if you can help yourself, which isn't always simple. It was just serendipitous that I took this opportunity after 14 years, to apply to be a judge. I didn't know enough to know that it was a good idea or a bad idea, except I knew that I had a good sense of what's reasonable. There were times in the law firm where we meet with a client and the partner would say, oh, we get the government on the run, they're going to cave. And afterwards I'd say to the guy, Was I at the same meeting? I didn't have quite the bravado that would have helped, but in any case. So I think you should try to look at it as a great opportunity.

Jonah Perlin [00:43:02]:

That was Judge Ellen Siegel Huvelle, former District Court judge on the District Court for the District of Columbia, who I want to thank so much for being on the podcast. I'm so proud to call Judge Huvel my judge, and for the opportunity I had to clerk for her. The judge law clerk relationship is a special one, and it's certainly one that I will always treasure. One of the most important things I learned from our conversation, and I hope you did too, was that success in the legal profession requires some serendipity, being in the right place at the right time, but it also requires confidence and an appreciation that you often need to make your own luck. As we discussed, the practice of law certainly changed over Judge Yuvell's almost 50 year legal career. But what I also loved to learn was how much has stayed the same. The importance of good, careful, precise writing, the importance of treating everyone with respect, from the courtroom clerk to the litigant to opposing counsel, and most of all, the importance of always remembering that the task of a lawyer is to do justice. As always, I want to thank you for listening, and if you're interested in learning more about past and future episodes, please sign up for the email list@howielawyer.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You can always reach me at howielawyer@gmail.com or find me on Twitter at jonah Perlin. Thanks again to Judge Huvelle. Thanks for listening, and have a great week.