Happy Martin Luther King Day.

It's been nearly 60 years since I heard Martin Luther King deliver his famous, I have a dream

speech.

I was a 24-year-old law clerk on the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court term starts the first October, first Monday in October, and so this was

August of 1963, and it was the interim between my first clerkship in the Court of Appeals

and my second clerkship in the United States Supreme Court.

But I was employed at this point by the Supreme Court of the United States, and I heard

like everybody else did that Martin Luther King was coming to Washington to deliver a major

speech on civil rights and I wanted to go.

But the Chief Justice of the United States, and this is a story that's not widely known.

The Chief Justice of the United States, the great Earl Warren, who wrote just nine years

earlier, Brown versus Board of Education, told the law clerks not to go to the Martin Luther

King speech and told all court employees to stay away from it because there was a concern

that the speech may result in arrests and the issue may come to the United States Supreme

Court, and law clerks should not be witnesses to issues that come before the Supreme Court.

So we got a pretty strict instruction to stay away from that speech, but I wanted to

go.

And I was a cocky young kid.

And so I went back to my first judge, Judge David Baselon, who at the time was Chief

Judge of the United States Court of Appeals, and I said to him, Judge Baselon, I really

want to hear this speech, but I know that members of the judiciary were told not to go.

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