By Jerry Crimmins
Law Bulletin Staff Writer
Monday, May 3, 2010
His career has been "unconventional," Barry Sullivan said this week as he was inducted as Loyola University Chicago School of Law's first Cooney & Conway chair in advocacy.
In an era when law professors typically practice law for only a brief period before launching a lifetime career in academia, Sullivan has traveled back and forth between law practice and law school.
He is probably best known as a partner at Jenner & Block LLP in two stints, adding up to about 25 years.
He was co-chair of Jenner's appellate and Supreme Court practice, and he argued cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, numerous state supreme courts and state and federal appellate courts. He also tried cases at the trial court level.
Part of the attraction of the chair of advocacy is "to be a mentor" to young people in the same way that Chicago lawyers, including the late Albert Jenner, helped him when he was starting out, Sullivan said.
In academia, Sullivan was dean of the Washington and Lee University School of Law for five years in the 1990s and vice president of that university. He has been a visiting professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law, a Fulbright professor of law at the University of Warsaw in Poland, and a visiting law fellow of the University of London.
"I feel like I've had a really interesting career," he said. "I've always liked teaching and scholarship and also practicing law." His list of publications is as long as his arm.
Sullivan had an early, unconventional role model.
Asked how he came to be a lawyer, he said, "I had an uncle who was a lawyer." His uncle graduated from Harvard Law School and, in an unusual career choice, became a police detective in San Francisco.
"He came out of Harvard during the Depression," Sullivan said. "He retired as deputy chief of detectives."
Sullivan, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, built his law career on advocacy, the subject for which he now holds the chair at Loyola.
After clerking for Judge Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in 1970s after law school, he said, "I was inspired to think you could do good things as a lawyer."
After his time as a law clerk, Sullivan became assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. He argued his first case before the U.S. Supreme Court when he was 31.
Since then he has litigated significant cases across the country in public law, such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004) where he represented the American Bar Association as amicus curiae.
"The Humanity of Advocacy," was the title of his speech Tuesday when he was inducted into the Cooney & Conway chair in advocacy. There Sullivan spoke mostly of appellate advocacy, which has been his strength.
"Appellate judges may or may not be moved by the same arguments that move jurors," he said. "But we do know they are not lifeless, mechanical beings. ... Nor are they immune to the emotions produced by boring, repetitive, fantastic or ill-conceived written and oral presentations. ...
"Advocates who appear to exaggerate or prevaricate will not be believed. If they substitute such things for the hard work of thinking about how to persuade those who are to judge their case, they also risk losing sight of the realities of their case, to the detriment of their clients and their own self-interest. ... Their clients' cause -and their own reputations - may suffer in either case."
