“It’s here! It’s here! Front page!” Unable to adequately express her excitement through traditional dance, the judge’s bun broke into a bastardized jumping jack. “Sheba! Markhew! Did you see? Did you see?” The judge flew into the clerks’ cave, waving a Philadelphia Inquirer. On the cover, above the fold, was the Dell Nelson case, with excerpts from the majority opinion as well as our dissent. With Judge Adams’s nomination hearings scheduled for February, the media was watching her every move through a microscope. A death penalty case ordinarily would never have received such press.

“You both did a rilly rilly good job.” The judge smiled at me and Matthew. While we were thrilled with the compliment, it was still perplexing. We’d spent a day earlier in the week, going over the opinion, line by line, word by word, with the judge in the torture chamber. When she wasn’t dozing off, sitting up, clutching her mechanical pencil, she was busy criticizing every inch of the dissent, down to comma placement. I was sure she’d rewrite the whole thing behind our backs. She hadn’t and now it was in the newspaper!

As soon as the judge headed for her private bathroom, paper in tow, Matthew brought up the Inquirer’s Web site on his computer and I read over his shoulder. Not since getting an offer to clerk had I felt so proud—entire paragraphs that Matthew and I had written appeared verbatim. Death penalty advocates and critics commented on each side, the president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the ACLU noting: “Once again, Judge Friedman has proven herself to be the rational calm amid a hateful, irrational storm of conservative jurists. We expected more from Linda Adams, but she has revealed herself to be no more than a political hostage of Republican senators.” The junior senator from Texas called Linda Adams a “hero who refuses to bend our beloved Constitution to allow murderers to walk the streets and kill our children.” According to Professor Neil Haltow, the constitutional law guru of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, “in finding no Sixth Amendment violation, the majority opinion has indeed, as the dissent points out, created nothing short of a circuit split, considering the striking similarity in facts between the Nelson and Drexel cases. Notwithstanding Drexel, ruling on sleeping lawyers falls squarely within the ‘exceptional importance’ category for which en banc hearings were created.”

“Oh my God,” Matthew whispered gleefully, “we’re in the middle of a feeding frenzy.”

“Yes, yes we are,” I murmured, pinching myself. “I know the old lady isn’t exactly a dream to work for, but you have to admit, this is exciting!”

The phone rang off the hook throughout the afternoon, Roy and Janet taking turns explaining to the press that Judge Friedman never took calls from journalists (it wasn’t clear that journalists had ever called before). As for the judge, she sat staring at her name in the paper, gloating. That is, until she received a call from Dr. Fernandez.