Sad to learn this weekend that Judge Laurence Silberman has died at the age of 86. The term public servant was made for Americans such as Silberman, but it barely begins to describe his significance.
He entered government service in 1969, in Richard Nixon’s Department of Labor, became Deputy Attorney General in 1974, and the American ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1975. He then worked in the private sector for a time (including as a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, alongside Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, and others busy laying the intellectual groundwork for judicial originalism). In 1985, Ronald Reagan nominated him to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, often thought of as the second-highest court in the land. He was a full-time judge on that court for the next 15 years, and served as a judge in senior status for another two decades, right through this summer.
Silberman was among the most important judges never appointed to the Supreme Court, authoring influential opinions regarding gun control, the independent counsel statutes, the Patriot Act, the Commerce Clause, and other crucial legal and constitutional questions. His opinions were models of how to put the meaning of the Constitution and the laws above the wishes of the judge. And it was in that mold that he also shaped generations of originalist scholars, lawyers, and judges who served as his clerks — including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Silberman never lost a step as a sharp and thoughtful legal thinker: A wonderful speech he delivered as a Constitution Day lecture at Dartmouth last month was just published in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. I had the privilege of spending a couple of days with him at a conference in August, where not only his intellect but also his charm, wit, and energy were impossible to miss. But above all, on that occasion and in general, it was his decency, humanity, and good humor that stood out. He loved his country and its people, and they were terribly lucky to have him. R.I.P.