On June 23, 2022, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court protected the right to carry legally owned guns outside the home. Hours later, Paul D. Clement, the lawyer who had successfully argued the case on behalf of the petitioners, was driven out of his job.

Clement, then the best-known attorney at the 3,000-lawyer megafirm Kirkland & Ellis and perhaps the nation’s most famed Supreme Court advocate, has been a leader of the conservative legal movement, which in recent years has been rolling back the work of many decades of left-leaning judges and academics. The triumph in the Bruen case of Clement and his law-firm partner Erin E. Murphy came at a time when progressive cancel culture, deeply hostile to the Court’s new direction and intolerant of free-speech principles, had been spreading from campuses out into the professions, the media, Big Business, nonprofits, and almost all other elite institutions. It also came as three Trump appointees were making the Supreme Court more supportive of conservative causes than at any time in more than 80 years, most notably with the Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade.

President Biden assailed the Bruen decision. So did many of Kirkland’s lawyers and clients, who thought it would bring more gun killings or give the firm a bad image or both. Kirkland immediately announced that it would stop representing gun-rights clients. Clement and Murphy resigned and founded their own boutique firm, taking a number of other Kirkland lawyers with them.

“There was only one choice,” Clement and Murphy wrote at the time in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We couldn’t abandon our clients simply because their positions are unpopular in some circles.” In fact, he said in an interview, “essentially all” of his and Murphy’s clients came with them, and the firm has attracted many new ones. Clement & Murphy, which has focused on high-stakes appeals, is prospering, although Clement acknowledges that “you don’t leave a law firm like Kirkland & Ellis without taking a pay cut.”

The gigantic firms that dominate the profession today, each employing thousands of lawyers and making millions of dollars in annual profits per partner (more than $7 million in the case of Kirkland), are attuned to left-leaning elite opinion. They face increasing pressure from corporate clients and from many of their own lawyers — especially recent graduates of the ever more left-tilting colleges and law schools — to shun controversial conservative causes such as gun rights. Kirkland’s only comment on the exit of Clement and Murphy was a statement by Jon Ballis, chairman of its executive committee, that “Paul and Erin have been valued colleagues” and “we wish them the best of luck in the future and we look forward to collaborating with them in the future in matters not involving the Second Amendment.”

Clement stresses that when Kirkland “was reaching out” to him and Murphy in 2016, the two lawyers clearly stated one “nonnegotiable” condition: They would continue to represent gun-rights clients, including the NRA. “I was given express assurances that we could continue to represent them,” recalls Clement. “If you’re a constitutional lawyer, having a client who’s trying to vindicate a constitutional right that is kind of radically underdeveloped by the Supreme Court,… that’s a fascinating client.” More broadly, he says, “we had a practice that we were very proud of,” with “a great mix of blue-chip, Fortune 500 companies on the one hand but also cases involving state and local governments, and Second Amendment cases, some First Amendment cases, some religious-liberty cases.” He and Murphy had resolved not to join any firm that wanted most of their practice but not clients who “would make some people nervous.”

Clement and Murphy are not the only lawyers lately driven out of a big firm for agreeing with a Supreme Court decision decried by the Left. Also in 2022, Hogan Lovells (a firm of some 2,500 lawyers) drove out and disparaged retired, but still active, equity partner Robin Keller. By her account, it was for saying during an online conference call advertised as a “safe space” for female employees that she agreed with the Dobbs decision. “My contracts with the firm were terminated,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “and other firms, wary of the publicity, blackballed me — all after an unblemished 44-year career.”

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Clement clerked for D.C. Circuit judge Laurence H. Silberman, sometimes called the most important judge never to sit on the Supreme Court, and for Justice Antonin Scalia. Since 1998, he has taught at the Georgetown University Law Center, and he also teaches at the Gray Center at Scalia Law School. He served from 2005 to 2008 as President George W. Bush’s solicitor general.

Clement had had a prior stint at Kirkland & Ellis beginning in 1995, after his clerkship for Scalia. Kirkland was then “demonstrably a place that sort of welcomed conservative lawyers and saw that as something it affirmatively wanted,” he says. Among them were the late Robert Bork, the late Ken Starr, and now-justice Brett Kavanaugh. But between 1995 and 2022, Kirkland’s practice, in addition to its ideological evolution, became more focused on transactions and less on litigation. “Of course if you’re a litigator you’re going to represent unpopular clients,” Clement says. “I don’t think that’s as hardwired in with the transactional folks. They’re used to having a couple of big companies on both sides of the transaction. Nobody’s particularly unpopular. At the end of this there’s going to be a closing dinner and maybe both sides will come.”

Now more than ever, since the days when the biggest of them had only a few hundred lawyers, law firms bring in their riches through mergers, big bankruptcies, other transactional work, and the piling up of litigation-discovery profits. All of this requires “leveraging” partners by assigning many young associates to them. Firms do not, on the other hand, get much richer by adding, or keeping, the best Supreme Court and appellate specialists around. Nice to have in the arsenal, but expendable when they come under ideologically driven attacks.

In all, Clement has argued over a hundred cases before the Supreme Court — more since the turn of the century than any other lawyer — and many in the lower courts, including major administrative-law challenges and constitutional litigation against the federal government. His pro bono engagements in the Supreme Court have included a win in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), in which the ruling allowed a Washington State high-school football coach to pray quietly on the field after games.

In a major argument in January 2024, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Clement will urge the Court to abandon or modify the 39-year-old “Chevron deference” doctrine, which has helped increase the power of the executive branch by requiring courts to defer to an executive agency’s own interpretation of an act of Congress when there is doubt about legislative intent. He is counsel of record in another important upcoming case, Moody v. NetChoice, and will argue against the constitutionality of 2021 laws in Texas and Florida that would regulate how large social-media companies such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) control content posted on their sites — which they sometimes do by excluding or marginalizing conservative content.

Murphy, for her part, has argued dozens of cases in appellate and trial courts around the country, including the Supreme Court and nearly all the federal courts of appeals, and has an active pro bono practice. She clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes of the Seventh Circuit and for Chief Justice John Roberts. The National Law Journal has named her one of the nation’s “outstanding women lawyers.”

Clement and Murphy’s exit from Kirkland came eleven years after the first time they were forced out by a big law firm, Atlanta’s King & Spalding. In 2011, the Republican-majority House of Representatives had retained them to advocate the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which barred federal recognition of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages, after the Obama administration had refused to do so. The firm came under fire from gay-rights and LGBTQ groups at top law schools. Assailed on social media, it caved and announced it would drop the case, prompting Clement and Murphy to resign. (In 2013, the Supreme Court found DOMA unconstitutional in the 5–4 Obergefell ruling.)

Clement sees the cancel culture sweeping through universities and other institutions as a problem for the constitutional system. “The adversary system of justice can only thrive if both sides of disputes have access to able representation and, particularly in a place like the Supreme Court,… to the best available representation,” he says, “so the issues can be presented as sharply and effectively as possible.”

He adds that the profession’s “bedrock principles,” going back at least to John Adams representing the British defendants in the Boston Massacre case, are that “we don’t represent only popular clients. We don’t let one set of clients dictate who our other set of clients are.” He continues: “The First Amendment is a principle that says we don’t just suppress speech that we don’t like.” Therefore, in his view, “even if you’re a private university or something like that, [so that] you’re not directly bound by the First Amendment, we’d expect you to be committed to” free speech.

“Even to a greater degree,” he adds, “lawyers have a special responsibility to defend the adversary system of justice and to explain [it] to nonlawyers…. It’s easy for a nonlawyer to say you’re just representing bad people who did bad things. [But] our whole legal system depends on the idea that both sides get to be well represented in court.”

Clement thinks that “big law firms are becoming increasingly woke because their clients are becoming increasingly woke,” as he said on a Federalist Society panel in 2022. This has translated into an unwillingness to represent conservative clients. Last year, he told a Republican National Lawyers Association: “We seem to have migrated from ‘Of course lawyers represent unpopular clients’ to ‘Of course big law firms aren’t going to represent certain unpopular clients.’ The representations that are coming out of the biggest law firms seem to be skewed in one direction in particular.”

Clement also sees the Left as dominant in getting big firms to support its causes by filing amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases: “If you look at the amicus briefs that were filed in the Dobbs case… or the affirmative-action cases,… it’s a clean sweep. They’re on the liberal side of the case.” This lopsidedness conveys, “implicitly, that there’s only one right answer in these controversies,… only one respectable side of these disputes.”

Murphy worries about the quality of legal advocacy. She notes that “driving conservative clients out of firms” means “driving conservative lawyers out of firms too.” But “whether firms and their clients like it or not, many members of the judiciary are conservative.” That can affect how judges approach all sorts of cases, not just the most hot-button ones. And so when firms drive conservative lawyers away, they “are really doing a disservice to their clients, as they are depriving them of the insights of lawyers who may better understand the thinking of the judges who will be deciding their cases.” For this reason she has always prioritized “true diversity of thought.” It’s “all well and good to task someone with trying to play the role of Justice Thomas or Justice Kagan at a moot court. But there’s no substitute for having someone moot you who genuinely thinks like the judges or justices you are trying to persuade.”

Those who decry the Supreme Court’s supposed lurch to the right tend to forget certain decisions that were passionately denounced in academia and the media yet in sync with public opinion. While polling on Dobbs is negative, strong and stable majorities express opposition to the consideration of race in university admissions and hiring, even as large firms apply DEI principles to their hiring decisions. Perhaps there will come a day when elite legal opinion catches up with the times and a lawyer like Paul Clement no longer has to take refuge in boutique practice. Until then, Big Law will continue to forfeit opportunities for its attorneys to test their views and arguments against those who see the world differently, and clients and the judiciary will be the worse for it.