The New Sage of Stanford

Lawyer Kathleen M. Sullivan introduced herself to lawyer Susan R. Estrich in a legal brief. Estrich, now a USC law professor, was representing labor against the city of Boston in a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court case.

“We thought we had clearly won the opening round, and then this reply brief came in,” Estrich remembered.

Every argument that Estrich’s legal opposition had overlooked was there. Every bone she thought was safely buried rose before her in meticulous detail. Her heart pounded as she scanned the names of the lawyers who wrote it. They were all the same as before, with one addition.

Who, shouted Estrich, is that . . . Kathleen Sullivan?

By now, Sullivan, if not exactly a household name, has a national reputation. The Stanford law professor is a constitutional lawyer, scholar, teacher and commentator, renowned for a penetrating intellect and, among her friends and colleagues, endless humor.

Her name is linked to the most golden of jobs in the legal world. When people muse about Sullivan’s future, they mention the U.S. Supreme Court, a Cabinet post in a Democratic administration or the presidency of a university.

She writes U.S. Supreme Court briefs on cases that pose some of the most profound and vexing social questions of the day. U.S. senators call her for advice in drafting legislation, and members of Congress invite her to testify. She has enlightened a broader audience with incisive legal commentaries on television and in newspapers.

When Stanford Law School announced in February that Sullivan would become the school’s dean in September, the first woman to run one of the nation’s three top law schools, Stanford, not Sullivan, was viewed as having won the prize. Of 181 law schools accredited by the American Bar Assn., only 20 are headed by women.

Being dean will give Sullivan an even higher profile. It will allow her to shape the teaching of law into the next century and mold new generations of lawyers. It also will mean lots of time spent on fund-raising.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to be of service,” said Sullivan, 43. “That is what really appealed to me . . . to give back to this profession, to be of service.”

She smiled at herself.

“I did think about being a priest when I was young,” she said, “until I realized that was not in the repertoire of the Catholic Church.”

Seated in her office on the Palo Alto campus recently, surrounded by bouquets of fading flowers and balloons that poured in after the announcement, Sullivan said the good things in her life have come unexpectedly. Books lined one wall of the modest office, and legal documents sat in stacks.

“My Irish grandmother used to say, ‘Don’t let your head get swelled up now,’ ” said Sullivan, who wore a black pantsuit and pearls. “Those were wise words.”

She fussed over a visitor’s coffee and tried to ignore a telephone that rang often. A U.S. senator wanted legal advice on legislation, a newspaper reporter needed scholarly analysis for a story.

Sullivan, who has reddish-blond, shoulder-length hair and striking blue eyes, exudes energy. She literally glowed as she rattled off anecdotes about her life, from a middle-class upbringing in an Irish Catholic family in Queens, N.Y., to a tenured teaching job at Harvard and finally to California, a place she considers paradise.

Few Women Break In

to the Elite Specialty

Constitutional law has traditionally been the subject to teach in law school, and men have dominated the elite specialty. Sullivan is one of the few women who has broken into the cadre, and she is the only woman editor of a constitutional law book. She has described the U.S. Supreme Court as “the court I know best.”

“Not that it makes your family happy that you are in constitutional law,” she said, adding in mimicry: “Let’s get this straight. You don’t do wills. You don’t do closings. You don’t do real estate. You don’t do contracts. But you’re very good at the dinner table on impeachment.”

Friends describe Sullivan as a liberal Democrat--she has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on various cases--but she is more intellectual than political. She served on the 1992 Clinton-Gore transition team and met the “extremely courteous” Kenneth Starr from the outgoing administration. She later wrote an unsuccessful brief for 17 law school professors to urge the Supreme Court to postpone the Paula Jones sexual harassment case until after Clinton left office.

She said she never planned to become a constitutional scholar or even to teach. She went to Cornell University in New York on a scholarship for gifted students to study literature. But Watergate, which she calls “that brief moment in 1974,” inspired her and changed her mind. She noticed women lawyers on the steps of Capitol Hill during the Watergate hearings.

“It never occurred to me before that women were lawyers,” Sullivan said. “And I thought, well, that’s exciting.”

She attended Oxford University in England on a scholarship after graduating from Cornell. The British didn’t quite know what to make of her, she said.

“I was female, I was American and I was Irish American, three grounds for some suspicion,” she said, smiling.

She later turned serious, explaining in a quiet voice: “Being Irish has been an important part of my life. It gives me a little bit of a perspective of the outsider . . . of how easy it is to be a subordinated group.”

Back in the U.S., Sullivan entered Harvard Law School and managed to get into the constitutional law class of Laurence H. Tribe, a renowned scholar with generally liberal views. He became her mentor and still feels what he described as “an almost parental pride in having discovered this wonderful person.”

The class was large, maybe 200 students, Tribe said. But Sullivan stood out “in some of the questions she asked and the ways she responded to my questions--with a very unusual and unusually clear and crisp mind.” Even then her “glow” was noticeable, he said. She exuded a “dramatic personal and charismatic intelligence.”

A Chance to Work on

Supreme Court Cases

She planned to enter a large litigation firm in New York. But Tribe changed all that when he offered her the chance to work with him on cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sullivan and Estrich met after working on opposing sides of the labor case, in which Sullivan’s client prevailed, and they became fast friends. Estrich was already teaching law at Harvard and made it her project to get the law school to hire Sullivan.

Over a chilled bottle of vodka at Estrich’s home, Estrich plotted strategy. She decided they needed to create a buzz around Sullivan to convince Harvard to hire her. Estrich used her contacts and coached Sullivan in presentation.

“I had been in law teaching . . . long enough to see enough women come through and fail to generate excitement because we don’t know how to be commanding in this world,” Estrich said.

She paused. “That was part of the reason for the vodka.”

Harvard’s initial resistance--Sullivan had not made law review or clerked for a U.S. Supreme Court justice--eventually gave way, according to Estrich and Tribe, and Sullivan dazzled Harvard students with her intellect and style.

She entered a class of more than 100 and on the first day called on students by name. (She had memorized the names of the students with their photographs.) Students gave her high ratings.

She calls her students by their last names “because in the law, a lot of times formality is a way of achieving dignity and therefore equality.” She tries to give her students problems “so hard that you can escape the agony only by thinking hard.”

The Socratic method is a misnomer, she said. “Socrates actually didn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise.”

Her most striking intellectual gift, according to colleagues and former students, is an ability to see through a mushy maze of concepts and find the clarity.

“She has a tremendous ability to convey the most difficult legal principles to her students in a very precise and accessible way,” said Teri Little, a former student and now a corporate lawyer in Palo Alto. “She teaches students to think. . . . She is trying to train their minds.”

Jay Wexler, a former Sullivan student who now clerks for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, described Sullivan as “scary smart.” Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan agreed.

“She practically does origami with the [legal] cases, the way she can fold them around each to create something new,” Karlan said.

In the 1991-92 school year, Sullivan left Harvard for visiting teaching posts at USC in the fall and Stanford in the spring.

“I called it surf and turf,” said Sullivan, who is unmarried and has no children.

Estrich had by then left Harvard for USC to join her husband after a bicoastal marriage, and she and Sullivan worked on cases together. Estrich said she always wrote the first draft of briefs because she could be fast and sloppy and get the process started quickly. Sullivan, Estrich said, is meticulous about her work.

Sullivan fell in love with California, particularly its climate. One episode in Los Angeles during that time still stands out. She was a speaker at a political event.

“I was introduced by Cybill Shepherd,” she said. After a beat, she added: “I knew I was not in Boston anymore. And I will always treasure what she said to me at the end of the evening. ‘You’re not bad for such a smart cookie.’ ”

On her last day of class at Stanford, her students gave her a Stanford sweatshirt. She put it on in class. As she was writing on the blackboard, she pulled one board down and saw a message scrawled on the other: “Defect to Stanford.”

A former student recalled that Sullivan was visibly moved. She left Harvard permanently for Stanford in 1993.

She Comes Into Her

Own on the West Coast

Did she move in part to get out from Tribe’s shadow?

“It wasn’t conscious at the time,” she said. “But here on the West Coast, I have just been Kathleen Sullivan. I haven’t been Kathleen Sullivan, comma, protege of Laurence Tribe.”

The two remain close friends and talk often. “‘Having a mentor was crucial,” Sullivan said. “All of the most important lessons in life we learn from people whom we respect and admire. In my case, that has been partly my family and Irish grandmothers and my parents.

“But Larry showed me every dimension about what is wonderful about this job: the intellectual challenge, the capacity for hard work and the dazzling creativity with which he approaches legal problems.”

Sullivan’s friends like to describe her “great capacity for fun” in addition to her love for her work. She goes to movies, reads widely, enjoys hikes and the beach, and is always game for a new restaurant.

“I think of Kathleen as a serious eater,” said New York University law professor Sylvia A. Law.

When she becomes dean, Sullivan will take over a law school recently rocked by the much publicized resignation of professor Linda Mabry, an African American woman who filed a racial discrimination suit against Stanford and charged that the administration made her feel invisible and inferior.

Sullivan said her study of constitutional law, “which is largely about making things work in a very heterogeneous society,” will help her as she tries to make the school “as inclusive and hospitable and supportive . . . as I possibly can.”

Mabry and Sullivan were friends.

“I am very sad and sorry about Linda’s departure,” Sullivan said, “and I would hope that nobody would leave Stanford again with that sense of the place.”

Times staff writer Maura Dolan can be reached by e-mail at Maura.Dolan@latimes.com.