Clint Bolick

Clint Bolick (born December 26, 1957) is a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. Previously, he served as Vice President of Litigation at the conservative/libertarian Goldwater Institute. He co-founded the libertarian Institute for Justice, where he was the Vice President and Director of Litigation from 1991 until 2004. He led two cases that went before the Supreme Court of the United States. He has also defended state-based school choice programs in the Supreme Courts of Wisconsin and Ohio.

Bolick was born on December 26, 1957 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Bolick grew up in nearby Hillside, New Jersey and graduated from Hillside High School in 1975. He graduated from Drew University in 1979 and received his Juris Doctor from the University of California Davis School of Law in 1982. As a law student, he supported laws and legal rulings that knocked down racial discrimination (calling Brown v. Board of Education a "triumph of the principle of equality"), and was a vocal opponent of Affirmative Action-based admission policies.

In 1980, he ran as a Libertarian for a seat in the California State Assembly. He lost to an incumbent Democrat but garnered 7.1% of the vote. (In that election, the Libertarian presidential ticket earned about 1% of the vote nationwide.)

In 1982, he joined a public interest law firm, the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver, Colorado. He was hired by the foundation's acting president, William H. "Chip" Mellor. In 1984, Mellor left the organization over a conflict with one of the foundation's sponsors. Bolick also left, believing that the foundation was more interested in protecting business interests than in promoting economic freedom. In 2005, he said:

Chip and I discovered that there is a world of difference between an organization that is pro-business and an organization that is pro-free enterprise.

After their break with Mountain States, they began planning a free-enterprise public interest law firm that would follow a philosophy of "economic liberty." These plans would lead to the founding of the Institute for Justice in 1991.

Bolick joined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1985. While he only stayed at the EEOC for a year, he became friends with its chairman, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (Thomas is the godfather to Bolick's second son.) Thomas helped convince him that removing economic barriers for the poor was more important than fighting race-based "reverse discrimination." In 1991, he would support adding punitive damages to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He explained "It seemed to me that if you didn't want quotas, you had to have tough remedies and punitive damages against recalcitrant discriminators ... That very much came out of Thomas." Thomas also shaped his preferred remedy for inequality: removing laws and regulations he viewed as preventing the poor from starting small businesses. Thomas did this in part by telling Bolick about his grandfather, who began with a hand-built pushcart and built a profitable delivery service that comfortably supported his family, only to encounter threats from regulations designed to destroy Black-owned businesses.

Bolick left the EEOC to join the Justice Department in 1986. In 1988, he wrote his first book, Changing Course. In this book, he defined civil rights in part from the perspective of removing economic and regulatory barriers for the poor and disadvantaged.