In the summer of 1998, Matthew M. Nee arrived at the Supreme Court of Ohio. He was a second-year law student at Ohio Northern University College of Law, and the law school faculty had selected Matt to serve as an extern to a Supreme Court justice.
Matt couldn’t have known it at the time, but he had won a sort of lottery by being assigned to the office of Justice Paul E. Pfeifer. Serving as an extern to a Supreme Court justice is a wonderful opportunity for any law student, but getting to work for Justice Pfeifer would do more than enhance Matt’s resume.
But it wasn’t just Pfeifer’s judicial reputation that made an externship in his office so valuable. While Pfeifer took the job of being a justice seriously, he never took himself too seriously. Despite all his career achievements – a prosperous private law practice, 16 years in the Ohio Senate, 24 years on the Supreme Court – the trappings of the office he held never affected him. Perhaps it was because of his small-town roots – he grew up in Bucyrus, the son of a dairy farmer. Or maybe it was because he never stopped being a farmer himself – for years he’s maintained about 200 head of Black Angus cattle on his own farm in Bucyrus. (Pfeifer always said that no matter what people thought of him as a justice, the cows just knew him as the guy who brought the hay.) For whatever the reason, the important thing is Pfeifer never lost the “common touch.” And that was a lesson he imparted to all of us who worked for him – not by preaching it, but rather by example.
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