Frank H. Easterbrook - Early Career

Early Career

Easterbrook was born in Buffalo, New York on September 3, 1948, the son of Vimy and George Easterbrook. He is the older brother of author Gregg Easterbrook and of Neil, an English professor at Texas Christian University. Easterbrook attended Kenmore West High School in Tonawanda, New York, where he was the classmate of Wolf Blitzer; the two were good friends and were the leads of the KWHS rendition of The Diary of Anne Frank. He attended Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received his bachelor's degree with high honors. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School (where he was an editor of the law review with Douglas H. Ginsburg and a member of the Order of the Coif) in 1973, and then clerked for Judge Levin Hicks Campbell on the First Circuit.

In 1974, along with Danny Boggs and Robert Reich, he joined the Solicitor General's office as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and was promoted in 1978 to Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. The solicitor general at the time was Robert Bork, and Easterbrook has reminisced that when he joined the Solicitor General's office, "The Washington Post noted that around the same time the SG's Office had hired three lawyers either fresh from clerkships or lacking the customary appellate experience. None of us had clerked on the Supreme Court. The Post concluded that good lawyers were no longer willing to work for the SG and attributed this to Bork's role in firing Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. The paper thought that dark days lay ahead for the Office with a second-rate staff. The three bottom-of-the-barrel selections were Robert Reich (later Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration), Danny Boggs (now Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit), and me." Easterbrook was considered "one of the very top advocates appearing before the Supreme Court in his days at the bar."

Easterbrook joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1978 (and is still a senior lecturer there today), and was a principal at Lexecon from 1980 until his judicial appointment. Easterbrook argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court while in the Solicitor General's office and in private practice, including several landmark antitrust cases.