Clark Neily
Clark Neily
Chip Mellor (December 31, 1950 – October 11, 2024), cofounder of the Institute for Justice. (Photo: Institute for Justice website)
My friend and former boss at the Institute for Justice, Chip Mellor, passed away earlier this month, and I’m still trying to process the loss. Chip was a towering figure in libertarian circles. Besides founding one of the nation’s premier public interest law firms together with now-Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, Chip mentored a generation of libertarian constitutional lawyers and activists whom he inspired with his unflagging optimism, uncompromising standards, and clarity of vision. As a tribute to his memory, I’d like to share a few personal anecdotes that are special to me and will hopefully provide some sense of Chip’s enormous contribution to the cause of freedom.
1. Be willing to lose. When Chip offered me a job at IJ in the spring of 2000, I was a young litigator coming off of a judicial clerkship in Washington, DC, and four years at a large law firm in my home state of Texas. Having realized that a career in BigLaw was not for me—and having spent a year watching lawyers from DOJ and the DC Attorney General’s office advocate for maximum government power with minimum accountability—I yearned to join IJ’s “merry band” of bureaucrat-suing litigators.
Following several rounds of interviews, Chip took me out for dinner to make the offer. As our dishes were being cleared away, he fixed me with his trademark fatherly football-coach gaze and told me something I’ll never forget: “If you take this job, you’ll have to make peace with something you won’t like.” “What’s that?” I asked. “Losing,” he said.
Of course, Chip was not warning me that IJ had low standards or that its lawyers are more complacent than others—on the contrary. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/chip-mellor-life-well-lived