“I believe he’s the first priest to serve as a priest and Supreme Court clerk simultaneously.”
Holy Cross Father Patrick Reidy, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, will clerk for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming term. Few lawyers have the privilege of clerking for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, but Father Reidy’s vocation to the priesthood makes his situation even more impressive.
“I believe he’s the first priest to serve as a priest and Supreme Court clerk simultaneously,” said Father William Dailey, who is, like Reidy, both a Holy Cross priest and a lawyer. The Register inquired at the Supreme Court Public Information Office and the Supreme Court Historical Society to verify the novelty of Father Reidy’s clerkship, but neither organization maintains sufficiently detailed records of past clerks.
A native of Colorado, Father Reidy was the salutatorian of his graduating class at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science. After graduation, he entered formation with the Congregation of Holy Cross — the order that founded and continues to serve at Notre Dame — and earned his Master of Divinity from Notre Dame.
Father Reidy was ordained to the priesthood in 2014, and he worked in a variety of pastoral and administrative positions before enrolling at Yale Law School in 2018. During the following summer, he worked as a judicial intern for Judge Thomas Hardiman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
“I met Father Reidy as a Yale Law student, and I hired him as an unpaid intern after his first year of law school,” Hardiman told the Register. “I don’t hire interns as law clerks — that’s pretty much a rule. But he was doing such incredible work as an intern that all of the clerks with whom he worked that summer came to me and said, ‘This guy is already doing the work of a law clerk, and he only has one year of law school under his belt.’”
Impressed by Father Reidy’s work, Hardiman decided to hire him to clerk after graduation. During the intervening summer, the Holy Cross priest worked as a legal intern at Becket, a nonprofit, public-interest religious-liberty law firm. Then, from 2021 to 2022, Father Reidy clerked for Hardiman.
Some may be wondering: Is there a conflict?
The Code of Canon Law states that “clerics are forbidden to assume public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power.” Though clerks support the work of a justice or judge, their role is scholarly — not political.
“Clerks advise judges, but the judges exercise all the power,” Father Dailey said. “Priests as law clerks are quite safe, since the ethical obligations of working in the judicial branch also require one to refrain from public partisanship.”
Photo: Robert Franklin/Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame
