Olson

WASHINGTON — Theodore B. Olson can quickly summon up the title and key details of the very first case he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, and he represented an employee seeking overtime pay from the agency.

And yes, said Olson, he had butterflies when he stood before then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to argue the plaintiff’s side in that case more than 24 years ago — just as he will tomorrow afternoon when he argues Rhode Island’s side in a Narragansett Indian tribal lands case that has big implications for the state.

“Every lawyer who argues before the Supreme Court has butterflies,” Olson said in an interview Friday. “You want to do your best, and a certain amount of nervous energy and anticipation is expected and even welcome.”

Olson would know. In the years since the Garcia case, he has become a leading member of Washington’s legal establishment, arguing before the Supreme Court as a private appeals lawyer and, for the first three years of the Bush administration, as solicitor general of the United States, the government’s chief representative before the high court.

Olson, 68, has also become closely identified with Republican legal causes — some of them famously controversial — since he came to Washington to serve President Ronald Reagan as an assistant attorney general in 1981. He represented Reagan during the Iran-contra scandal in the 1980s, helped some of President Bill Clinton’s legal adversaries from Arkansas in the 1990s, and argued for the Supreme Court ruling that halted Florida’s presidential ballot recount in 2000 and helped to send Mr. Bush to the White House.

Governor Carcieri is certainly a staunch Republican, but he had different reasons for choosing Olson to fight a federal appeals court decision that could permit the Narragansetts to launch gambling and other enterprises on the land at issue in tomorrow’s arguments.

“We can’t afford to lose this case, and Ted Olson is without a doubt the best appellate advocate in the United States,” said Kernan “Kerry” King, Carcieri’s executive counsel. The governor called on Olsen because of “his experience, his temperament and his record” of winning about three-quarters of his cases before the Supreme Court, said King.

Carcieri v. Kempthorne, tomorrow’s tribal lands battle, will be Olson’s 51st case before the high court.

The former Californian is a 1962 graduate of the University of the Pacific. He earned his law degree from Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1965. That year, Olson joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the Los Angeles-based firm that — except for his stints in government — has been his home ever since.

From 1981 to 1984, Olson led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a job that embroiled him in battles between congressional Democrats and two controversial conservatives in Reagan’s cabinet, Interior Secretary James Watt, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford, who later resigned under fire.

After he left the Justice Department, Olson returned to the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, gradually developing the specialty in appellate work that has made him so experienced in Supreme Court arguments.

Less than a month after his inauguration in 2001, Mr. Bush nominated Olson solicitor general. He won a difficult Senate confirmation vote, 51 to 47, after Democrats questioned his role in a conservative magazine’s reports on the Whitewater affair and other controversies under Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas.

Some skeptics questioned whether Olsen, who had often fought the government as a private attorney seeking to limit federal regulations, would adequately defend the government’s positions as its principal representative before the Supreme Court.

Admirers of Olson’s legal skills point to his successful arguments in defense of the McCain-Feingold campaign-spending law, which many conservatives condemn as an unwarranted form of federal regulation.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Olson’s wife, Barbara Olson, a well-known conservative lawyer and commentator, was killed aboard the airliner that terrorists hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. He has since remarried.

Olson said on Friday that he considers it “a privilege to be representing the Rhode Island family” in tomorrow’s arguments. He said he expects the nine justices, as always, to be “extremely well prepared” with “hard and penetrating questions” about the case.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com