Ted Olson argued some of the biggest cases the Supreme Court heard in his lifetime, and he did it for clients on opposite ends of American politics. He helped win the presidency for one man and, a decade later, stood up for the right of same-sex couples to marry. What connected the two was not a politics. It was a craft, the craft of appellate advocacy, practiced at the highest level there is.
Olson was a California lawyer who spent most of his career at one firm, Gibson Dunn, and built a reputation as one of the finest appellate advocates in the country. He served in the Reagan Justice Department, and then, under President George W. Bush, as Solicitor General of the United States, the lawyer who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court. Over his career he argued dozens of cases there, a number almost no lawyer reaches, and he argued them with a precision that made the hardest questions look like conversations.
Appellate advocacy is a different animal from trial work. There is no jury to move, no witness to break. There are nine of the most prepared readers in the country who have already studied your brief and are waiting to find the flaw in your reasoning. The argument is not a speech; it is a conversation under fire, where a justice can stop you on your first sentence and not let you finish a thought for ten minutes. Olson was a master of it because he did the one thing that makes it possible. He knew his case, and the cases around it, so thoroughly that no question could take him anywhere he had not already been.
In December of 2000 he stood before the Court and argued Bush v. Gore, the case that ended the disputed presidential election, and he won it. It made him, for a season, the most famous lawyer in America, and it is the case his name is most tied to. Whatever anyone thinks of the outcome, the advocacy was a clinic. He took a chaotic, fast-moving dispute and reduced it to a small number of clean legal questions the Court could actually decide, which is what great appellate lawyers do.
Nine months later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, and on his own birthday, his wife Barbara was a passenger on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. He had just become Solicitor General. That he kept serving, kept arguing, kept building a life of public work through a loss most people could not have carried, is part of the measure of the man, and it is worth saying plainly and without decoration.
Then, years later, he did the thing that makes him worth putting in this series. He joined David Boies, the lawyer who had argued the other side of Bush v. Gore against him, to challenge California's ban on same-sex marriage. The conservative who had helped win the presidency for a Republican and the liberal who had fought him took the same table, because they had reached the same conclusion about a constitutional question, and they argued it together. It told the profession something it forgets too easily. The best lawyers are loyal to the argument, not the team.
That is the inheritance to take from him. Advocacy is a craft with its own standards, and a lawyer who masters it can serve a client he agrees with and a cause he believes in with the same excellence, because the excellence lives in the work, not the label on it. Learn the record cold. Reduce the chaos to the few questions that decide the case. Answer the hardest one first. And never confuse which side you are on with how well you do the job.
Olson died in 2024, one of the most accomplished advocates ever to stand at that lectern. The lesson he leaves is not about any single case he won. It is that the craft is the thing, and that a lawyer who truly commands it becomes something rare, a person the highest court in the country stops to listen to, whichever side of the question he is arguing.
Theodore B. Olson (1940 to 2024), the appellate lawyer and longtime Gibson Dunn partner who served as Solicitor General of the United States under President George W. Bush and argued many of the most significant cases of his era before the Supreme Court, among them Bush v. Gore and, with David Boies, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8. Considered here for the craft of appellate advocacy, not for politics. This is general information, not legal advice.
