A young wife and mother from rural northern Utah is improbably about to join one of the most exclusive clubs in the nation.
Only a select few lawyers become U.S. Supreme Court clerks — law school graduates who help the justices write opinions and decide appeals. The clerks wield tremendous power by influencing which cases the justices accept and how they decide them.
RonNell Andersen Jones of Tremonton is about to become one of them.
There are only a handful of former Supreme Court clerks in Utah.
"It's a credential," said Michael Zimmerman, former chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1970. "A pretty rarefied one."
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience," said Tom Green, a graduate of the University of Utah who also clerked for Burger.
The typical clerk is a single, white, male Harvard graduate.
That makes Jones just a bit different.
She went to Utah State University in Logan. She's married to K.C. (pronounced "Casey") Jones, and has a 2-year-old son. The stereotype would have her destined more for the PTA than the highest court in the land.
But Jones is one of those people that you look at and wonder how she does it all.
"She's always been an overachiever," her mother Eileen Andersen said. "She's always been in the top of her class in everything."
Growing up, Jones entered a poem in a contest that was so good the judges initially refused to believe she had written it herself. It won first place, of course. A farm girl, she was president of her 4-H club. She won numerous awards in various areas. She was interested in everything.
After marrying, graduating from USU and working as a Deseret News City Desk intern one summer, Jones moved with her husband to Carson City, Nev., and Columbus, Ohio, following K.C.'s career as an engineer. Along the way Jones picked up a master's in communications and a law school degree from Ohio State — top of her class, of course.
"I was surrounded by children of lawyers and politicians, but I also felt like that in many ways it was a benefit to me," Jones said. "I wasn't the same as everybody else, so I didn't have this set pattern of what I should do or what I should be."
She graduated six months pregnant. After working for a large law firm in Columbus for a year, she became a clerk at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Reflecting her Mormon upbringing, Jones never worked Sundays, and always went home at 5 p.m. to be with her family — unheard of for an appellate court clerk.
"I did a lot of work in my pajamas," she said with a laugh.
Realizing what kind of woman he had married ("I'm proud of her"), K.C. worked from home to care for Max.
"We made a commitment early on that we weren't going to do any of these things unless Max was cared for by a parent," Jones said.
Jones was at the 9th Circuit when the controversial Pledge of Allegiance case came down — the one that ruled the Pledge was unconstitutional because it contained the words "under God." There were protesters outside her window for weeks.
Jones had no intention of applying to clerk at the Supreme Court. "There were just a lot of reasons why I was not the traditional candidate." But her judge and others urged her to do it.
Four days after her full application was received, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor herself called to set up an interview.
"I thought it was a joke at first," Jones said.
To prepare for the interview, Jones read "everything the justice ever wrote, everything they ever said, everything they ever did, everything they ever thought. I had stacks and stacks of stuff."
Knowing O'Connor had grown up on an Arizona ranch, Jones even called her father for pointers on cattle.
The interview took place in O'Connor's San Francisco hotel room. "I have only dim recollections because I was just really nervous and highly overprepared and trying to pretend that I was neither of those things," Jones said.
She was offered the job on the spot.
Jones will begin her yearlong clerkship in July. Until then, she's working only two days a week to be with Max as much as she can, since Supreme Court clerks work famously hard. During the clerkship K.C. will again take over caretaking duties.
"It's a full-time-and-a-half job," Zimmerman said. "I suspect at first she'll be a little overawed by the surroundings."
Zimmerman describes the 36 clerks — four for each of the nine justices — as "a group of very bright people, very sophisticated, very up on the ins and outs of judicial politics." They have their own lunch room where justices and senators and even the vice president visit. For a year, Jones will be at the pinnacle of the legal world.
K.C.'s sister, Kerry Bringhurst, summed up her brother and his wife this way:
"They're definitely living a life of interest."
E-MAIL: aedwards@desnews.com