Yale, Ely became a summer clerk at Arnold, Fortas, & Porter—a Washington, D.C. law firm. There, he assisted Abe Fortas in the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright, writing a first draft of a brief on behalf of the plaintiff, Clarence Earl Gideon. Ely had been tasked with doing the basic research for the case, writing tirelessly to produce a set of legal memoranda including a twenty-five page paper titled "Application, Ambiguities, and Weaknesses of the Special Counsel Rule" that examined the application of Betts v. Brady in state courts. After law school, Ely served as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, aiding its investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. From 1964 to 1965, Ely clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court. As a law clerk, Ely drafted the majority opinion in the landmark decision Hanna v. Plumer; he considered Warren his hero, later dedicating his landmark book, Democracy and Distrust, to him. Following his clerkship, Ely studied at the London School of Economics as a Fulbright scholar. Upon returning to the United States, he spent some time as part of the Military Police Corps and, despite being overqualified for the job, took a lowly position as a public defender in San Diego. Academic career In 1968, Ely joined the faculty of Yale Law School. For five years, he served as a professor at Yale before moving to teach at Harvard Law School in 1973—holding the school's first chair in constitutional law. During this period, he wrote several influential law review articles, including his highly critical analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in an article entitled "The Wages of Crying Wolf," published in the Yale Law Journal. For a brief period, he took a year's leave to serve as general counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation and spent a year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1982, Ely left his place at Harvard in order to serve as the dean of Stanford Law School, remaining with the faculty until 1996. At Stanford, his tenure as dean was marked by a program to implement a loan forgiveness program for public interest lawyers and to revitalize the law school's curriculum—something he described as "a boring wasteland". A liberal Democrat, he also worked to advance the university's social justice and