Bachelor of Arts cum laude. Cruz then attended Harvard Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. He was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. Referring to Cruz's time as a student at Harvard Law, professor Alan Dershowitz said that Cruz was "off-the-charts brilliant." Cruz graduated from Harvard Law in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude. Legal career Clerkships After law school, Cruz served as a law clerk for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1995 to 1996, and then for Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1996 to 1997. Private practice After his Supreme Court clerkship, Cruz worked in private practice as an associate at the law firm Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal (now Cooper & Kirk, PLLC) from 1997 to 1998. At the firm, Cruz worked on matters relating to the National Rifle Association and helped prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. In 1998, Cruz was briefly one of the attorneys who represented Representative John Boehner during his litigation against Representative Jim McDermott over the alleged leak of an illegal recording of a phone conversation whose participants included Boehner. Bush administration Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser, advising then-Governor Bush on a wide range of policy and legal matters, including civil justice, criminal justice, constitutional law, immigration, and government reform. During the 2000 Florida presidential recounts, he assisted in assembling the Bush legal team, devising strategy, and drafting pleadings for filing with the Supreme Court of Florida and U.S. Supreme Court in the case Bush v. Gore. Cruz recruited future Chief Justice John Roberts and noted attorney Mike Carvin to Bush's legal team. After Bush took office, Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the United States Department of Justice and as the director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission. Texas Solicitor General In 2003, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott appointed Cruz to be the solicitor general of Texas. The office was established in 1999 to handle appeals involving the Texas state government, but Abbott hired Cruz with the idea that Cruz would take a "leadership