U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, a longtime fan of Bryant's, said Bryant's legal talents are on display every day in his courtroom, but lawyers are still taken aback by his factual resolve and clear logic when hearing an audiotape recording of his Supreme Court argument in the Mallory case.
"He's clearly a terrific lawyer, but he's mostly a terrific human being," Friedman said. "He sees the best in people, and he really cares about what happens to people."
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, above, hopes that a new annex to the U.S. courthouse in Washington will be named after William Bryant, the nation's first black chief judge on a federal bench.
(James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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Bryant remembers that when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to be a judge, he felt elated, confident he had earned his opportunity. But Bryant said a different feeling came over him the day he donned the robes.
"I was sworn in in the morning that day, and Oliver Gasch was sworn in that afternoon," Bryant recalled. "I told Oliver, 'You know, I've been a lawyer for many years, but putting on this robe, I don't feel so sure. This is a serious responsibility. ' "
Gasch smiled: "Bill, I don't think it's going to be that hard for you. You know right from wrong."
Bryant oversaw some famous cases, and he freely shared his thoughts when he thought something was wrong.
After presiding over the 1981 trial of Richard Kelly, a Republican congressman caught on videotape taking money from federal agents in a sting operation, Bryant complained that the FBI had set an "outrageous" trap for the Florida representative by stuffing cash in his pocket after he'd refused the bribe several times. He set aside Kelly's conviction.
"The investigation . . . has an odor to it that is absolutely repulsive," Bryant said then. "It stinks."
In handling the longest-running case in the court's history, a 25-year-old case about inhumane and filthy conditions in the D.C. jail, the judge chastised city leaders in 1995. He said he had been listening to their broken promises to fix the problems "since the Big Dipper was a thimble."
In weighing the case of a group of black farmers with similar discrimination complaints against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2000, Bryant warned a government lawyer that his argument against a class-action discrimination suit wasn't working: "Either you're dense or I'm dense," he said.
Schultz said the judge simply trusted the combination of facts and the law.
"He always said, 'Don't fight the facts,' " Schultz said. "He thought most of the time the law would end up in the right place."
Bryant acknowledges it's hard sometimes to see lawyers struggle to make their arguments when they have the law and the facts on their side.
"A judge has a stationary gun, and he's looking through the sights," he said. "Unless the lawyer brings the case into the bull's-eye, the judge can't pull the trigger. Good lawyers bring the case into the sights."
Bryant said he was preceded by many great lawyers, which is why the new plan to put his name on a piece of the courthouse gives him conflicting feelings.
"I was flattered, but I thought they shouldn't have done it," Bryant said. "There are so many people who were really giants. I stand on their shoulders."
