Osler's Razor

On Wednesdays, I'm profiling my classmates from the Yale Law Class of 1990. It's simultaneously making me feel nostalgic and relatively unaccomplished!

Today we meet Jon Nuechterlein, one of the more remarkable people in our class (and that is saying something). He already made a cameo in this series, in the profile on Roger Leishman.

Jon was double-Yale, and one of the first people I met in law school, and we became fast friends-- in fact, during second year, we shared a house at 69 Edwards Street with Mike Schwartz.  There are... a lot of stories. We went to Brooklyn, and to Boston for the Head of the Charles races. We made the mistake of throwing a football around in the dining hall during lunch, something that might have been ok if I was good at catching. Which I'm not.  We also got thrown out of the Anchor Bar by Dee the waitress for playing quarters without asking the permission of the tables around us (a weird rule, you have to admit). This remains the only time I have ever been thrown out of a bar.

Through it all, Jon was a remarkable student. He helped me over and over to understand things that were slipping right by me in class. During a beach part in the first week of class he met fellow classmate Stephanie Marcus, who he later married (she deserves--and will get-- her own separate profile). He resisted our entreaties to come live at the beach in Madison during third year because he was an Articles Editor for the Law Journal and was going to be spending his time there-- typical of his dedication.

After graduating, Jon clerked for Judge Stephen Williams of the DC Circuit, and then for Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Then he worked for Sidley Austin, a big firm in DC, for three years. In 1995, he embarked on a five-year stint working for the Solicitor General, which included seven arguments before the US Supreme Court. After that, he spent a year as Deputy Counsel at the FCC and another dozen at the WilmerHale firm. That takes us to... about 2013. At that point he became the General Counsel at the Federal Trade Commission-- basically, the head lawyer at an agency of lawyers. Finally, in 2016 he came back to Sidley (which had ditched Austin by this point), where he remains today doing telecom law.

When he was named the 2019 DC Lawyer of the Year for Telecommunications law, he was described as "incredibly smart." Which is, pretty much, how he was described in the hallways back in 1988. Some things don't change.