Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

to work and so I thought I probably would want to come home to Arizona. So I
interviewed with a whole bunch of different law firms and I wound up doing a
summer clerkship at Jennings, Strauss and Salmon, which is an old line, Phoenix
firm, still here, still in business. Wonderful place to work. That was the Salt River
Project’s law firm. I liked it there and it was pretty interesting. There were two
guys working there at the time that I particularly liked and wanted to work for.
One was named Jay Stuckey, who was the king of zoning in those days. He
would represent all the property owners around Phoenix seeking rezoning. I was
interested in urban issues and urban growth and so that appealed to me. The
other guy I wanted to work for a lot was Jon Kyl, the senator, who was a water
guy and was the Salt River Project’s main lawyer in those days. So I had a good
experience clerking. I went back and finished my third year and flirted with going
to D.C. I had an offer from what’s called the honors program in the Justice
Department to work in the Lands and Resources Division. I thought I wanted to
be an environmental lawyer, in fact my final year in law school I did an internship
at the Natural Resources Defense Council which is an environmentally oriented,
save-the-world kind of place and I thought that was what I wanted to do. John
Leshy, who was subsequently an ASU law professor and then became Solicitor
of the Interior under Babbitt, was at National Resources Defense Council in Palo
Alto and I had worked for him. I loved him and I loved the people there, but I
didn’t like the work very much, because you didn’t have a client. You didn’t feel
like you were accomplishing anything. I felt like I was eating paper. It was just
paper. It was just producing these huge records of decisions on major
Interview with Grady Gammage
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