Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, of Covington & Burling. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM.

Four months after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, as the country's racial tensions reached a boiling point, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to talk about the divide between law enforcement and communities of color. As he spoke to a room overflowing with concerned citizens, he was interrupted by a group of young protesters chanting, “No justice, no peace.”

As the commotion dwindled, he warned against those who might view their action in a negative light.

“It is through that level of involvement, that level of concern—and, I hope, a level of perseverance and commitment—that change ultimately will come,” he said.

It was a remarkable moment of honesty in the eyes of Sally Yates, then the U.S. attorney in Atlanta and soon to be Holder's deputy attorney general.

“That was Eric instinctually knowing and speaking what he really believed,” she says. “It was a healing moment.”

It was “classic Eric,” according to Zachary Carter, corporation counsel for New York City and the former U.S. attorney in Queens.

“The reason why people are willing to follow him, to walk through walls for him, is because he honors their viewpoints,” Carter says.

Holder has been inspiring that level of confidence since his early days in the then newly formed public integrity section of the Department of Justice and throughout a career on the bench, in private practice at Covington & Burling, and at the highest levels of the government. His frank assessment of the criminal justice system's role in the mass incarceration of generations of black and Latino men, Carter says, has inspired prosecutors across the country to reconsider their priorities. It was an approach informed by his time spent as a judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 1988 to 1993, during the height of the crack epidemic, Yates says.

“He saw how the wheels of justice were grinding there, and how an approach of enforcement only, of just sending people to prison, wasn't going to make our communities as safe as they could be or should be,” she says.

Holder sees a theme running through his career, an unending search for justice and equality. It was there in his time at the DOJ, and it's still there in the work he's done since—the report for Uber Technologies Inc. on its issues with gender equality and workplace harassment, say, or helping Airbnb address racial bias.

“I get to do things that are consistent with what I think lawyers should be doing as change agents, while at the same time being a contributing member of a great firm,” Holder says.

Perhaps Holder's greatest contribution, as Jim Cole of Sidley Austin, Holder's deputy attorney general from 2011 to 2015, sees it, is his career-long pursuit of voting rights for every American. Holder's first priority as attorney general was “the rejuvenation and reinvigoration of the Civil Rights Division,” Cole says, and he is now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, focused on eliminating partisan gerrymandering.

Holder wants his career to be a reflection of the “special responsibility” lawyers have, their unique capacity for involvement in the life of the country.

“I'd like to think that through the entirety of my work I've had a positive impact on the lives of people and made our system more fair and more just and our nation more equitable,” Holder says.

And he's not done yet. Beyond everything he's doing right now to continue his public service, a possible presidential campaign looms. He has said he's interested and will consider running.

“I don't think he's finished crafting his legacy,” Yates says. “He's still got more lifetime.”

Advice to young lawyers: “Young lawyers should not be cowed by their inexperience or their youth. Young lawyers have the capacity to be responsible for great change, however many years they've been a lawyer, whatever their age. If you look back at the Founding Fathers, they were, except for Ben Franklin, exceedingly young. These young guys decided to take on the mightiest empire in the world at that time and formed the nation that now exists.”

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