There are judges who write their own opinion,s and there are judges who let clerks do the drafting. 

According to his law clerks, Judge Raymond Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who died Saturday at age 80, was both.

"He gave us a huge amount of responsibility and freedom to do our own analysis—to come at it from our own perspectives and ultimately fashion an opinion. And then he subjected it to this very intensive stress testing," said Jacob Kreilkamp, a Fisher clerk from 2004 to 2005. "He trusted us to do a job that was up to his incredibly high standards," said Kreilkamp, now a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles. "It was sort of like he was working more by getting us involved." 

Matthew Segal, a former Fisher clerk who is now the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said that even among very smart people the judge stood out for "his unique combination of an ability to think crisply and an ability to understand people."

"There was like this laser beam that he could point at any problem that a case presented," Segal said. "What we were really doing was giving him something to shine that laser beam on."

Fisher, who was appointed to the court in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, had a long career in private practice and public service prior to establishing himself as an unflappable jurist a slight step left of the Ninth Circuit's center. Fisher was a litigator in private practice for nearly 30 years in Los Angeles, first at Tuttle & Taylor before he opened the LA branch of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in 1988. 

In the early 1990s, Fisher served as deputy general counsel on the "Christopher Commission" that investigated LA police practices in the wake of the 1991 Rodney King beating. He later served as president of the LA Police Commission from 1995 to 1997 and had a stint as an associate attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department prior to his nomination to the bench.

Early in his judicial tenure, Fisher wrote a groundbreaking 2001 decision upholding a San Francisco's domestic partner benefits ordinance in the face of a challenge from airlines operating at San Francisco International Airport. The judge later sided with the government in two cases involving anti-terrorism policies adopted in the wake of 9/11. In a 6-5 en banc decision in 2010, Fisher wrote that state secrets privilege shielded a private airline from liability in connection with the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. Fisher in 2012 wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel that found that John Yoo could not be sued for his role authorizing Bush administration interrogation policies. 

Keker, Van Nest & Peters associate Sean Arenson, who clerked for Fisher before joining the firm in 2016, said the judge "approached each case with the utmost seriousness, no matter how powerful or marginalized the parties before him, rigorously applying the law while never losing sight of the real-world impact of his decisions and his ultimate commitment to promoting justice."

Fellow former clerk Segal added: "My fear is that the kind of judge that he was will become rarer and rarer—a judge who sees logic and justice as being both very important and not at odds with each other." 

Fisher is survived by his wife of 59 years, Nancy; his son, Jeff; his daughter, Amy; and four grandchildren.