Before he was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, before he was the most powerful Nevadan to ever serve in Washington, D.C., before he was revered by Democrats and reviled by Republicans, he was Harry Reid, attorney at law. 

It was an unlikely career choice for the boy from tiny Searchlight who grew up in a shack without running water, hitchhiked to high school and was a better athlete than he was a student. Then again, traveling unlikely paths has long been a hallmark for Reid, who retired from the U.S. Senate last year after 34 years in Congress and who this spring joined UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law as its first Distinguished Fellow in Law and Policy.

As a young man, Reid veered toward a career in law not because he desired a career politics where he could author laws himself. Nor did he do it because he wanted to become wealthy or had an urge to mix it up with legal and political adversaries—to be sure, Reid grew up more comfortable fighting in a boxing ring than in a courtroom. 

Rather, the story of how he turned to the law is one of happenstance, the result of two influential figures—one a high school guidance counselor, the other a larger-than-life Nevada legend—who had more faith in a young Harry Reid than Reid did in himself. 

THE GUIDING LIGHT

Most attorneys will tell you they developed a passion for education at an early age, but Reid would prove to be an exception. “My parents were uneducated, and that’s an understatement,” Reid says in his office, where he’s heading up a public-policy think tank with former Republican rival and ex-House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. “My dad didn’t graduate from eighth grade; my mom didn’t graduate from high school. So in my young, youthful mind, education was not a big deal.” 

Despite his academic indifference, Reid says he loved his years at Henderson’s Basic High School, 40-plus miles from distant, dusty Searchlight. “I enjoyed high school so much,” says Reid, who played football and baseball. “It was a period in my life that was just idyllic, just a wonderful time.”

Case in point: He was popular enough to be elected junior class treasurer, the first political office he ever held. “I always said the most important election I ever had was [that one],” says Reid, who served for years as the Senate’s top Democrat. “Now I know that doesn’t sound like much, but for me, that was more important than being elected to any of the statewide offices I had or anything else. Because I was able to feel I’d been accepted by my peers.” 

Later, some girls approached him and asked him to run for class president, a request that caught him off guard. But he took up the challenge and won. “I surprised myself more than I surprised anybody else,” Reid says. “Of course, it didn’t surprise my mother.” 

Winning those elections brought Reid acceptance, but the most pivotal moment of his halcyon high school days occurred when he met with a counselor named Dorothy Robinson, who offered some life-changing advice: You, she told him, should go to law school. 

How Robinson arrived at that conclusion will remain a mystery—after all, Reid didn’t exactly challenge for class valedictorian. “My grades,” he recalls, “were not worth a damn in high school. I never studied. I wasn’t interested in academic things.” Still, Reid fought the urge to challenge Robinson’s recommendation. “I didn’t say, ‘Why did you say that, Miss Robinson?’ I said, ‘OK.’ She told me that’s what I should do, [so] that’s what I decided to do, even though I hadn’t started college yet.”

After graduating from Basic, Reid enrolled at Southern Utah University, then transferred to Utah State on an athletic scholarship. But he soon sustained an injury that sidelined him from competition—a blessing in disguise, because it convinced him to finally start taking his studies seriously. It didn’t take long for Reid to realize that he not only liked academics, but he had an aptitude for it.

All the while, Dorothy Robinson’s advice remained in the back of his mind, so after graduating from Utah State in 1961 with a degree in political science and history, Reid applied to a handful of law schools. Of course, at the time, there wasn’t a law school in Nevada, leaving would-be attorneys to seek their legal education elsewhere.

Reid actually turned down a scholarship offer from the University of Santa Clara in northern California, instead opting to attend George Washington University in Washington, D.C., at the suggestion of Mike O’Callaghan, who before becoming Nevada’s governor was one of Reid’s early-life mentors.

At the time, many young Nevadans who were in D.C. preparing for careers in law or public service would accept patronage jobs working for Nevada members of Congress. Reid applied for such a post with then-Congressman Walter Baring, a conservative Democrat. Baring denied the application in a letter addressed to “Mr. Reed.” 

The rejection didn’t sit well with O’Callaghan, who had taught Reid in high school, coached him in boxing and would influence the course of Reid’s life and career more than once. Chairman of the Clark County Democratic Party at the time, O’Callaghan decided to advocate for his protégé. “Typical for O’Callaghan, he picked up the phone right in front of me and said, ‘I’ll get that SOB on the phone,” Reid recalls. After vouching for his former student, O’Callaghan made it clear: Reid’s “coming to Washington, I want him to have a job, and you’re going to get him one, OK?”  

That’s how Harry Reid ended up in Washington as both a law student and a member of the U.S. Capitol Police. (He still displays his silver, eagle-topped badge, encased in Lucite, on his desk at Bellagio.) 

‘I HATED THAT DAMN PLACE’

If Reid loved high school and grew to enjoy his undergrad days, he loathed law school. The pressures of raising a family with his wife, Landra, and working the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift as a cop after attending school in the mornings were, as Reid recalls, “a grind.” He resolved to work as hard as necessary to finish his studies as swiftly as possible. “I went to law school full time. I went summers—the whole works,” he says. “I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I hated that damn place.”

So accelerated was Reid’s schedule that he finished in just over two years, and had to petition the Nevada Supreme Court to take the bar exam early. “I took the bar before I’d graduated from law school, so there were some courses I hadn’t taken. But I bluffed my way through that,” he says.

The newly minted attorney returned to Nevada to take a job at the law firm of Singleton, DeLanoy and Jemison. And thanks to the suggestion of his father-in-law, one of his first clients was the City of Henderson, where he worked part time as the city attorney while representing other clients at the firm. (In a historical bookend, Reid’s son, Josh, is now the full-time city attorney in Henderson.) 

Reid’s clients also included insurance companies, and he did criminal work. Both allowed him to gain valuable trial experience, and in time, he became quite comfortable in the courtroom—and successful. Like all good trial lawyers, Reid kept score; he says he worked more than 100 trials in his day, and only lost only a handful.

“I had quite a few trials,” he says. “I would take cases no one else would take.” 

Such as the one involving a cocktail waitress from the Hacienda Hotel & Casino who was arrested at work and charged with writing bad checks. The woman denied the allegations, but had trouble finding an attorney who would represent her. Enter Reid, who determined that his client hadn’t been given the required advanced notice, nor had she been given the opportunity to dispute the claim, prior to her arrest. Reid sued one of the businesses—the Safeway grocery store chain—that had complained about the bad checks. During the trial, he called Safeway’s corporate officers to testify about the company’s profits, a tactic that paved the way for his client to recover damages after a jury ruled she had been falsely accused. 

In another case no other attorney seemed to want to tackle, Reid sued several doctors who had failed to diagnose a brain tumor in a woman from his hometown of Searchlight. The woman had been plagued with headaches for so long that she self-medicated with alcohol. Her physicians dismissed her as an alcoholic; Reid contended the woman’s physicians failed to provide proper care, and won compensation for the woman’s neglect. 

But one of Reid’s most memorable cases involved a lawsuit filed against the Tropicana Estates apartment complex, which evicted Reid’s client—he freely acknowledges she was a prostitute—for failure to pay rent. One problem: Prior to the eviction, the apartment’s management didn’t give proper notice as required by law. What’s more, the landlord, after locking the woman out of her apartment, recklessly threw her belongings in storage. By the time the woman could pay back rent and retrieve her belongings, some of her possessions had been destroyed, including photographs of her former lover who had died in a vehicle accident while driving back from his job at the Nevada Test Site. After consulting with other attorneys, Reid sued Tropicana Estates and won punitive damages for his client’s lost memories. 

In addition to working his own cases, Reid says he continued to sharpen his legal skills by attending trials of prominent lawyers, most notably Harry Claiborne. Claiborne was a highly successful defense attorney who would later be appointed federal judge only to get impeached and be removed from office by the U.S. Senate after being convicted on tax evasion charges. But as a trial lawyer, Reid says Claiborne was spellbinding. “It was unbelievable” watching him work, he says.

THE NEXT GENERATION

As was the case when Reid was a practicing attorney, great trial lawyers are still at work in Southern Nevada courtrooms today. The big difference is many of these lawyers were educated in their backyard at the William S. Boyd School of Law, which opened in 1998.

Not only has the law school enhanced UNLV’s profile over the past two decades, but Reid says it has unquestionably raised the legal talent bar throughout the state and widened the pool of choices for those in need of a quality, experienced attorney. Additionally, some UNLV Law alumni have returned to campus to pay it forward to the next generation of graduates by teaching classes in their area of expertise.

“I think, No. 1, the law school has been supported by the community. You have benefactors like Bill Boyd, of course, the Boyd family, people have been willing to step in and help,” he says. “The law school has [developed] a pretty good reputation, so they’ve been able to [attract] some really good students.”  

Not to be discounted, Reid says, are the important partnerships created by the law school and community at-large through such things as education programs and legal clinics.

As much as anything, though, Reid says the presence of UNLV Law means local aspiring lawyers have an option he never had: the chance to attend law school close to home and avoid adding exorbitant out-of-state tuition fees to an already pricey law-school bill.

Indeed, 76 percent of UNLV Law’s 108 enrolled students for the 2017-18 academic year are Nevada residents. As for that enrollment number, there’s certainly room for expansion, but Reid cautions doing so could prove counterproductive. “They could triple the size of the law school, but that diminishes the quality of the students entering the law school,” he says. 

That doesn’t mean the law school won’t evolve, Reid says. In fact, the former senator will be part of that evolution in his role as a Distinguished Fellow in Law and Policy. This perch will allow Reid to share his own knowledge gleaned in politics and law. He’ll also be able to tap contacts ranging from the former head of the Bureau of Land Management to the former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to conduct seminars for students studying public lands law or energy law. 

ON SECOND THOUGHT …

Some six decades have passed since Reid had that pivotal meeting with his counselor that set him on his life’s course. But as he looks into his rearview mirror and recalls what Dorothy Robinson told him—“I think you should go to law school”—he also recalls being quite naïve. 

“I didn’t know a lawyer, I’d never been to a courthouse,” he says. “She told me that’s what I should do, and it was good enough for me. [But] I was not prepared to go to law school. If you have a good mind and a good memory, you can do well [in] undergraduate school, because you just memorize stuff. In law school, that doesn’t work. You have to be able to think things through.” 

As difficult as law school was for him, Reid doesn’t regret pursuing a law degree. He’s quick to acknowledge that his experiences as an attorney helped him in every facet of his career, from serving in the state assembly and as lieutenant governor (under O’Callaghan), to being chairman of the Gaming Commission during the tumultuous, mob-rich days of Las Vegas, to his 50 years of public service.

“Law school is good preparation for basically anything you want to do,” he says.

Which explains why he passed on the gene: All four of Reid’s sons—despite their father’s discouragement—chose a career in law. However, Reid is quick to point out that his sons’ road to success in the legal community was paved much more smoothly than his own. 

For one thing, the industry today is more professional, more regulated and more specialized. Then there’s the modern-day teaching of law, which Reid says is kinder than in his day. “Law school is much more humane now than when I went,” he says. “Law schools used to take just about anybody and then flunk people out. When we started school, the dean would say, ‘Look around. Every fourth or fifth one of you is going to flunk out of school.’ How’s that make you feel? Now, they want to keep you in school because they’ve invested in getting you into the school, and they don’t want to lose you. 

“Times have changed so remarkably. It’s not like it used to be.” 

The fact UNLV has the William S. Boyd School of Law is proof positive of that.