Carrie Stefaniak keeps a scrap of paper taped to the side of her printer, where her eyes land when she looks up from a brief. It holds a line she wrote down during one of the first sentencings she watched after leaving private practice to become U.S. District Judge Curtis Collier’s career law clerk.
A defense attorney had urged Collier to see his client as more than the crimes on the page, saying, “On paper, you’d say he’s a monster.” When it was time to sentence the man, Collier rejected that framing.
“In all my time on the bench, I’ve never sentenced a monster,” he said. “People who do bad things are just like us. In fact, they are us.”
Stefaniak copied the words and taped them where she’d see them every day.
“It would be easy to say, ‘Those are bad people. That would never be me,’” she says. “But Judge Collier’s belief is that we all have humanity in common. What matters is the choices we make.”
For the past 10 years, Stefaniak has watched Collier bring that combination of moral clarity to bear not only on criminal defendants but on nearly everyone who crosses his path – law clerks, interns, high school students, fellow judges and lawyers throughout the Eastern District of Tennessee and beyond.
“I don’t think anyone could be around Judge Collier and not be influenced for the better,” she says.
Inner chambers
Stefaniak arrived in Collier’s chambers with nearly a decade of civil and commercial litigation experience. A former teacher and university administrator, she went to law school intending to do estate planning, then discovered she loved litigation.
She spent nine years at Husch Blackwell in Chattanooga, working on large commercial disputes, among other kinds of cases. Collier, a longtime judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee and former chief judge, was a familiar name.
Among lawyers, she says, he had a reputation for high standards and professionalism.
“He always treated people in court respectfully, and he required lawyers to be respectful of each other as well,” she adds.
When Collier took senior status in 2014, he restructured his staff. After two decades of working with overlapping two-year-term clerks and a longtime judicial assistant, he opted for a different model: one career law clerk who could stay indefinitely and one-year term clerks who rotate every fall.
He hired Stefaniak as his first career law clerk.
He wanted continuity as his staff shrank and a career law clerk with experience – someone who could run the office and help train the young lawyers who’d pass through chambers every year, she says.
The travel he once envisioned for his senior status has been curtailed by his wife’s health, but the rest of his plan has unfolded as expected. The work in chambers remains collaborative, with Stefaniak managing administration and overseeing the day-to-day training of new clerks.
Answering questions
Every judge’s chambers functions a bit differently. In Collier’s, both the career clerk and the term clerks help shoulder the substantive work: research, drafting and preparing the judge for hearings and trials.
On top of that, Stefaniak serves as what she modestly calls “frontline supervision and training.” She reviews drafts, nudges arguments, suggests reorganizing a memo or reconsidering a tentative conclusion. She also translates the practical realities of practice to fresh graduates who know doctrine but not the daily grind.
The tone for that training, she insists, is set by Collier.
“Mentoring is an integral part of who he is,” she says. “He has the heart of a teacher – and I love to learn from him.”
New clerks sometimes hesitate to knock on a federal judge’s door. Collier disarms them with a simple line.
“If someone’s a little hesitant at first to ask him a question, he’ll tell them ‘Answering your questions is the most important thing I do during the day,’” Stefaniak says. “He lets us know that he values the opportunity to help us.”
Collier also refuses to micromanage.
“He’s not a micromanager and he doesn’t dictate outcomes,” Stefaniak explains. “What he says to his law clerks is that he hires the best and brightest minds, and it wouldn’t be worth it if he just told us everything to do. He wants the product of his law clerks’ best thinking.”
Clerks bring him proposed resolutions, and Collier will sometimes disagree, ask them to look at additional authority or consider another angle. But when they leave after a year, Stefaniak says, “they walk out ready to step into a legal job and make decisions with the confidence that they haven’t just been someone’s ghostwriter for a year.”
Collier himself is clear about what he considers his greatest professional achievement.
“He tells us that his greatest professional accomplishment is the legacy of all of his law clerks and interns who’ve gone on to do great things,” Stefaniak says. “That’s what he takes the most pride in professionally.”
It’s also why he chose one-year clerkships over two-year terms despite the constant need to train.
“That means more turnover and more training,” Stefaniak says, “but it also means more young lawyers’ lives he’s touching. I think he sees all of that as a service to the profession, to help give those lawyers the right start on their practice.”
Chambers as family
Collier’s mentoring philosophy is as evident outside the courthouse as it is from the bench. He often refers to his clerks and interns as his “chambers family,” a phrase Stefaniak says is more than a sentimental flourish.
Every few months, he circulates a newsletter to current and former clerks and interns, sharing news not only of job changes and professional achievements but also engagements, weddings and births.
“He really does value his law clerks as whole people,” Stefaniak says.
He delights in meeting their parents, both because he enjoys the families and because, as Stefaniak puts it, “he knows those parents are thinking, ‘Is my child in a good situation?’ He wants to help them feel comfortable that their children are in a good situation.”
Early in her tenure, during a staff meeting, Stefaniak wrapped up the agenda and asked if there was anything else. Collier had one more item.
“He said, ‘Yes – when are you taking your vacation?’” she recalls. “I’d never in my legal career had anyone in authority say, ‘By the way, you need to take your vacation.’ He was concerned about my well-being.”
The relationship doesn’t end when clerks move on. Former clerks call Collier for advice, personal and professional. He and his wife, Cheryl, have even traveled to officiate the weddings of former clerks and interns.
When Stefaniak’s mother died, they drove from Chattanooga to Cookeville for the funeral and interment.
“He really does not consider us just as employees,” she says.
Beyond the courthouse walls
That instinct to teach and support extends well beyond his own staff.
Within the courthouse, probation officers and others will ask for time with Collier to talk through difficult situations. In the community, he’s participated in private scholarship programs, mentoring the college students those funds support – meeting them for lunch and helping them think through the transition to campus life.
In recent years, a growing share of his efforts has gone to civics education.
Last summer, the federal court in Chattanooga partnered with the Supreme Court Historical Society to host a two-week summer day camp for high school students, drawing teenagers from public, private and home schools. Collier was there every day.
“They’d come in after a full day, and in the morning they’d have questions from what happened the day before,” Stefaniak says. “Most often it was Judge Collier who was answering those questions.”
One student from that camp – McKinna Wiles – later asked if she could intern for him the following summer. She expected to be making coffee. Instead, she joined the law students as a real – if carefully supervised – member of the chambers team.
She helped Collier with civics outreach projects, including planning for a recent teachers’ law school program. She did the assigned reading and homework for a series of classes Collier organizes for his summer interns that walk through how federal civil and criminal cases work. She even delivered a presentation to the law clerks on what she had learned at the camp.
Whether Wiles ultimately goes to law school, Stefaniak believes she will be “a more critical thinker and appreciate the values of professionalism and ethics and civility in the legal system” because of the experience. (Read more about Wiles’ internship starting on Page 11.)
And while local readers know Collier for his monthly civics columns, Stefaniak sees those as part of the same mission.
“He wants people to learn and understand and grow, and that’s one way he can put that out” to adults, she says.
“With schools, you have a captive audience. With adults, you have to be more creative.”
Mentoring the mentors
Collier’s influence reaches well beyond his own district.
At the national level, he’s spent years serving as a mentor and instructor for judicial education programs, first working with newly confirmed district judges and later helping to shape training for mid-career judges launched in 2014, for which he served as an inaugural instructor and continued in that role for the next five years.
Informally, judges in the Eastern District of Tennessee and around the country seek him out.
“There are judges in other districts who will call and say, ‘May I speak with Judge Collier?’” Stefaniak says. “He’s mentored new judges coming into the judiciary, judges who are becoming chief judges for the first time, or judges who are just going through a difficult situation.”
Here, too, Stefaniak sees the same qualities at work: “his life experience, his intellect, the way he’s a deep thinker, his humility and his humanity.”
When a future judge once asked what to read while waiting for confirmation, expecting titles on evidence and procedure, Collier instead recommended biographies of George Washington, John Marshall and other figures from the founding era.
“The lesson there,” Stefaniak says, “is that a federal judge has to understand the system and the role of the judge and the judiciary in the system in order to discharge that duty properly.”
‘A once-in-a-lifetime experience”
If Collier is always teaching, Stefaniak says, he’s also always learning. He reads constantly – history, biography, news and commentary – and tells would-be clerks that “intellectual curiosity” is one of the qualities he looks for.
“He’s always reading the news and commentary and thinking about the way things fit together at a deeper level,” she says. “He loves learning new things.”
That example, combined with his encouragement, has shaped her own career in ways that are harder for her to quantify than a list of cases or lines on a résumé.
For one thing, Collier has pushed her to stay deeply rooted in the Chattanooga legal community. Because most of his term clerks are new to town, Collier makes a point of encouraging bar and professional involvement; with a longtime local lawyer as his career clerk, that support has been even more direct.
“I didn’t just come to Chattanooga to work for Judge Collier. This is my legal community,” Stefaniak says. “He’s encouraged me to remain active in the Chattanooga, Federal and Hutchins bar associations, in the Inns of Court and in other organizations.”
When pro bono projects arise that are ethically permissible for a federal law clerk – such as will clinics for first responders or teachers – Collier urges her to volunteer.
And he’s given her room to live into her own identity as a teacher and mentor, whether she’s working with summer interns, new term clerks or other law clerks in the building.
“I always thought I’d be a teacher,” she says. “It’s something I’ve always loved, and now I’m in a wonderful environment where that can flourish.”
Asked to sum up Collier’s impact on her life and career, Stefaniak – a lawyer who prides herself on her words – struggles.
“For 10 years I’ve gotten to wake up every workday morning and come to work for Judge Collier and support the federal justice system,” she says slowly. “I’m so grateful for the chance to do that and for his mentorship and friendship in my life.”
After a pause, she adds the closest thing she’s found to a neat answer.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she says, “and I’m grateful to have been a part of it.”