PLAYING FOOTBALL has plenty in common with practicing law, according to Brian Morris ’92 (BA ’86, MA ’87). “With both of them you have to learn the rules and figure out how to adapt the rules to your situation,” he said without a hint of jest. “To play football you need perseverance and discipline. Being a lawyer involves the same skills.”

For Morris, certainly, the two vocations have been intertwined: A full football scholarship first brought him to Stanford, where he played varsity fullback for four years. And his fame as a high school ball player in Butte, Montana, helped win him a seat on the supreme court of Montana, where voters choose their justices. Morris captured the spot in the November 2 election with 56 percent of the vote and took office on January 3.

Morris, who was inducted into the Butte Sports Hall of Fame in 2003, attributed part of his victory to his athletic notoriety: “That helped me,” he said. Of course, his appeal came from more than football. He had been state solicitor for four years, so “my name was in the paper a lot,” Morris said, adding that his Stanford background also helped.

The retirement of Justice Jim Regnier prompted the 41-year-old Morris to run for the seat. “When an opportunity opens up, you have to seize it or let it go by,” he explained. In campaigning opposite Ed McLean, a 58-year-old Missoula district judge, he said, “My youth was an issue, but I was able to neutralize that by talking about the experience I’d had.”

After law school, Morris clerked for Judge John Noonan on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Rehnquist ’52 (BA ’48, MA ’48). He then moved to The Hague, where he represented U.S. citizens and businesses whose property had been seized during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Morris headed home to Montana in 1995; there he became a partner at Goetz, Gallik, Baldwin & Dolan in Bozeman and met his wife, Cherche Prezeau, also a lawyer and Montana native. Morris left the firm in 2000, and he and Prezeau, now with two young sons, spent a yea in Geneva, where Morris worked for the United Nations Compensation Commission representing people and businesses that had suffered losses during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Morris left that job when he received an offer to become state solicitor; the family returned home to Montana, where a third son soon arrived.

It was at Stanford Law School that Morris first decided he’d like to become a judge. As a research assistant for the late Gerald Gunther, who was writing a biography of Judge Learned Hand, Morris said, “I was exposed to the day-to-day life of a judge and decided that I could do this some day, that I’d like to try it.”

Morris’s friends from law school said they weren’t at all surprised that Morris ran for—and won—a seat on the Montana Supreme Court. “He’s level-headed. He looks at things from a lot of angles,” said David Domenici ’92, executive director of the See Forever Foundation, which runs a charter school in Washington, D.C.

Miles Ehrlich ’92 added that he never thought Morris would be happy as a firm lawyer. “He’s a guy who’s always wanted to be in the arena,” said Ehrlich, a U.S. attorney in San Francisco. He added that he expected the 6-foot-3 Morris to win: “Being a hometown football hero doesn’t hurt. He’s a big, good-looking guy, but he doesn’t come across as arrogant. He’s got a nice public presentation.”

Campaigning for a statewide seat in a place the size of Montana proved a logistical challenge, Morris said: “It’s a huge state. I logged 30,000 to 40,000 miles on my car. In Montana, people still expect to see you if they’re going to vote for you.”

Morris, though homegrown, had the disadvantage of having left the state for college and law school. His opponent attended the University of Montana School of Law and was able to use the local alumni network. “I didn’t have that,” Morris said. “But I had the Stanford name, and you’d be surprised how many alumni are here in Montana.”

Donations from his law school friends enabled him to run TV commercials, he said. “They provided a source of money my opponent didn’t have.” A term on the seven-member Montana Supreme Court is eight years. Morris said he expects his life will be “a little more cloistered” on the bench than it was when he was a practicing lawyer. “I’ll have less contact with lawyers and colleagues,” he noted. “Luckily I have a busy life outside work. I’ll do one term and see how I like it.”