One evening several years ago, retired Delaware Supreme Court Justice Randy Holland sat at the dinner table on a small, southeastern Iowa farm.
He had just finished supper at the childhood home of a former law clerk, Jenness Parker. Parker had become a close family friend more than a decade earlier and by extension, her large family – there were perhaps 20 people at dinner that night – had also become important members of Holland’s inner circle.
Without a word, the 70-year-old pushed back his chair and stood up, walking decisively to the kitchen sink. Quietly, he rolled up his sleeves and began tackling the pile of dirty pots and pans.
This was a man who was good friends with then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He had attended one of the Queen of England’s garden parties at Balmoral Castle.
And among other notable projects, he’d worked closely with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and numerous other preeminent jurists and legal scholars on a book to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.
Yet here he was, sponge in hand. No one had asked Holland to clean, but he was happily scrubbing away.
“Who does that?” Parker said recently. “You’re this storied Supreme Court justice and you just walk over to the sink and start doing the dishes? That was the hard-working, nice person he was.”
Holland, who retired from Delaware’s highest court in 2017 after more than 30 years on the bench, died last week following a brief illness. He was 75.
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While his death has impacted dozens of people locally and across the U.S., it’s also been felt internationally.
On Monday, Lincoln’s Inn of Court in London – one of the world’s most prestigious professional bodies of judges and lawyers that dates back to at least the 15th Century – rang its bell in honor of Holland. The bell tolls midday to mark the passing of benchers, or members of the council.
Holland was elected as an honorary master of the bench in 2004 – a prestigious feat for an American. One of the most notable honorary American benchers was Ginsburg.
But while legal societies and court institutions in the U.S. and worldwide honor the former justice’s academic and professional legacy, his family, close friends and mentees remember the humble, fun-loving man who adored his granddaughters, whose game of choice at Funland was Skee-Ball and whose favorite food was spaghetti and meatballs.
“He was an extraordinary man and we (his friends) lost a gentle giant,” said Delaware Alcoholic Beverage Control Commissioner Jackie Paradee Mette, a former law clerk and longtime friend.
“But his family lost a husband, a dad and a grandfather, and those are the people you worry about the most.”
‘The stars aligned’
Holland didn’t have an easy childhood.
Born into a “very difficult environment, both financially and just in general,” said Holland’s son Ethan, the justice’s mother died when he was 4 or 5 years old. His early life was filled with “a lot of turmoil” and he was “surrounded by chaos,” Ethan said.
Though some become victims of their circumstances, Holland took the adversity and found a way to succeed. His life motto became “work hard, do the right thing and don’t cut corners.”
“It was a system he had to create out of protection for himself because he was afraid if he cut corners or didn’t have faith in people, things wouldn’t work out,” Ethan said.
It paid off.
In high school, the Sussex County resident was a celebrated athlete, starring on Milford High School’s baseball and football teams. He also met his future wife, Ilona, during those years.
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He continued playing football in college, though always downplayed his time as an athlete. Decades later, he told Parker the only requirement to play was “you had to have a pulse.” And in one exchange with Ginsburg – known for her exercise routine – he said he “probably could not match her in doing push-ups.”
The justice’s athletic and academic prowess led him to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania – one of the best schools he could get into. Ethan said his father was motivated to strive for the best because of his lack of safety net.
“He chose economics (for a major) because it had the word economics in it and then he chose to be a lawyer because lawyers seemed to do OK,” Ethan said. “Just miraculously, the stars aligned and he found what he was meant to do.”
Ilona also attended Swarthmore for her undergraduate degree, but she was younger than Holland and didn’t graduate in the same class. In the years the high school sweethearts were apart, Holland wrote to her daily.
The two married in 1972, the same year Holland graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and had Ethan several years later. They would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in June.
‘He was consistent’
Much like her husband, Ilona was driven to succeed. In 1985, she received her Masters in Education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and six years later in 1991, received her doctorate degree.
As a master’s student, she commuted from Delaware to Cambridge, Massachusetts while Holland worked at a private law firm. The commute in pursuit of her doctorate continued after Holland was appointed to the Delaware Supreme Court by Gov. Mike Castle in 1986.
At age 39, he was the youngest justice in Delaware history.
Though Ilona was in Cambridge most weekdays and Holland was a busy attorney, Ethan never lacked attention.
Holland was always home for dinner and took his son’s calls during the day. If his secretary picked up, she would quickly transfer Ethan to him.
“I cannot think of a single time he didn’t answer the phone,” Ethan said. “He never said he was busy and he never said anything like ‘I’m on an important call’ or ‘I gotta go.’ I think he was consistent with this trait.”
That consistency was evident elsewhere, too.
Each morning as he left for work, Holland waved goodbye to Ethan, who would watch his father drive away from a window in their home.
One day, much to Ethan’s bewilderment, Holland drove by and forgot to wave, leaving the boy wondering what happened.
The befuddlement didn’t last long. As quickly as Holland passed by, he threw his car into reverse and backed down the street to wave at Ethan.
“How many kids can say your dad never messed up?” Ethan said. “He was definitely my closest friend.”
‘You really had something to offer’
Just as Holland was committed to his son, he cherished Ilona and fiercely supported her education and career goals.
At that time, said Mette – the Delaware Alcoholic Beverage Control commissioner – there likely weren’t many Delawareans who went to Harvard and there were probably even few female Delawareans who attended the university. And there “definitely” weren’t many mothers who commuted to the Cambridge school, she said.
Yet that happened “because the two of them supported each other and they co-parented so well,” Mette said.
“When the workday ended, Justice Holland was going home to make sure that Ethan had a meal,” she said. “They were really (equals) in everything and that’s something I really admired.”
It wasn’t just his wife Holland championed.
In the early 1990s, when Mette clerked for Holland, women were just beginning to enter the male-dominated legal profession.
Even as recently as 2020, only 37% of attorneys in the U.S. were women.
Holland, Mette said, gave her the same respect he gave to the Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice. And he treated her with the same dignity he did Justice O’Connor, whom he met through the American Inns of Court.
Holland and O’Connor “had a very long-abiding friendship and mutual respect for the principles fostered by the Inns of Court program, which is really centered around the civility and professionalism of members of the legal community,” Mette said.
Sussex County Family Court Judge Paula Ryan echoed Mette, saying Holland was instrumental in both her professional career and personal life.
Laughing through tears one recent morning, she said she wished she could apologize to the justice for how she likely acted as his clerk in the mid-1990s.
“I must have been just such an idiot – I was young and couldn’t have known anything, but he had this way of making you feel like you weren’t an idiot and like he really valued your input,” Ryan said.
“He made you feel like you really had something to offer, and that’s an incredible feeling.”
For a woman in a male-dominated industry – and coming from someone as intelligent, dignified and kind as Holland – that “fosters this confidence in you that can never be shaken, no matter where you go or what you do,” said Parker, the former clerk from southeastern Iowa.
She is now a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates in Wilmington.
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Holland’s respect and belief in his clerks, many of whom he remained close with for decades, was also “organic,” Parker said.
Nowadays, she said, inclusivity is expected. But in the 1990s – and even when Parker clerked for Holland from 2004 to 2005 – it wasn’t something that society demanded from institutions, corporations and leaders.
“For him, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, I should support women because I’m supposed to,’” Parker said. “He always said, “I just picked the best people and it just so happens many of them are women.’”
Progress, she added, takes a while. And it “certainly only comes with people like Justice Holland.”
‘Becoming a part of your life’
On a recent Friday morning, Judge Ryan eyed a bookshelf in her home filled with numerous volumes of work.
As she looked at the book titles, her composure melted and she sniffled, her voice beginning to crack.
She’s had these books for years, since her father’s death in 1999. They first belonged to him and she later inherited them.
But while she’s always cherished the books, they take on even more special meaning now. These were the works Holland, a “voracious” reader, and her father mailed back and forth to one another in the final years of her dad’s life.
Holland didn’t know Ryan’s father prior to her clerking for the justice. Yet he formed a relationship with the man through her – a story echoed by Holland’s other longtime friends.
“He just had a way of just becoming a part of your life and your family,” Ryan said.
For Parker, Holland and Ilona “were like a second set of parents.”
When the then-26-year-old moved from Iowa to Delaware in the mid-2000s, she knew no one. She had met Holland several years earlier when he taught a spring intersession course at the University of Iowa School of Law and had asked her to apply for his clerkship. When he hired her, she had never been to Delaware.
Knowing this, Holland told Parker’s parents – whom he became close with through her – that he and Ilona would watch over their daughter. And they did.
Whenever the couple invited Parker to dinner, they would ensure she had some kind of leafy green or another vegetable on her plate. Holland would remind Parker that he’d made a promise to take care of her – which meant she had to eat her vegetables.
And very early in her clerkship too, before Parker made friends in Delaware, Holland took it upon himself to teach the young woman to cook.
One day, they went to someone’s house – Parker can’t remember who – and the justice had a raw turkey waiting. Rolling up his sleeves, he told Parker the day’s lesson would be how to perfectly cook a turkey.
Hours later, she’d prepared her first gobbler.
“The man taught me the foundation of being a lawyer – everybody will tell you that,” Parker said. “But he also made me eat my vegetables and taught me how to cook a turkey, and I’d bet nobody else has a turkey story.”
As caring as Holland was to the people close to him, he extended the same tenderness to strangers.
To this day, Ethan vividly remembers an encounter his father had with a little boy in Georgetown.
Holland’s office was undergoing some sort of construction and he had been temporarily moved next to Sussex County Family Court. Ethan was at the office working on homework when a bailiff stopped by.
“Justice Holland, do you have a minute?” Ethan remembers the man asking.
Curious, Ethan looked over and saw a boy no older than six or seven, though possibly younger. The child, Ethan said, had just come from a family court hearing where he’d been removed from his father’s care.
The bailiff understood the little boy needed to hug someone. And, having just been taken from his father, the bailiff thought that person should be male.
As Holland hugged the boy, the child began to sob. Quickly, the minute the bailiff had requested turned into 30 – and Holland never once tried to push him away.
“If you’re asking me what it’s like to be his son, what it’s like to know him, that’s it,” Ethan said. “He was a very tender man and he believed in people. He just was genuinely kind.”
Got a story tip or idea? Send to Isabel Hughes at ihughes@delawareonline.com. For all things breaking news, follow her on Twitter at @izzihughes_
