The night before IJ opened its doors in the fall of 1991, I made a pilgrimage to commune with “TJ” at the Jefferson Memorial, just across the National Mall from IJ’s first offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. I was a 24-year-old kid who had just graduated from law school and taken the bar exam. I was going to my dream job, the reason I went to law school in the first place—to practice constitutional law to protect the rights of individuals from abuses by government.