pamela karlan
thought they’d bat .500 the first season.
Instead, they’re 4 for 4.
The year-old Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford
Law School has had all four of its inaugural cases accepted
for review by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court grants
less than 5 percent of the petitions for certiorari
in civil cases, and less than 1 percent overall.
“If we were to ask in the long run what do we
think our likely success rate on cert. petitions would
be, it’s not going to be 100 percent,” says
Karlan, a law professor who teaches the clinic with
Thomas Goldstein and Amy Howe, partners in a Washington,
D.C., firm specializing in Supreme Court practice. “But
I think if you pick the cases judiciously, you can aim
for getting most of them granted.”
The instructors also judiciously pick seven or eight
students per semester. They strive to give them experience
in Supreme Court litigation—“its own weird
world,” Karlan says—but also to teach teamwork
and sharpen writing skills. No other program in the
country offers students the opportunity to work on the
full range of cases before the Supreme Court.
In teams of two to three, students draft cert. petitions
and merits briefs, sometimes 13 or 14 times. “Almost
always, you could do it better than the student and
faster than the student,” Karlan says, “and
the main thing you want to do is not give in to that
temptation.”
The clinic is half its students’ course load,
but three-fourths of their workload. Some days, students
prepare their instructors or other attorneys for oral
argument, quizzing them in the mode of a particular
justice. Other days, they huddle around a table in a
law library seminar room and collaborate on last-minute
revisions to a brief, watching as Goldstein uses state-of-the-art
software to make edits from Washington. Most students
have flown to D.C. to watch one of the clinic’s
cases argued before the Supreme Court.
“A lot of us hoped someday in our career we could
litigate some Supreme Court cases,” says Michael
Abate, a third-year law student who is participating
in the clinic for his third semester. “We all
joke that it will take 10 years to get back to this
level, if ever.” |
