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.”
