Stanford Law School’s high court clinic was first in the nation, giving students a rare opportunity to help shape history
Every law student reads Supreme Court cases. At Stanford, students help to litigate them.
JD/MBA student Sam Byker ’17 learned just how much of a difference a student can make in 2015, when he helped to represent the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples a right to marry.
Byker did so as a participant in Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, the first of its kind at any law school and a model for many others. Since its launch in 2004, clinic students have worked on 180 U.S. Supreme Court cases and have represented a party in roughly one out of 13 cases the U.S. Supreme Court has decided on the merits, with victories for the clinic’s clients in a majority of the cases.
Clinic students are guided by Stanford Law faculty who are leading authorities on Supreme Court practice.
As the clinic’s co-director, Stanford Law Professor Jeffrey L. Fisher served as co-counsel for one of the groups of petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges, six same-sex couples in Kentucky who sued their state in 2013 for the right to marry.
It wasn’t Fisher’s first epochal case. The 28 cases he has argued before the Supreme Court include Riley v. California, a unanimous and landmark 2014 decision for privacy in which the court for the first time applied the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches to digital data on smartphones.
As the clinic’s co-director, Stanford Law Professor Jeffrey L. Fisher served as co-counsel for one of the groups of petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges, six same-sex couples in Kentucky who sued their state in 2013 for the right to marry.
Students commit to the clinic full time for a quarter, taking no other courses. For the marriage case, Byker joined four other students and a professor in a three-week marathon of reading, working with co-counsel and writing – “all day, every day,” he told Stanford+Connects in 2015. They crafted portions of briefs and of rebuttals to opposing briefs.
“We all played a role,” Byker said. “I spent hours digging through old discriminatory laws, looking for an analogue.”
Late one night, after finding an 1891 law against women voting, he wrote two paragraphs extending the illogic of that argument to the same-sex marriage ban.
“Those two paragraphs, after many edits and revisions, made it into the brief.
“Every other student on the team has a similar story,” said Byker.
The clinic students flew to Washington to help the lawyers prepare for oral argument. The university brought some of the Kentucky couples to Stanford, where they shared with audiences from across the university what the case meant to them.
Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic was co-founded by Law Professor Pamela S. Karlan and then-Lecturer Tom Goldstein, now publisher of SCOTUSBlog.
Under Karlan’s direction, the clinic helped to secure an earlier victory for marriage rights in 2013. It was part of the legal team representing Edith Windsor, a New York woman who successfully challenged the Defense of Marriage Act that restricted “marriage” for the purpose of all federal laws solely to a legal union between a man and a woman.
Karlan is still the clinic’s co-director, along with Fisher.
The Supreme Court Litigation Clinic is just one of eleven Stanford Law School clinics that give students real-world experience working on cases that range from environmental protection to religious liberty. They exemplify Stanford’s extraordinary commitment to experiential learning.
“Every time I witness legal injustice, I’m going to see our clients in my mind’s eye,” Byker told Stanford+Connects.
“And that’s just about the best education I can imagine.”
In this video, Byker shares what it was like to play a role in the historic 2015 case for marriage equality.