Courses

    This seminar examines the challenges presented by written and oral advocacy in the United States Supreme Court. Supreme Court advocacy is uniquely demanding because of the nature of the legal issues before the Court, the potentially far reaching implications of the Court’s decisions, the competing expectations of the individual Justices, and even the physical setting of the courtroom itself. The seminar will explore these issues by reviewing scholarly writings and the Supreme Court briefs of some of the most celebrated Supreme Court advocates, by meeting with and learning from some of the nation’s best advocates and former law clerks to the Justices, by studying in detail the briefs filed in several pending Supreme Court cases, and by attending selected moot courts sponsored by the law school’s Supreme Court Institute of counsel with cases before the Supreme Court. Students in the seminar enrolled for two credits will be required to prepare two five-page papers on different aspects of one or more of those pending cases. These papers will critically analyze the filings in one or more cases and consider in depth the questions that a particular advocate is likely to face in oral argument in one or more cases, including the strategic opportunities and pitfalls that the argument is likely to present. Students enrolled in the seminar for three credits will need to prepare a paper that satisfies the upperclass legal writing requirement. In addition, for all students in the class, there will be several in-class exercises related to oral advocacy requiring student participation.