Clinics in the Supreme Court

I've just added one more case to the list I've been compiling of Supreme Court decisions from last term (2012-13) in which law school clinics helped represent a party -- now a total of 8 out of 78 cases decided on the merits by the Court that year. Arguably these numbers understate the clinics' influence, since they don't include amicus briefs that clinics may also have filed (though there are lots of those briefs nowadays). I don't know whether the 2012-13 numbers reflect an ongoing phenomenon, but I hope to keep an eye on this year's cases as well and try to find out.

The presence of law clinics in the Supreme Court may startle both clinical and nonclinical faculty: clinicians because most clinics focus largely on interpersonal skills of lawyering, while the Supreme Court litigation experiences presumably are mainly about writing, and nonclinicians because writing a Supreme Court brief is the sort of elite, intellectual practice work that even those who most strongly emphasize the role of doctrine and scholarship in law school would likely validate. That makes the role of clinics in the Supreme Court important pedagogically as well as practically.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the clinical teachers and students who did this work!

Latest update on my list of Supreme Court cases handled by clinics last year

I've just added another case to this list, which you can find here. So far the total is 6 cases, three of them featuring a single clinic at Stanford (which won two of the three)! 6 cases is actually 7.6 % of the total of 79 "Opinions of the Court" that the Supreme Court lists on its website. It's worth adding that my list so far is only of cases in which a clinic represented a party; there are probably many other cases in which clinics submitted amicus or friend-of-the-court briefs and these too can be influential.

Law school clinics and American law, continued

Just a note: I'm in the process of keeping a tally of all Supreme Court cases from the 2012-13 term (the one that's coming to an end in the next few weeks) in which a law school clinic helped represent one of the parties to the case. I'm also going to start listing Supreme Court cases in which clinics contributed to amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs.

All of these will be listed here, in a gradually expanding version of my original post on this subject. But from time to time I'll add new posts like this one, just to report that new cases have been added to the list.

So far, by the way, I know of 5 cases from this term in which clinics represented a party. Two of them, remarkably, are from a single clinic, the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, whose record for wins is 2 for 2! 5 cases may not seem like a huge number, but the Supreme Court, according to its FAQ page, "grants and hears oral arguments in about 75-80 cases" a year -- so 5 cases is actually about 6 % of all the cases the Supreme Court will have given its fullest consideration to during this entire term.  

UPDATE: My count is now 6 cases, three of them from the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, whose record overall is 2 for 3. For the latest addition to the list, see the link above.