Third-year Northwestern law student Jonathan Hawkins was away from Chicago for a wedding in September when he received a large FedEx package from Washington, D.C.
Inside was a three-ring binder stuffed with materials for an upcoming Supreme Court case argument. It was too important to wait until he returned.
“There was an awful lot of material to get caught up on quickly,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins and fellow law student Ira Karoll were helping prepare the oral argument for the defendant in Arizona v. Gant, on which the decision was released April 21. Through Northwestern School of Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, Hawkins and Karoll worked with Northwestern professors and attorneys at Sidley Austin LLP’s Supreme Court pro bono practice. Hawkins and Karoll familiarized themselves with similar Supreme Court cases and precedents in order to anticipate questions Supreme Court justices would have during the trial.
The defendant, Rodney Gant, was arrested in 1999 on an outstanding warrant after being investigated on drug charges. Police officers went on to search his car and found a gun and cocaine. Gant objected to the search, and, almost 10 years later, on Tuesday, April 21, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Gant’s objection. The decision interpreted Fourth Amendment rights and scaled back the ability of police to search vehicles when making an arrest. A former Northwestern law student (and in fact, the one with the highest GPA in the school’s history), Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote the majority opinion.
“It was hard to know with certainty what questions the justices were going to ask,” Karoll, also a third-year law student, said. “I think the biggest challenge is the Supreme Court justices are a lot smarter than us.”
The students began working on the case in September, and continued helping out for a few weeks before the oral argument took place in October.
“You don’t have a whole lot of time,” Hawkins said. They continued to follow even after their work on it was done.
Both Hawkins and Karoll said this was the first time they had made such a direct contribution to a Supreme Court case.
“I had never had any other involvement with Supreme Court cases, other than reading them,” Hawkins said.
Northwestern’s Supreme Court Clinic, now in its third year, aims to get students to work on real cases and learn the nuances and skills necessary for practicing in the Supreme Court, according to clinical assistant professor Sarah Schrup, the director of the Appellate Advocacy Program. The Supreme Court Clinic, as well as the Federal Appellate Clinic, is a part of Northwestern’s Appellate Advocacy Group, which falls under the umbrella of the Bluhm Legal Clinic.
The Supreme Court Clinic works on 15 to 25 cases a year, according to Schrup. Three previous cases made it all the way to the Supreme Court, she said. In two of the cases, Gall v. United States and Chambers v. United States, Northwestern students fought on the winning side.
“It’s an entirely different scenario,” Hawkins said, of working on a real Supreme Court case as opposed to a case in a moot court.
Schrup said, “When you’re in a closed universe, it’s very tidy. You don’t run into dead ends.”
However, in a real case, “the facts aren’t tidy,” she said. “There’s a lot of different issues you can raise.” According to Schrup, students in the clinic usually get to work on five or six cases to build up their real world legal experience.
“The most exciting part of the course is to be part of these landmark decisions,” Karoll said. “I think it would be great to do this in the future.”