Supreme Court Clinic

Founded:
2009

The Supreme Court Clinic is the nation’s first to closely integrate practical experience on Supreme Court matters with a semester-long academic seminar on the workings of the Court. Clinic students must enroll in the seminar before or at the same time as their clinic work.

Clinic students work on real Supreme Court cases, including conducting research, writing briefs and participating in moot court rehearsals that are held prior to oral arguments at One First Street. The clinic is led by Professor Stephanos Bibas, a former law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy and a former federal prosecutor, and Penn Law lecturer Stephen B. Kinnaird, also a former clerk to Justice Kennedy and a partner with the Paul Hastings law firm, where he heads the firm’s appellate litigation practice based in Washington, D.C.

In the seminar, students study the Supreme Court primarily from the point of view of the advocacy process that precedes and influences the Court’s decisions. The course examines the nature of effective advocacy before the Court and the ways in which advocates’ strategies may (or may not) influence the Court at each stage of a case – the petition for certiorari and brief in opposition; merits briefs by petitioner and respondent; and oral argument. The seminar includes consideration of one or more cases currently before the Court, with a trip to the Court to hear an oral argument if feasible. The seminar is taught by Professor Amy Wax and adjunct lecturer James Feldman, both former assistants to the solicitor general, the office that represents the United States at the Supreme Court. Wax has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court; Feldman, 45 of them.

Penn Law students participate in Supreme Court case

Supreme Court Clinic