Solicitor General visits College

02/13/2008

Solicitor General describes work,
dealings with highest court 

 Paul Clement

Solicitor General Paul Clement 
     As U.S. Solicitor General, Paul Clement has argued nearly 50 times before the United States Supreme Court on issues as varied as campaign reform, medical marijuana, the access of disabled people to public buildings, and the military detention of American citizens on American soil.
     But there's something that never changes for an attorney standing before the nation's highest court: fear.
     "You get more comfortable the more you argue before the Supreme Court, but you never get too comfortable," Clement told first-year law students at the College of Law during a session on Feb. 12 with Dean Patricia White. "People ask, do I still get nervous? And my answer is always, `Of course.` If that ever changes, I'm going to get into a different line of work."
     Clement, the Solicitor General since 2005, said his office represents the executive branch of the government before the court, which accepts about 1 percent of the more than 7,000 Writ of Certiorari petitions it receives each year. Clement's office is selective about the cases it presents to the court for such consideration and requires government agencies to demonstrate the need for appeal.
     "We're better off if we self-select to make sure the petitions we file in the Supreme Court are the most important in the United States, and therefore are more likely for the Supreme Court to take," he said. "And the proof is in the pudding: we have approximately 70 percent of our petitions granted, compared to the 1 percent chance for the average lawyer."
     To prepare for a case, the Solicitor General's office conducts two moot courts involving both its lawyers and those from agencies most affected by and most familiar with the case, Clement said.
     "They take people with tremendous technical expertise who may talk in a series of acronyms or technical terms, which may be pretty hard to grasp and, without losing any accuracy, translate it into terms that are more accessible for the justices," he said.
      Among its other functions, Clement's office performs the same detailed analysis on about 2,000 cases a year that government lawyers want to appeal to the Supreme Court from lower courts. They need permission from the Solicitor General to do that.
     Occasionally, the office becomes a party to litigation if there is sufficient federal interest to justify it, Clement said. And, the Supreme Court justices ask the Solicitor General's Office to get involved in about 20 cases a year.
     "When they ask, we can't refuse," he quipped. "Some say the Solicitor General is the 10th justice, but I've never heard any of the nine real justices make that statement. Others say we're the 35th law clerk, and that's probably more like it."
     Clement told the students the importance of oral argument depends on the written work that goes along with it.
     "Oral argument matters a lot if you've written a good brief to support it," he said. "But if your brief is terrible, even Clarence Darrow isn't going to be able to save a case."
     Lawyers in the Solicitor General's office gradually learn to recognize where the Supreme Court justices are coming from by paying attention to which of their questions are softballs, fastballs or real fact-finding queries.
     "Sometimes you sense they are not coming from any place in particular, and if you answer satisfactorily, you might win a justice's vote," Clement said. 
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