Let me set the scene..
In March I took my students to see oral arguments for a Supreme Court case (Abuelhawa v United States). We didn't get to see the whole case being heard but we did catch the last 20 minutes and it was a lot of fun. The case was about whether or not someone should be charged with a felony for minor possession of a narcotic because they used a cell phone to facilitate it. What I noticed when we left was that even though we had gone through the background of the case, the students had a really hard time understanding what was going on when we were in the courtroom.
Taking this into consideration, and after reading an article in the Washington Post about a school in Virginia that did mock Supreme Court cases, I decided it would be fun to take an upcoming case from the Supreme Court and have the students be the lawyers and do all the leg work. So first I gave students brief summaries of the cases and then we picked one that interested them. The students picked the case Safford Unified School District v. Redding. This case was about a student who was strip searched when students were looking for illicit prescription drugs (in this case 400 mg prescription ibuprofen). The student says her Fourth Amendment rights were violated and she was traumatized by the experience, developed ulcers and had to leave the school. The school district basically says it was protecting their students and they need to maintain the right to do so. Once they had picked the case they were assigned to teams representing the two sides.
The first thing the students had to do was submit legal briefs. They worked together and performed research using only primary sources (the same sources that were used in the case) reading and citing previous legal decisions on the case (local, appellate and en banc), relevant Supreme Court decisions, and the sworn statements used in the case. While the final briefs were far shorter than the real thing, the students used legal terminology and made multiple outlines, drafts, and numerous revisions to come to their final product and gained experience using legal evidence and making strong arguments based solely on the law and interpretation of the law.
The students then had to present 'Oral Arguments'. First the students had to write a persuasive speech representing their side. This forced them to pick only the strongest arguments for their side and work on their persuasive writing and speaking skills. Then they had to present the speech in front of their peers.
The next step was to simulate what it would be like to be in front of the Supreme Court Justices (who get to interrupt you at any time and interrogate you mercilessly). Because our class is too small to have a set of Justices, I decided to arrange it as a debate, where they would get to question each other and force the other side to answer potentially damaging questions.
The culmination of this project was for us to go to the Supreme Court and hear the Oral Arguments for the very case we had been studying ourselves. The students picked a very popular case, and one that has gotten a reasonable amount of press (far more than the other case we attended though certainly not a landmark case). I decided we had to arrive at the Court early because seating is very limited and it is first come, first serve. I figured that if I arrived by 5:30 then my students arrived by 6:30 and we would be fine.
I arrived at the Court around 5:35 and to my dismay saw a huge group of people already waiting. I ended up being about the 70th person in line. My students arrived and were able to join me (with a little bickering behind me) and we patiently waited in the fairly cool/cold weather to see if we were going to get in. I was not very hopeful but my students jokingly 'kept the faith'. After lots of time in line, we received the final 'placeholder' issued by the police at #75. We kept waiting since we only got one for the six of us. At one point we were offered $100 for the placeholder (which in retrospect my students said we should have taken haha) by a supposed friend of one of the attorneys trying the case. Apparently the parents of one of the attorneys trying the case was actually behind us in line as well, clearly no special privileges were given to anyone.
In the end we were about 20 people away from getting a seat for the whole trial (and when there are only about 200 seats total 20 is a lot). I probably would have needed to get there at least an hour earlier and the students would have had to have been there with me to avoid a riot. So we didn't really have a shot since the fifth student arrived around 7 AM.
We then moved directly to the 5 minute rotation line and were the first group to go inside. We went in, put our things in the little lockers, heard 5 minutes of the case, and were then led out. While we only got to hear a tiny portion of the case my students did not come across as very disappointed and were animatedly talking all about the case as we left. I can only imagine what it would've been like for us to hear the whole thing if 5 minutes got them going.
Here are the highlights of what we did get to witness:
- Safford Unified School District was presenting and was talking about how the school district had to be able to protect their students from illegally using prescription medications and that there had been a history of students getting sick and abusing these drugs.
- One of my students who represented Safford in our class was very excited that she heard the very argument she used in her paper used by the lawyer
- Ruth Bater Ginsburg began to pull Safford's case apart
- Another student who represented Redding was very excited that the Justices seemed to be very harsh on the Safford lawyer
Case and point: 3 out of 5 students are now saying that they are seriously thinking about law school (when before none of them had any interest).
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