Storming The Court: A U.S. Senator Looks Back On His Law School Days

He missed a ton of classes in his last year of law school, but it all turned out okay for him in the end.

Last Friday, I attended an excellent conference at New York Law School, Storming the Court: 25 Years After HCC v. Sale. It centered on the landmark human rights case brought by Yale law students on behalf of the hundreds of Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo Bay in 1992. The inspiring story of this litigation forms the subject of NYLS professor Brandt Goldstein’s critically acclaimed, award-winning book, Storming the Court: How a Band of Law Students Fought the President — and Won (affiliate link).

One of the highlights of the conference was the lunchtime address by Chris Coons — one of the YLS students who worked on HCC v. Sale, and now a U.S. Senator from the state of Delaware. Senator Coons is just one of several HCC v. Sale alumni who have gone on to amazing careers in law, politics, or public service. As Professor Raymond Brescia wondered aloud when introducing Senator Coons, “Did the students make the case, or did the case make the students?”

Coons talked about how he came to be involved in the litigation. He was a 3L when the case began — or really a “4L,” because he was also getting a divinity degree at Yale — and was laboring away on multiple papers that he needed to finish in order to graduate. Some of the students already working on the HCC case contacted him because of his reputation as a “Bluebooking maniac who loved sourceciting” and asked if he’d be willing to proofread a draft filing for them.

Despite being swamped with his academic work, Coons agreed to go into the offices of Simpson Thacher, which was lending pro bono support to the case, and spend an hour or so looking over the draft. What ended up happening turned out to be quite different.

“I wandered into a funny-smelling room at Simpson Thacher full of great people,” Coons recalled. “They wanted me to review a 147-page rough draft and turn it into something that had to be filed in federal court in 72 hours or less.”

“I was transfixed by the elegance and the overreach of the brief,” he said. “So I whipped out my copy of the Bluebook, fourteenth edition, and didn’t leave that room for the next 72 hours.”

The groundbreaking case ended up consuming the rest of Coons’s law school career: “From March until graduation, I don’t think I returned to a single class.”

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I’m generally not a fan of skipping class — I rarely missed class when I was a law school gunner student — but working on a history-making case seems like a good excuse. And it didn’t seem to hurt Coons at all. He enjoyed a successful legal career, including a Third Circuit clerkship and service as in-house counsel, before winning election to the Senate in 2010 (defeating the notorious Christine O’Donnell, of “I’m not a witch” and “Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?” fame).

Chris Coons has come a long way from his law student days, but he remains deeply committed to human rights. While in the Senate, he has worked on such issues as fighting ebola in Africa and the plight of Syrian refugees.

His past experience with refugee issues is extremely relevant to his current service as a senator, in light of the current international migrant crisis. As he eloquently declared in concluding his remarks last week, “It is not acceptable to treat as ‘other’ and as disposable the many refugees who are trying to reach the United States today.”

Storming the Court: 25 Years After HCC v. Sale [New York Law School]
Storming the Court: How a Band of Law Students Fought the President — and Won [Amazon (affiliate link)]

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