Stanford Law School’s high court clinic was first in the nation, giving students a rare opportunity to help shape history

Every law student reads Supreme Court cases. At Stanford, students help to litigate them.

JD/MBA student Sam Byker ’17 learned just how much of a difference a student can make in 2015, when he helped to represent the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples a right to marry.

Byker did so as a participant in Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, the first of its kind at any law school and a model for many others. Since its launch in 2004, clinic students have worked on 180 U.S. Supreme Court cases and have represented a party in roughly one out of 13 cases the U.S. Supreme Court has decided on the merits, with victories for the clinic’s clients in a majority of the cases.

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As the clinic’s co-director, Stanford Law Professor Jeffrey L. Fisher served as co-counsel for one of the groups of petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges, six same-sex couples in Kentucky who sued their state in 2013 for the right to marry.

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Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic was co-founded by Law Professor Pamela S. Karlan and then-Lecturer Tom Goldstein, now publisher of SCOTUSBlog.

Under Karlan’s direction, the clinic helped to secure an earlier victory for marriage rights in 2013. It was part of the legal team representing Edith Windsor, a New York woman who successfully challenged the Defense of Marriage Act that restricted “marriage” for the purpose of all federal laws solely to a legal union between a man and a woman.

Karlan is still the clinic’s co-director, along with Fisher.

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