Age-bias ruling puts law clinic on the map
BY JUDITH ROMERO
The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling March 30 that workers over 40 do not have to show intentional discrimination by employers to recover damages under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) was also a landmark for a Law School clinic.
The petitioners in the case, a group of police department employees in Jackson, Miss., were represented in the nation's highest court by the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, directed by law Professor Pamela Karlan and lecturers Thomas Goldstein and Amy Howe, and by Mississippi attorney Dennis Horn. Four students in the clinic—Michael Abate, William Adams, Jennifer Thomas and Lee Reeves—worked intensively on the case, participating in drafting the merits briefs and certiorari petition, a document intended to persuade the court to hear the case. Goldstein presented the petitioners' oral argument to the court in November 2004.
The 5 to 3 ruling held that the ADEA permits lawsuits under a disparate impact theory, the same rule that applies under federal law for claims of race and gender discrimination. The decision affects the rights of an estimated 70 million workers, about half the nation's work force. The court, however, rejected the plaintiffs' claim that the particular policy they challenged violated the ADEA. The case is Smith v. City of Jackson, No. 03-1160.
The clinic was launched at the Law School in January 2004 to teach students about Supreme Court litigation, as well as to give them intensive instruction in legal writing and working as a team. The Smith case was the clinic's first. Currently, the clinic has two other cases in which it represented petitioners awaiting decision, and an additional case scheduled for oral argument in the court's next term.
The clinic was designed by two veteran Supreme Court advocates—Karlan, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, and Goldstein, a lecturer at the Law School and a partner, along with lecturer Amy Howe, at Goldstein & Howe, a Washington, D.C., law firm that specializes in Supreme Court litigation. Howe formally joined the teaching team at the start of the clinic's second semester. "While we're pleased that today's decision establishes the principle that the ADEA reaches disparate impact claims, we are of course disappointed that the court rejected our clients' claim," Karlan said. "The decision is a lesson about Supreme Court litigation that only a clinic like Stanford's can teach students so vividly."
Goldstein said, "We were very pleased to have such a fundamental civil rights claim vindicated. And we could not have been more pleased that it came in a case in which the students worked so hard." The clinic, with nine students and three faculty members, operates as a small law firm focused solely on pro bono cases. Students participate in drafting certiorari petitions, oppositions to certiorari petitions, merits briefs and amicus briefs. They also comment on drafts of briefs being filed by lawyers in other cases, and help prepare advocates for their oral arguments through moot courts.
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