Two lawyers who argued recent cases before the U.S. Supreme Court are among the panelists at Thursday's annual review of the nation's highest court presented by the UC Irvine School of Law.
]
Dream Team Assembled at UCI Law School Squeezes Boring Right Out of 2010-11 U.S. Supreme Court Term
Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-director of the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, has argued several and worked on dozens of cases before the high court. He was most recently on the appeal team for the San Diego gang member at the center of Riley v. California, which resulted in the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling last month that police may not search the smartphones of people placed under arrest without a warrant. Fisher is now seeking a new trial for the imprisoned David Riley.
Joining Fisher on the panel at UCI is Bert Rein, a leading antitrust and commercial litigator at Wiley Rein, who represented the prevailing parties in two Supreme Court cases from the October 2013 term: Fisher v. University of Texas and Shelby County v. Holder. A 5-4 high court majority sided with Rein's client Abigail Fisher, who challenged the university's race-based admission policies. The vote was 7-1 in favor of Shelby County, Alabama, which challenged the constitutionality of the renewal of the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Returning to the UCI panel is Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the courts and law for Slate. She will not be the lone journalist on the panel as Mark Sherman, who covers the Supreme Court for The Associated Press, is also scheduled to participate.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a nationally recognized constitutional law expert and founding dean of the UCI law school, could make a plug from the panel for his latest book, The Case Against the Supreme Court, which comes out in September. One of his professors, Jennifer Chacon, joins him on the panel, and among her areas of expertise are constitutional law, criminal law and procedure and a currently hot topic: immigration law.
Moderating the panel is election law expert Rick Hasen, a professor of Law and Political Science at UCI. Google his name and you'll discover there are few national publications that have not run his columns and/or quoted him. Among them: The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. Hasen was co-founding editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed Election Law Journal, and his Election Law Blog is regarded as a must-read in law circles.
The event runs from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the UCI Student Center's Pacific Ballroom. Registration to attend is now closed, but you can catch a live webcast by clicking through at UCI.edu. And you can participate as if you are there from your smartphone or computer by tweeting questions to Hasen at @rickhasen with the hashtag #ucilawscotus.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.