One Lawyer’s Triple Play: Work on Three Briefs, All in Cases Argued Yesterday
U.S. Supreme Court specialist Thomas Goldstein has another feather in his cap.
The lawyer from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld worked on briefs in all three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday in an unusual three-argument day, reports the BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.
The cases were argued by other Akin Gump lawyers or by colleagues at the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic that Goldstein launched four years ago, the blog story says.
The cases involved sentencing for drug dealers, the Voting Rights Act, and a tax dispute.
The cert petition in the drug sentencing case was filed by a jailhouse lawyer who cited a “grievous ambiguity” over what counts as a felony for sentencing purposes, according to a story by McClatchy Newspapers.
The Voting Rights case concerned whether Alabama’s governor had authority to appoint a fellow Republican to a county commission seat in a minority district without Justice Department clearance, the Associated Press reports. After the hearing, Pamela Karlan, a lawyer for Democrats challenging the appointment, said many of the justices seemed to have fundamental questions about the Voting Rights Act.
The tax dispute involves the procedure that needs to be followed by three companies trying to recover taxes they paid before the levies were determined to be unconstitutional, SCOTUSblog reports.
