Research Shows Clinics — Including UVA Law’s — Shape U.S. Supreme Court Docket
July 20, 2026 / Mary Wood
Law school clinics — including those at the University of Virginia School of Law — are playing a significant role in which cases are heard at the U.S. Supreme Court, according to new research from Professor Mitu Gulati.
In his paper “The Inside Track,” written with Tracey George of Vanderbilt Law School and Albert Yoon of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Gulati and his co-authors look at the lawyers whose cases most often are granted certiorari, or who are able to block cases from being heard. The authors found that lawyers affiliated with the 15 appellate clinics at law schools across the nation are filling a gap in pro bono representation and taking cases that firms cannot take due to potential conflicts of interest.
“After the elite firms, law school clinics, rather than other types of legal organizations, appear most often on our measures,” the authors write. Given that they are thinly staffed and only focus on a couple cases a year, “it is remarkable that they show up repeatedly on our top lawyer tables.”
”Each year, UVA’s yearlong Supreme Court Litigation Clinic introduces 12 third-year students to all aspects of current U.S. Supreme Court practice through live cases. The clinic’s instructors have argued 20 cases before the court. In the Appellate Litigation Clinic, a dozen students work with Professors Scott Ballenger ’96, Cate Stetson ’94 and Lori Alvino McGill on at least one appellate case over the course of an academic year, preparing briefs and presenting oral argument themselves in federal appellate courts.
Professor Daniel Ortiz, who ran the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic from its launch in 2006 until 2023, was among the lawyers with the highest rate of “responses requested,” at 32% — meaning, among the cases Ortiz filed as the clinic’s leader, the justices requested respondents to submit a reply opposing cert, suggesting the case would soon be heard.
“This request, we contend, is a signal of the petitioner lawyer quality,” Gulati and his co-authors write. “[The] response requested measure reflects that at least one justice, based just on the cert petition, deemed it necessary to hear from the respondent before deciding whether to grant cert.”
Ortiz said clinics could have some advantages over firms in appellate litigation matters.
Economically speaking, we can do things that might be hard for them, like 50-state surveys of the law and tracking down the history of a doctrine to the 14th century. Also, being inside the academy, we might ‘see’ things a little differently. Our students and we, the leaders, tend to be less siloed than many practitioners. That might lead us to make different kinds of arguments or the same arguments a little differently.DODaniel Ortiz
The authors’ data, covering 2000-2024, includes lawyers with five or more responses.
Since then, the clinic’s new director, Professor Xiao Wang, has argued two more cases at the Supreme Court, and had a 100% response rate in the last term. The Appellate Litigation Clinic, through instructor Alvino McGill, also argued before the court for the first time and won.
Stetson also appears in Gulati’s paper as one of the lawyers with a top relisting rate at the Supreme Court. Having a case relisted means the justices are deferring on voting whether to grant cert until another time when they can look at it more closely; it is considered a positive sign of interest in the case.
Ballenger, who argued cases before the Supreme Court while in private practice for 20 years at Latham & Watkins before joining the Law School faculty, said that “the biggest surprise in taking over the Appellate Litigation Clinic has been that highly complex, Supreme Court-worthy issues are everywhere if you know how to look for them — even in cases where prisoners have been representing themselves pro se.”
Gulati agreed with Ballenger that there are many cases raising issues that could garner the attention of the Supreme Court. But “he was too humble,” Gulati added.
“It takes real skill to go beyond finding a circuit split or an issue of national importance involving foreign sovereigns to find that diamond of a case that, if the issue is posed beautifully, could get four votes to hear the case,” he said.
Gulati and his co-authors’ paper also examines how lawyers with certain types of elite credentials dominate among the cases granted cert, just as they are leaders in how often they argue cases before the court, according to another paper the trio wrote. The leading lawyers typically were clerks themselves at the U.S. Supreme Court, often trained at the Solicitor General’s office, and have elite educational credentials.
This article was originally published here: https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/202607/research-shows-clinics-including-uva-laws-shape-us-supreme-court-docket