Students Briefed for Day in Court

mbridge at midnight for a 24-hour trip to Washington D.C. to hear two Supreme Court cases and meet with Justice David H. Souter ’61 next Tuesday. In preparation for the excursion, former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey L. Amestoy and Harvard Law Professors Noah R. Feldman and Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. discussed the context and facts of the two cases in Lowell House library last night.

Amestoy said he couldn’t predict how Souter—who is a former Lowell House resident and a long-standing member of the House’s Senior Common Room—would vote in the two cases.

“One of the great things about Justice Souter is that he doesn’t lend himself easily to trait categorizations,” Amestoy said.

Sullivan introduced the first case, Pearson v. Callahan, which he said will involve questions of Fourth Amendment interpretation.

In Pearson v. Callahan, the defendant claims that Utah police entered his residence with neither a warrant nor consent.

Sullivan said that the Supreme Court must decide exactly what constitutes “consent” in this particular case.

In addition to this substantive issue, Sullivan cited the case’s “difficult procedural posture” as a source of complication.

Sullivan said that while the defendant did not directly consent to the entry of a uniformed police officer, he did consent to the entry of a civilian informant.

“It goes back to the reasonable expectation of privacy inside one’s home,” Sulivan said. “When you allow someone into your home, do you really assume that you are also allowing in the state?”

Feldman, who was a Supreme Court clerk for Souter, addressed the second case, Bartlett v. Strickland, which involves the legislative allocation of districts.

States are mandated to create majority-minority districts under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The legislation was enacted to ensure that minorities could exert real electoral influence and be represented by members of their racial or ethnic group.

The allocation of districts has immense political consequences, said Feldman, who highlighted the potential abuses of the majority-minority mandate and the latent assumptions of the VRA.

“Many people are revolted by the background assumption that black people vote for back people and white people vote for white people,” he said.

Feldman also gave the Lowell students an idea of what to expect from the cases next week, saying that technical legal jargon can baffle even experienced spectators.

“They won’t explain things in the courtroom,” said Feldman, who Esquire magazine named one of the 75 great individuals to shape the next 100 years. “They’ll just talk in code.”

Jonathan C. Miller ’10, who will be taking part in the trip next week, said the discussion gave him a better understanding of the Constitutional issues.