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Five current and former students with the University of Notre Dame Law School sat in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court April 30 to hear oral arguments they helped develop.
The students worked on the arguments as part of the university’s Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic.
“They had played an important role in getting this case to where it is, and for them to be interacting directly with the client, interacting directly with our co-counsel, and just really be there as part of the team, they walked away feeling like they had really made a difference, even as a law student,” said Meredith Holland Kessler, a staff attorney with the clinic.
The case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, asks the nation’s high court to consider whether a faith-based school should be allowed to operate as a virtual charter school in the state of Oklahoma.
The Notre Dame students helped St. Isidore develop its case in support of the faith based school.
The case began in June 2023, when the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School’s application to join more than 30 privately operated charter schools in the state.
The school was set to open for the 2024-2025 school year. But, in October 2023, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, sued the school board for approving the application, arguing it violated both the state and U.S. constitutions.
“There is no religious freedom in compelling Oklahomans to fund religions that may violate their own deeply held beliefs,” Drummond said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “The framers of the U.S. Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all.”
According to Drummond, proceeding with the publicly funded religious charter school, the nation’s first, would put at risk more than $1 billion in federal education dollars the state receives each year.
In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court granted the relief Drummond sought, directing the charter board to rescind its contract with St. Isidore.
That October, the school petitioned its case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Building the case
The Religious Liberty Clinic had been involved with St. Isidore long before Drummond filed the lawsuit. In fact, the clinic has been advising the school on how to develop as a virtual school for around four years, starting soon after the COVID-19 pandemic moved classes online, said John Meiser, director of the clinic and second-chair counsel in St. Isidore’s case in the Supreme Court.
After finding success virtually, leaders saw the opportunity to make it permanent.
“They realized that there might be a real opportunity to have a virtual Catholic school, because huge chunks of the state have no access to Catholic education because they’re so rural,” Meiser said.
But Drummond argues that, according to the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, a charter school “shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.”
St. Isidore and the Oklahoma charter school board, however, claim that the Free Exercise Clause within the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from “denying generally available benefits to a school solely because it is religious.”
This school year, the St. Isidore litigation team is comprised of four law students, though several groups of students have worked with the school since Notre Dame became involved.
Since the case made its way to the courts, students have been involved in the litigation process, including preparing the petition for certiorari to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Hadiah Mabry, a third-year law student, attended SCOTUS arguments last month. She was working with the school before the lawsuit was filed.
“When I came in, we were still working through the charter negotiations and basically just serving an advisory role to the school, so I got to see a lot of that side of things,” she said. “Once the school was chartered and then sued by the attorney general, the students still kind of remained working on the project in the clinic, but then it shifted more into litigation mode.”
Mabry said her favorite part of the litigation process was prepping for the oral arguments. To prepare, students sat in on moot arguments, gathering potential questions from a panel of pseudo-judges to get an idea of what could be asked in the Supreme Court. Students would then research those questions and come back with details to bolster their side of the case.
“It was just a constant revision of what’s the best way to say this certain thing, and that would often involve a lot of different student conversations between us in the clinic,” she said.
Kessler, one of the attorneys on the case, has been working with students all year, ensuring the soon-to-be lawyers can practice what they learn in the classroom.
The experience is helpful not only for the students, but the educators as well.
“I think the students are able to just go into it with eyes wide open and just sort of act as sponges as they soak it all up,” she said. “And I think they often lose sight of how helpful they are in doing all the research and the drafting.”
Meiser said that because Notre Dame has been part of St. Isidore’s journey for so long, it feels especially significant that the clinic can represent them in this case.
“It’s an instructive and rewarding learning experience for the students to see a project where we’ve been here since day one, and that is the project that ends up at the U.S. Supreme Court and helping defend our client every step of the way,” he said.
An invaluable experience
The Religious Liberty Clinic is set up as a teaching law firm, Meiser said. By this, he explained that the clinic is designed to give students both classroom and real-world experiences in the practice of law before graduation.
Law students are accepted into the clinic during their second and third years of law school. When joining, students enroll in one of three focus areas the clinic prioritizes: litigation, as seen in the St. Isidore case, transactional work, and immigration, specifically in the realm of persecution and asylum due to religion.
“You can think of it like a practice group at a law firm, where it gives them a chance to come and learn a particular set of legal skills or interact with a particular type of legal work for the course of a year,” Meiser said. “And that gives them a real opportunity to see what that might look like in the profession after they graduate.”
Students are involved in determining which cases the clinic can assist with. These cases reach the clinic in different ways, including through organic requests, word of mouth, and simply by keeping up with cases around the country.
Right now, for example, the clinic is also working on an appeal in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals concerning a Muslim inmate being denied Ramadan accommodations.
Case work is typically performed in small groups of students, ranging in size based on the complexity of the project.
Mabry said the most challenging part of her work with the clinic has been balancing the legal demands of the case and the academic demands of the classroom. Unlike her class schedule, where deadlines are set and everything is essentially about her and the work she’s completing for a class, the clinic work is all about the clients and a case docket that doesn’t follow an academic timeline.
Despite the juggle, she said being in the Supreme Court and witnessing arguments to a case she’s a part of was one of the most exciting things she’s done.
Not only did she bear witness to a case that law students will be reading about in the future, but the opportunity to participate in litigation has been invaluable to her education and future as a licensed attorney.
“I think it’s solidified that I want to do litigation but I think it’s also just made me a better communicator and will be really helpful when I go to clerk for a federal judge next year and then hopefully into a career in private practice as well,” she said.
She emphasized the rare privilege of collaborating with professors one-on-one to improve her work, as well as interacting with clients on a case that will have lasting effects on both parties.
Both Kessler and Meiser agreed that the chance to finally be in D.C. with the team was an invaluable experience not only for the students, but the educators as well.
“It’s exciting for me as a lawyer to be doing exactly the same thing but to get to do it alongside our students, and while helping guide and teach our students, that’s even more special,” Meiser said.
The Supreme Court is expected to have a decision on the St. Isidore case by the end of June.•
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