Reflections on my Kendall Fellowship | Constitutional Accountability Center

On my first day on the Constitutional Accountability Heart, I labored on a quick about Donald Trump’s disqualification from state GOP major ballots, a far cry from the traditional first day actions. This set the tone for an unbelievable yr because the Douglas T. Kendall Fellow at CAC.

Broadly, top-of-the-line elements of working at CAC was my involvement with all kinds of points. Within the context of CAC’s main questions doctrine work, I had the possibility to find out about web neutrality, local weather disclosure guidelines, the Truthful Labor Requirements Act, CFPB supervision of economic organizations, and drugs abortion restrictions. I labored on a quick defending the ensures of Title IX and its utility to making sure equal entry to bogs for transgender college students. And in a substantial undertaking to shut out the fellowship, I helped draft a quick that we filed on the Supreme Court docket to guard entry to legal professional’s charges for civil rights plaintiffs.

Engaged on CAC’s temporary in Garland v. Cargill, a case concerning the problem to ATF’s ban on bump shares, was one among my favourite elements of the fellowship. Hardly ever do first-year attorneys get to generate new authorized arguments. Not so at CAC. Analyzing the historical past of gun rules meant studying dozens of microfilm newspaper articles reporting on these rules. It meant looking via countless problems with The American Rifleman. It meant going to the Library of Congress to seek out the one version of Webster’s Dictionary that has not discovered its approach on-line—naturally, the one we would have liked. The chance to generate new analysis and do new textual evaluation to place earlier than the Supreme Court docket felt genuinely significant, even when the end result was not what we had hoped.

I additionally really feel fortunate to have gotten to work with colleagues who should not solely fascinating but additionally deeply within the state of the world. There isn’t a sharp division between our day jobs and the problems we care about in the remainder of our lives. I’ve discovered as a lot from casual conversations as I’ve from researching for briefs. And I’m extremely grateful for the quantity of steering and assist I’ve obtained as I’ve discovered to do just about the whole lot for the primary time.

CAC helps drive the dialog about how regulation must be interpreted. Many courts declare to look to textual content and historical past to assist their conclusions. However as I noticed final time period, precise constancy to the Structure’s textual content and historical past is sadly much less widespread than the frequent invocation of these rules would counsel. CAC not solely acts as a counterweight to flawed textual and history-based arguments, but additionally affirmatively shapes the framing of sophisticated and important authorized points in a fashion that’s each extra correct and extra protecting of civil rights and liberties.

I’m going to overlook CAC—and everybody I’ve had an opportunity to work with—an incredible deal as I transfer on! And I’ll at all times be completely satisfied to know that there’s a company on the market working tirelessly to guard the progressive values of the Structure.