Female lawyer keeps on winning
WASHINGTON — No woman has appeared more often before the Supreme Court than Lisa Blatt, who will make her 50th argument this month.
No lawyer, male or female, has done it with quite the same mix of humor, passion and style. And her win-loss record isn’t bad, either: 40-6, with two cases yet to be decided.
She elicits laughs and the occasional sharp response from the justices, who seem to enjoy Blatt’s presentations as much as they respect her legal acumen.
When Blatt joked that Justice Samuel Alito was being her “enforcer” with a friendly question in a case about a claimed retaliatory arrest that was argued last month, the justice said, “I’m not trying to be your enforcer by any means . ... You don’t need one, by any means.”
The Supreme Court’s guide for lawyers who are arguing before the justices essentially warns against trying to emulate Blatt.
“Attempts at humor usually fall flat. The same is true of attempts at familiarity,” the guide advises. “Avoid emotional oration and loud, impassioned pleas. A well-reasoned and logical presentation without resort to histrionics is easier for listeners to comprehend.”
She can be strikingly informal, in one case referring to the highest court in the land as “you guys.” She is often blunt, once telling Justice Elena Kagan that her question was factually and fundamentally wrong. She has resorted to the personal, in one case where she felt her Harvard-educated opponent was being condescending. “I didn’t go to a fancy law school, but I’m very confident in my representation of the case law,” the University of Texas graduate said.
“Texas is a fine law school,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, just as the arguments were ending and before the court handed Blatt a unanimous win.
Blatt also can be hyperbolic, cautioning last year that a decision against her client, a Turkish bank, would be “borderline, you know, cataclysmic.” A ruling that recognized a large swath of Oklahoma as tribal land would have “earth-shattering” consequences, she said in 2018. The justices risked causing “madness, confusion, and chaos” if they ruled for a high school student who was suspended from the cheerleading squad over a vulgar social media post.
Clients keep hiring her, and the court keeps agreeing to hear her cases, said Paul Clement, Blatt’s friend and onetime boss at the Justice Department.
“She just has this kind of inimitable style, and she’s very confident in her own style and the justices love it,” said Clement, who has argued more than 100 times at the Supreme Court. Only a dozen active lawyers who have made as many as 50 arguments. Blatt, 59, makes no apologies. “Oral argument is like truth serum. Under the stress of their questioning, you can’t become someone you aren’t,” she said in an email. “I do think I am very direct but at bottom, my style reflects the fact that I want to win and the Court to step into the shoes of the party I am representing.”
She heads the Supreme Court and appellate practice at the Williams and Connolly law firm, where her husband also is a partner. They have two children in law school. Blatt has argued just over half her high court cases in private practice, the rest as a Justice Department lawyer.
When she made her first appearance at the court in December 1996 at the age of 31, there were two women on the court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ginsburg. Blatt had been a clerk for Ginsburg on the federal appeals court in Washington.
Today, four of the nine justices are women. The percentage of women who argue before them is lower, though the number has jumped markedly this term. Since October, just over one-third of the arguments were made by women, compared with under one-quarter of arguments the year before.