State Government Lawyering

Practitioner-in-Residence: Paul Suitter ’09, Assistant Attorney General, State of Maine

Course Overview: State attorneys general have emerged* as important players in our federal system–from ensuring citizens’ civil rights are not violated, to protecting the environment, enforcing consumer protection statutes, and at times litigating against the federal government, itself.  While the U.S. Supreme Court issues major decisions on hot-button issues such as abortion, religion, immunity, big tech, and firearms on only a handful of occasions per term, state attorneys general are required to wrestle with these issues day-in and day-out.  

This course will explore in a highly interactive manner the intersection of law and public policy–exploring doctrinal “black letter” law that is at the core of state attorney general work, but also applying that law to real-world scenarios where the details are not always as straightforward as legal rules might envision.  Students will also be encouraged to consider the ethical guidelines that frame the work of government lawyers, and whether or how the obligations of public lawyers differ from those who work in private practice. 

The assigned materials will be based on those developed by instructors who have taught a version of this course at Columbia, Harvard, the University of Maine, and Yale Law Schools. In addition to the course’s focus on government lawyering generally, another important goal of the course will be to answer the questions many undergraduates have about whether they should go to law school, whether they should consider public service, and whether they would like practicing law.

*For decades, the term “government lawyer” was used interchangeably with working for the federal government’s Department of Justice, overlooking the tens of thousands of civil servant attorneys working for states and municipalities around the nation. But this role has begun to change.

Learning Goals:

• Ability to read critically legal and background materials, which include cases, statutes, attorney general opinions, law review articles, and newspaper articles.
• Appreciate, understand and respond to varying points of view in participatory class discussions.
• Understand the varying roles in the governmental legal process: within an attorney general’s office, other government officials and stakeholders, opposing counsel, public members, and the press, through role-play in hypotheticals largely based on actual cases.
• Appreciate the real-world implications of the powers and responsibilities of attorneys general and the choices that attorneys general and their staff make, often with inadequate information or inadequate resources.
• Engage in the legal negotiation process by participating collaboratively and competitively with members of a team in a mock negotiation for settlement of a multistate privacy lawsuit.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the role of state government lawyers by researching and writing a paper on an issue relating to state attorneys general.

This course counts toward the Law and Society GEC