Sep. 13, 2012
Jeffrey L. Fisher
See more on Jeffrey L. FisherStanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic Palo Alto Litigation Specialty: appellate litigation
Fisher is the rare West Coast attorney who has a thriving U.S. Supreme Court litigation practice.
Fisher has argued 17 cases in front of the high court, 13 of which have come since he moved to the Golden State in 2006. The former clerk of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is set to argue three more cases in the upcoming term and has an additional five cases that have been submitted for certiorari with the high court.
If that weren't enough, Fisher also has a day job as a professor and co-director of Stanford Law School's cutting-edge Supreme Court Litigation Clinic where he works with a handful of students to develop potential Supreme Court cases.
"It's the busiest I've ever been in my career," Fisher said.
Fisher is renowned for his groundbreaking work in "reconceptualizing," as he puts it, the confrontation clause of the 6th Amendment through a series of cases before the Supreme Court. The confrontation clause guarantees defendants in criminal trials the right to confront their accusers.
The revitalization of the confrontation clause began with the landmark Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004) case in which Fisher successfully argued that an attempted murder conviction had to be overturned because the prosecution introduced testimonial evidence from a witness who did not appear in court and could not be cross-examined.
He further advanced the "testimonial" approach to the confrontation clause made in Crawford in two subsequent cases. In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 129 S. Ct. 2527 (2009), Fisher successfully argued that laboratory reports were testimonial for confrontation clause purposes. That ruling was further bolstered in June 2011 when the justices ruled in another case Fisher argued, Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705 (2011), holding that a non-testifying lab analyst's work could not be introduced through the testimony of another analyst who appeared in court.
He said the process of shaping the jurisprudence of the confrontation clause, which Fisher called "the backbone of the adversarial system," has been both uplifting and humbling.
"It's been incredibly exciting and rewarding," he said. "It's so fun and interesting to be involved in basically building constitutional law from the ground up. It's also incredibly fortunate that the court even took the [Crawford] case and that we were able to win."
When Fisher is not buried under a mountain of case briefs, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Lisa Douglass, who directs the Stanford Social Security Disability Project and is a staff attorney in the school's Community Law Clinic, and their two daughters, ages six and nine, exploring the outdoors in and around the Bay Area.
- HENRY MEIER
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