Jeffrey L. Fisher

Fisher was at the forefront this year of a U.S. Supreme Court case heralded as a major victory for privacy rights in the digital age.

The professor and co-director of Stanford Law School's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic argued and won Riley v. California, which largely puts an end to the practice of searching a suspect's cellphone at the time of an arrest without a warrant. The June ruling was one of the high court's first serious opinions addressing constitutional privacy protections of modern technology and is expected to have broad application to a range of devices, including laptops and tablets.

"Being lucky enough to work on several Supreme Court cases a year, there's still not very many cases I've worked on with that level of importance and just fascinating challenge of applying the constitution to such a new and fundamental development of modern life," Fisher said.

Fisher and his team of law students received the Riley case last Spring and worked on it from the review stage onwards. It's just one of the two to four cases he argues before the high court annually and the more than 10 cases a year that his "fingertips might touch," whether through filing amicus briefs or working to get review granted.

Like attorneys who are local counsel for state high courts or administrative agencies, Fisher considers the U.S. Supreme Court his home turf. He's poised to argue three cases in the coming term, and he recently signed on as lead counsel for the Oklahoma couples who challenged their state's same sex marriage ban.

"If you were to ask me 15 years ago when I was coming into practice if I could build an entire practice on Supreme Court cases, I never dreamed I would be so lucky," Fisher said.

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