Students in the Rockefeller Center’s PBPL 82.09 Supreme Court Seminar braved some December rain and an early start last month to get seats to watch the justices hear cases.
“After waiting outside in the rain for so long, getting in was genuinely excellent,” says Tie-Ese Stewart ‘26. “The adrenaline rush and the sight of the justices in person were incredible.”
For the second year in a row, arguments were for a case the students had studied in class, in this instance First Choice Women’s Health Centers v. Platkin. The New Jersey case started with a consumer fraud investigation but turned into something much bigger when the state’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, subpoenaed the nonprofit’s donor information, implicating the First Amendment right of association, donor privacy, and, as it turned out, rules for accessing federal courts.
Students enjoyed the oral argument experience, tracking the concerns of each justice and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the advocates’ responses.
The students met in the Supreme Court with Heather O’Brien, managing director of the Supreme Court Fellows Program, and Addison Becker, the Fellow currently serving in the Office of the Counselor to the Chief Justice. That meeting was followed by a private tour of the Court led by two current Supreme Court undergraduate interns. Students learned about the art and architecture of the Court, got to see the library as well as the conference room where the justices deliberate after each week's arguments.
On a private tour of the Supreme Court.
The next day, students met in chambers with D.C. Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Wingo ’92 before she took the bench. After Supreme Court arguments the day before, they saw some of the “bread and butter” of the legal system—status hearings in the Superior Court’s Domestic Violence Unit, which ask very different kinds of questions, like: Has the government completed the case viability check? How are the probationer’s anger management classes coming?
The group then visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum to have another, albeit very different experience at the intersection of law and culture. Karen Lemmey, Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture, was part of the curatorial team for the recent exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, named in a 2025 Executive Order as the type of “corrosive ideology” that needed to be purged from the Smithsonian’s collection.
Some works in the exhibition specifically intersected with legal histories and the construction of race, including the one-drop rule and blood quantum, and a goal for the exhibition was to serve as a portal for conversations about race. Lemmey spoke with the students about the intersections between law, cultural production, and social understandings that inform legal change.
Students in the Smithsonian American Art Musium look up at "Bridge" by Glenn Kaino (2023-2024). The work is based on Tommie Smith's Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. The work is a cast of Smith's arm.
After lunch at the Smithsonian, students met with the Portman family at the American Enterprise Institute. Longtime friends and supporters of the Rockefeller Center, former U.S. Sen. Rob Portman ’78, Jane Portman, and current member of Rocky’s Board of Visitors Sally Portman ’17 shared their experiences working in government, nonprofits, and the private sector to advance public policy and the common good.
JJ Dega ’26 said his experience with them “crystallized why I'm drawn to the intersection of law and policy…. Hearing Senator Portman discuss his work on the First Step Act” made clear that “criminal justice reform isn't just about proving a program works; it's also about building bipartisan coalitions willing to champion effective programs.”
The student walking in to the American Enterprise Institute.
The students also visited the studios of WETA Washington to watch a taping of the Emmy-winning PBS NewsHour. Leah Clapman, Executive Director, PBS Student Reporting Labs and Ross Goldberg, Director of Business Development, Licensing, and Syndication, explained how PBS works, shared the complicated shot grids from which the NewsHour comes into being, and discussed the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and funding rescission of 2025 and their effects on public broadcasting.
The control room at WETA watching a taping of PBS NewsHour.
Leah and Ross also arranged to have Amy Howe, co-founder of SCOTUSblog, sit and talk with the group at length.
On Thursday, students had lunch at Milbank LLC, hosted by Kami Arabian ’24 and Supreme Court litigators Neal Katyal ’91 and Colleen Roh Sinzdak. The team had just finished arguing Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (the tariff case) and were deep in the throes of research, preparing for January arguments in Wolford v. Lopez, a 2nd Amendment case from Hawaii.
The students met at Milbank LLC with Supreme Court litigators, Neal Katyal '91, Colleen Roh Sinzdak, and Kami Arabian ‘24, Neal's research assistant.
Before celebrating at a final reception with the Rockefeller Leadership Fellows program, students visited Georgetown Law School, where Greg Millett ’90, Director of amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research's Public Policy office in D.C. and a Senior Scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, had gathered members of his team to discuss the role of research in the development of public policy and the communication strategies involved in getting that research heard, understood, and integrated effectively.
"The trip's architecture—moving between courtrooms, law firms, think tanks, and newsrooms—taught us something no single event could: that law in practice is a vast, interconnected system…" JJ Dega '26