Appellate Insights Recap: Navigating Urgency with U.S. Supreme Court Emergency Applications Attorney Robert Meek
By At the United States Supreme Court building, there are statues of tortoises at the bottom of several lampposts. These tortoises symbolize the slow, deliberate pace of the justice typically delivered by the nation’s highest court. As the Court’s emergency applications attorney, Robert Meek, recently shared with members of the North Carolina Bar Association’s Appellate and Criminal Justice Sections, there also is a statue of a hare, located on the East Pediment at the back of the building.
The hare represents another aspect of the Court’s work — promptly deciding applications for immediate relief in emergency cases.
On December 5, NCBA Appellate Practice Section members Chelsea Pieroni and Ty Jameson led a discussion with Mr. Meek as part of the NCBA Appellate Section’s “Appellate Insights” series. Rob, a North Carolina native and Campbell Law School graduate, joined the Supreme Court as an emergency applications attorney in March 2022.
The Supreme Court’s emergency applications docket (separate from the merits docket) consists of applications often seeking stays or injunctions on an expedited basis. Unlike cases on the merits docket, these cases are handled with limited briefing and without oral argument. Several high-profile cases recently have appeared on the emergency applications docket, including late-stage capital cases and disputes about student loans, immigration, and environmental concerns.
As the Court’s emergency applications attorney, Rob assists the parties and the Court throughout the emergency applications stage, including reviewing the parties’ briefs, preparing orders, and coordinating with the justices. Rob shared a few tips for appellate practitioners based on his experience with quick review of high-stakes matters:
- Get to the point right away. On the first page of your filing, identify the urgency, the relief you’re requesting, and why you’re entitled to it.
- Include citations for everything, every time.
- In a Blue Booking bind? Call on court librarians for advice.
Rob discussed his path to working at the Supreme Court after serving with the Central Legal Staff for the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. As a Campbell Law School student, Rob never expected that he would end up working for the nation’s highest court. He found and applied to the position on USAjobs.gov, a comprehensive listing of open positions with the federal government. With that anecdote, Rob’s advice for young lawyers thinking about the arcs of their future careers was honest and direct: keep an open mind and, when the right opportunity presents itself, go for it.
Finally, Rob impressed on the audience that the Supreme Court is small, which is something that surprised him upon starting this position. The staff is relatively modest and consists largely of security personnel. Moreover, the Court, in general, is not a high-tech place. Paper remains the official form of filing, though represented parties must also submit electronic versions of filings through the Court’s electronic filing system. Rob shared the picture below of the Court’s system for assigning case numbers, emphasizing that, if a case number is skipped and then assigned to a later-filed case, there’s probably no strategic reason behind it. The folder probably was just temporarily on someone’s desk before finding its way back to the cart.
Rob extended an invitation to NCBA members to reach out to him if they are ever in the D.C. area. We’re grateful that Rob joined us for this discussion and look forward to holding more Appellate Insights events in the future!