Lisa Blatt

I, I do think that's a fair reading of the oral argument.

Uh, Lisa Blatt, she's an- A, a very famous Supreme Court litigator.

Mm-hmm.

She argued for the state of Oklahoma, and she leaned hard into the supposed consequences of allowing this Tenth Circuit ruling to stand.

And then a bunch of weird things happened.

[laughs] About a week after oral argument in Murphy, the Supreme Court issued an order asking for supplemental briefing, and the question that the Supreme Court posed to the parties for supplemental briefing essentially said, "Okay, assume that this is still a reservation.

Is there some other federal law that could give the state of Oklahoma jurisdiction over..." And then there were a var- a variety of, of, of sub-issues, which I took as the, the Supreme Court looking for an exit, right? A way to say, "Okay, fine, there might be some law arguments on disestablishment, but we are really, really worried about that parade of horribles that Lisa Blatt put in front of us." So the parties file supplemental briefs over the winter, and then nothing happens for months, right? And on the very last day of the term in June of 2019, instead of an opinion, the Supreme Court just issues this one-line order.

It says, "The case is restored to the calendar for reargument." And that's something the court almost never does, right? That's saying, "Hey, I, I know you came in here.

Like, this is a guy who is-- can, can turn on a dime.

I've always had this, uh, thought, what if we had one of our best Supreme Court advocates on the Court? Like, what if you plucked somebody who was just a, you know, a Cannon Shanmugam, a Lisa Blatt, or whatever, and you put 'em on the Court, what would that be like? So that's Lando Calrissian.

Like, it's, it's like L- Lisa Blatt on the Court, you know, the person who can represent many different sides, see all of the different sides, extremely persuasive, charismatic, would be a machine in conference after the, you know, after oral argument.

I don't know.

I don't know.

And then when I moved down, I kind of was facing this conundrum because I Tend to be a kind of, you know, type A ambitious person, and I really wanted to be the most successful appellate lawyer that I could.

But I knew that I didn't have the credentials that a lot of your former guests, for example, have, folks like Lisa Blatt and Paul Clement and Easha and others, and even, and Willie as well.

But I really wanted to be good at this, and I wanted to get to a very high level, and so I thought, "You're gonna have to find a different way, Jamie.

It's not like the normal path, Supreme Court to OSG is not gonna work for you, and you're gonna have to find another way to get there." And so I basically spent the next five-plus years trying on the one hand to get really, really good at honing my appellate craft and learning as much as I could and working really hard, and then I tried to figure out ways that I could raise my profile to the outside world and expand my network so that I could kind of succeed in the long term 'cause I know you can only go so far just being a smart, hardworking person in DC.