The Supreme Court on Tuesday appointed a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts to defend a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in an immigration case after the Biden administration declined to do so.
The announcement that the court had appointed Stephen Hammer, an associate in the Dallas office of Gibson Dunn, to brief and argue in support of the 4th Circuit’s decision in Riley v. Garland came in a short unsigned order released by the court on Tuesday afternoon.
In Riley, the justices will weigh in on questions relating to the 30-day deadline to seek review of a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals denying a request to block deportation to a country where an immigrant’s life or freedom is threatened. Pierre Riley, a native of Jamaica who has lived in New York for nearly three decades, contends that he is likely to be killed if he is required to return to Jamaica. The Biden administration agrees with Riley that the court of appeals was wrong when it concluded that the 30-day deadline to file a petition to block deportation is jurisdictional – that is, that the court cannot review the petition if the deadline is missed. But the government urged the justices to send the case back to the lower court for another look in light of a recent decision by the Supreme Court holding that a similar statutory filing deadline is not jurisdictional.
Riley encouraged the justices to go ahead and take up the case and, if necessary, appoint a “friend of the court” to defend the 4th Circuit’s ruling, as they occasionally do when the federal government changes its position.
The court granted review on Nov. 4. On Tuesday, just under one month later, the justices appointed Hammer, who clerked for Judge Gregory Katsas on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Jeffrey Sutton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit before clerking for Roberts, who serves as the “circuit justice” for the 4th Circuit.
Hammer is a Texas native and former Rhodes Scholar who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army officer before going to law school. In 2019 he earned the year’s highest score on the Texas bar exam.
