Fighting for a More Perfect Union — Alumni Profile, Paul Smith ’76

While Paul Smith ’76 is nationally recognized as one of our country’s most influential lawyers, having advocated civil rights in several landmark cases, including Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, his devotion to justice arguably rings only fractionally stronger than his devotion to Amherst College. As a current member of the college’s Board of Trustees, an honorary degree recipient, and the parent of an Amherst alumnus, Smith’s emphasis on giving back to the college mirrors his career-long commitment to upholding our nation’s constitutional ideals. From arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court to inspiring the next generation of trailblazers at Georgetown Law School, Smith has taken advantage of his Amherst education to achieve his “goal of making the world better.”

The Preamble

While Smith was born in Utah, where his father worked as a professor at a local university, he recalled moving around a lot throughout his childhood. After spending his early childhood years in California, Smith left the state when he was 11 years old, when his father got a job at IBM. 

“When I was in sixth grade, we got transferred to New York, and I was in school in the Connecticut suburbs for junior high and most of high school. And then my father got transferred, going into my senior year of high school, to the south of France,” Smith said. “I was a boarding student in the international school of Geneva [Ecole Internationale de Genève] before coming back to [the U.S.] for college here at Amherst.”

While France and Switzerland were significantly different environments for Smith, he credited his abroad experience with easing his transition to Amherst: “It was an interesting challenge … It was a bit like going to college a year early, you know. Kind of fun.”

Smith was first inspired to apply to Amherst because it was very popular at his Connecticut high school.

“You sort of make these decisions when you’re young based just on what somebody said to you at some point and what the visit was like,” Smith said. “I did early decision, got it all over with by the fall, which was nice. Never, never looked back, never regretted it.”

Smith decided to major in political science at Amherst, but he remarked that he “would probably have been an Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought (LJST) major now, but they didn’t have that yet.” While Smith had been drawn to studying the law before even arriving at Amherst, his time at the college further affirmed his passion for this field.

“I never was much of an artist or musician or anything like that,” Smith said. “So I’ve always leaned in the direction of, if you’re going to work toward a goal of making the world better, [do it] in terms of justice rather than anything aesthetic. That was going to be my role in life.”

Smith fondly remembers taking classes with William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat. “He was already the great teacher he remains [to be],” Smith said. “It was in the Red Room and he wandered around the room, challenging us to answer hard questions. I honestly think he’s a positive influence on my teaching style at Georgetown 50 years later.”

Beyond his classes covering constitutional law and the American government, Smith also took advantage of Amherst’s open curriculum by “trying a little bit of everything” in terms of the courses he enrolled in.

Outside of academics, Smith joined a fraternity during his time at the college, explaining that “pretty much everybody joined one, because that was where you got your housing for sophomore year.” After living with his fraternity for a year in what is now Marsh House, Smith moved to the “Social Dorms” — which was a collection of suite-style housing located where the Science Center currently is — where he stayed for the rest of his time at Amherst. “It was sort of party central down there,” Smith remembered. “They were very popular because they had six-person suites with a common room and your own bathroom.”

Alongside experiencing the now long-gone fraternities and social dorms, Smith remarked that being at Amherst in the early 1970s was, in general, a really interesting experience influenced by both internal and national changes. “The [19]60s had just sort of ended, so we were transitioning into a less tumultuous time than that,” Smith said. “There was a lot of interest on the part of the student body, of getting coeducation done, which had finally happened. And so my senior year was the year when the first women graduated from Amherst, in the class of [19]76.” 

Smith had long been motivated to pursue justice, but the political events making national headlines during his time at Amherst also greatly impacted his decision to attend law school. He was particularly influenced by the Watergate scandal that gripped the nation from 1972 to 1974, as, despite the corruption that took place, “the lawyers were the heroes of that story.” 

Achieving a More Perfect Union

After graduating from Amherst, Smith attended Yale Law School and was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Smith credits this leadership experience with giving him the credentials to clerk for important federal judges upon graduating from Yale: From 1979 to 1980, Smith clerked for Judge James L. Oakes on the Second Circuit, and from 1980 to 1981, Smith clerked for Supreme Court Justice Lewis. F. Powell. 

“Court clerkship is one of the great experiences,” Smith said. “It’s only a very small number of young lawyers who get to do it every year, but you’re on the inside of an institution that has enormous influence and power, and you get a very close relationship with the other clerks and with your justice.”

Smith fondly remembered how, when he was clerking for Powell, he would go down the hall and listen to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall tell stories about the days when he was campaigning against segregation in the South, further inspiring Smith’s own commitment to working for civil rights. 

While Smith thought he would work for the government after completing his clerkship, he was dissuaded from this path after the presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 because he wasn’t politically aligned with the new administration. So Smith stayed in Washington, D.C., and ended up working at the small private firm Klein, Farr, Smith & Taranto and later the bigger private firm Jenner & Block. For Smith, working in private practice actually became instrumental in pursuing his passion for social justice.

“I was in private practice for like 35 years, but during that time, did lots and lots of interesting things in both civil rights and civil liberties,” Smith said. “I really tried very hard to take advantage of the fact that, in legal practice, you can do a lot of pro bono, ‘good guy stuff’ if you’re willing to put in the time and extra work.”

In fact, Smith argued his first case to the Supreme Court while working at Jenner & Block. Smith was only 31 years old at the time, which he explained was “kind of early in my career by the standards of Supreme Court arguments.”

For Smith, taking on this case happened almost by accident: “I was helping a secretary in our firm to get workers’ comp[ensation] for her husband, and they were working with a plaintiff’s law firm, and they had a case, and they said, ‘Do you want to argue this Supreme Court case?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’”

While Smith was familiar with the Supreme Court’s norms and procedures from his time as a law clerk, he nonetheless recalled feeling incredibly nervous before his first oral arguments. “This was the one case I ever argued where Justice Powell was still a Justice, and that made it extra scary. I had psychosomatic laryngitis 24 hours before the argument,” Smith laughed. “But I got through it, and you know, from then on, the arguments get easier each time. You’re never completely calm about a Supreme Court argument; it’s a very trying thing. But boy, that first one was tough.”

For Smith, preparing to argue in front of the Supreme Court first and foremost involves understanding how to put yourself inside the minds of the justices. “The Supreme Court is an unusual place, because the justices can change the law … You’re up there trying to appeal to their common sense and to their sense of justice,” Smith said. “What they want from you is a rule that they can use so that the next 30 cases can be decided by somebody else ... They want a workable rule that doesn’t just meet your case but also meets a lot of other cases.”

However, Smith said that arguing in front of the Supreme Court, no matter how prepared you may feel, is no easy feat. “You’re dealing with a lot of aggressive hostility, because the way the justices operate — if you have a controversial and interesting case that they care about — is arguing with each other through the lawyer,” Smith said.

Alongside these difficulties, Smith also noted that the current makeup of the Supreme Court poses a unique set of challenges. As Smith explained: “Most of the time in a controversial case, there are some who are adamantly against you, some of who are adamantly for you, and there’s ones in the middle which are your target; you have to try to make your case to them, even as you’re getting grilled by somebody else … There’s not a lot of people in the middle right now in the Supreme Court.”

Despite the current political climate, Smith expressed optimism about using Supreme Court cases as a means to build a more just nation. “There are many ways in which the world has gotten better during the time I’ve been out of law school, which is, at this point, 45 years or so. This is because of the work of a lot of people to try to promote more equality, more liberty in the country, and the willingness of the courts — some of the time at least — to go along with that and insist that the country live up to its ideals more,” Smith said. “I think the highest use of a law degree is to be involved in that kind of work.”

Smith certainly upheld this commitment throughout his career, as he has argued a total of 21 cases before the Supreme Court. While Smith has undertaken issues ranging from state gerrymandering to internet filtering software, he is perhaps most widely recognized for his successful efforts to invalidate laws criminalizing sodomy in the 2003 landmark case Lawrence v. Texas.

Smith’s arguments in Lawrence v. Texas, which emphasized that adults have a fundamental right to engage in private, consensual sexual activity, marked a significant civil rights victory for the LGBTQIA+ community and paved the way for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

“It was an enormously important case for us in the gay community to win,” Smith said. “I was extremely lucky to be that person who got to stand up and argue that.”

When Smith picked up the case, he found that there was actually very little public backlash regarding the issue at hand: “That would have been a very controversial case to be taking in a big firm back in the 80s or maybe early 90s. But by 2003, my law firm was very honored, in fact, to be doing this. And the world had kind of changed in its perspective on LGBTQ equality, in the sense that the legal profession was now on the side of equality.” 

Smith invoked this public support to appeal to both the Supreme Court’s liberal and conservative Justices during his oral arguments. “We were trying to consolidate what was the consensus view of most people at that point, which is that gay people at least ought to be left alone by the government,” Smith said. “If nothing else, you shouldn’t be harassing people and having a threat of criminal prosecution hanging over their heads as a way to keep them in the closet, keep them in second-class citizenship.”

In 2017, Smith left private practice and began two new full-time jobs that furthered his commitment to justice in different ways. He became the vice president for litigation and strategy at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization devoted to advocating for democracy, and became a visiting professor of practice at Georgetown Law School.

“I find it really rewarding to be around younger people and be able to use the experience of decades of lawyering to sort of teach them things that they might not get just from a more theoretical professor,” Smith said. “Sometimes I play the tape of myself getting pummeled by Justice [Antonin] Scalia or something, and they really enjoy that, I’m sure.”

Smith mentioned that he has continued to maintain his career-long connection to the Supreme Court — in a newly distinct way — through his role at Georgetown. “At Georgetown, we do a moot court for almost every single Supreme Court case,” Smith said, explaining how he judges simulated cases as a mock Supreme Court justice. “You get to sort of stay involved with the court as a proxy for the court, like six days before the person is actually standing up the street at the Supreme Court. And sometimes, you can have an influence on how they do it, which makes a big difference.” 

While Smith acknowledges that the perceived feasibility of successfully arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court feels different now than when he was arguing cases, he nonetheless affirms that “lawyers are probably as important right now as they’ve ever been … having a strong cadre of lawyers pushing the country to live up to its ideals is an absolutely essential piece of making progress to a more just society in America.”

Giving Back to Amherst

While Smith’s influential career has allowed him to directly interact with the highest level of our judicial system, he still maintains strong connections to the college that was with him from the beginning. Smith has attended multiple Amherst graduations since his own in 1976: His son Scott Smith graduated in the class of 2009, his niece Alexandria Gaines Smith graduated in the class of 2013, and he received an honorary degree from the college in 2015. 

“It’s always fun to come back to Amherst,” Smith said. “It’s a place that, when you go there, you end up having a soft spot in your heart for forever.”

Smith has also served on the Amherst Board of Trustees since 2016, where he currently chairs the Committee on Instruction. Through this role, Smith oversees teaching within the college and organizes an annual weekend where the trustees meet with faculty and hear about their pedagogical approaches. “It’s just great to be able to come back on campus, see students, and get to know faculty,” Smith said. “It is a wonderful thing to be able to contribute back to the college as a trustee, and it’s a lot of fun in many, many ways.”

Besides urging current Amherst students to take some time off before graduate school to “live life a little bit after college,” Smith also emphasized how important it is to take advantage of the short time you have on campus: “Use your four years really well. I mean, enjoy it, but also really study and challenge yourself, because it’s an absolutely unique four years in your life.”