SCOTUS sentencing cases involve unusual advocates

Writing in the Legal Times, Tony Mauro has this interesting piece headlined, "Supreme Court Justices Turn to Ex-Clerks for Unusual Role: Former clerks tapped to make the arguments others have abandoned."  Here is how it starts:

On Jan. 7, Jay Jorgensen took an unusual call from his former boss, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr.  Alito's request: Would Jorgensen have time to argue a Supreme Court case in April — a case Jorgensen had never heard of — for free?

In Greenlaw v. United States, it seems the government had decided that it agreed with plaintiff Michael Greenlaw on the main sentencing-related issue in the case.  So the Court needed someone else to argue against lawyers for Greenlaw, a Minneapolis drug dealer.

Jorgensen, a partner with Sidley Austin, eagerly agreed to the invitation, and on Tuesday he will make his debut before the high court. In doing so, he follows a little-known and rarely available pathway that has launched the Supreme Court appellate careers of several former high court clerks.  Among them: John Roberts Jr., now chief justice, and Maureen Mahoney, who heads the appellate and constitutional practice at Latham & Watkins.

Even more rare is the fact that Jorgensen won't be the only lawyer arguing as an appointed counsel under these circumstances on Tuesday. In a separate sentencing case called Irizarry v. United States, Catholic University law professor Peter "Bo" Rutledge, a former Clarence Thomas clerk, will also be appearing as "amicus curiae in support of the judgment below," as the Court phrases it.  This will also be Rutledge's first time before the Court.

"I've been talking to Bo. We're both honored and both scared," says Jorgensen. Rutledge declines comment.

These once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to argue before the Court arise when, as in Greenlaw, the respondent abandons the lower court decision that the petitioner is challenging. That scrambles the usual adversary nature of Supreme Court cases, because it means, in essence, that both sides think the lower court decision was wrong or should be vacated.  In that circumstance, which has not arisen for five years before this term, the Court appoints a lawyer — almost always a former clerk — to make the orphaned argument.