Who Wants to be a State Government Lawyer?

Practitioner-in-Residence: Peter Brann ’77, Esq., Partner, Brann & Isaacson

Course Overview: The lawyers for state government are the state attorneys general, who today are marching at the forefront of almost all high-profile issues of our time, where they appear in the U.S. Supreme Court on issues such as abortion, religion, and climate change. They also are involved in other hot button issues, such as consumer, privacy, and challenging Big Tech companies, to chasing after scam artists who rip off the elderly. The course will explore in a highly interactive manner this intersection of law and public policy. The assigned materials will be based on those used by the instructor, who has co-taught a version of this course for the past 12 years at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard law schools. Another important goal of the course will be to answer the questions many undergraduates have about whether they should go to law school, whether they should consider public service, and whether they would like practicing law.

Learning Goals:

• Ability to read critically legal and background materials, which include cases, statutes, attorney general opinions, law review articles, and newspaper articles.
• Appreciate, understand and respond to varying points of view in participatory class discussions.
• Understand the varying roles in the governmental legal process: within an attorney general’s office, other government officials and stakeholders, opposing counsel, public members, and the press, through role-play in hypotheticals largely based on actual cases.
• Appreciate the real-world implications of the powers and responsibilities of attorneys general and the choices that attorneys general and their staff make, often with inadequate information or inadequate resources.
• Engage in the legal negotiation process by participating collaboratively and competitively with members of a team in a mock negotiation for settlement of a multistate privacy lawsuit.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the role of state government lawyers by researching and writing a paper on an issue relating to state attorneys general.

This course counts toward the Law and Society GEC

Instructor bio: Peter Brann ’77, Boston University ’81, spent 18 years in the Maine attorney general’s office, ending up as the State Solicitor in charge of all state appeal up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court. There, he argued and won a major federalism case, Alden v. Maine, and won the award from the National Association of Attorneys General for the Best Brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is now a partner at Brann & Isaacson, with offices in Lewiston and Portland, handling litigation across the country. He has handled cases in over 20 states, in the U.S. Supreme Court, in most of the U.S. Courts of Appeal, in numerous state appellate courts, and has tried cases in many state and federal trial courts, appearing in over 120 reported court decisions. For the past 12 years, he has co-taught a class entitled The Role of the State Attorney General at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard law schools. In 2002, he co-taught a class at Bates with Prof. Margaret Imber entitled Civil Liberties after 9/11.