WHAT'S IN A WORD? THE SPIRIT OF LAW

U.VA. Law Students Help Win a Case by Arguing the Value of Ordinary Speech

CHARLOTTESVILLE - Lawyers often are reviled for torturing the English
language. Notwithstanding that truth, maybe, heretofore, we should
give them a break.

A crack team of University of Virginia law students who are part of
the school's fledgling Supreme Court Litigation Clinic took on a case
arguing, in essence, for the integrity of ordinary speech. The team won.

The clinic's mission is to find cases to argue in front of the U.S.
Supreme Court. The point is to teach the students by involving them
in real-life cases and to "initiate them into the rarefied air of a
Supreme Court practice," according to Mark Stancil, a lecturer at the
law school who is involved in the clinic.

This past year's clinic, with about 11 students, scored this first
victory on behalf of a guy named Michael Watson by arguing for the
plain-language use of the word "use."

That's right -- the entire legal argument before the highest court in
the land was over how the word "use" is used. The team argued that
the law should interpret the word "use" by its everyday meaning.

The case involved Watson, a Louisiana drug dealer, who was arrested
and charged not only with drug trafficking but with using a firearm
while selling drugs in 2004. That added about 11 years to his
approximate 22-year sentence when he was later convicted.

Here's the story. Watson, wanting to buy a gun, set up a deal with a
government informant, who suggested Watson could pay for the gun with
narcotics. Watson then met with the informant and an undercover
law-enforcement agent posing as a firearms dealer. He gave the fake
firearms dealer 24 doses of OxyContin for a .50 caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Arresting officers found the pistol in Watson's car and, in a search
of his house, turned up prescription medicines, guns and ammunition.
Watson said he got the pistol "to protect his other firearms and drugs."

The question before the court was "Did Watson 'use' the gun or not?"
Federal law mandates at least five years for "using" a firearm during
a drug-trafficking offense.

The law school's clinic, believing that Watson did not really use the
gun, offered Watson's lawyer, Karl Koch of Baton Rouge, free legal
help. The law students undertook hundreds of hours of research
beginning in the summer of 2006. With their instructors, including
Stancil, U.Va. law professor Dan Ortiz and New York City attorney
David Goldberg, they wrote legal briefs to help Koch with his oral
arguments in front of the Supreme Court. Oral arguments were heard in October.

The gist of the student's argument was that "use," in plain English,
does not mean that accepting a gun as payment is "using" it. In other
words, Watson received the gun but in fact didn't use it at all.

"How would you understand it in ordinary English?" Stancil asked.
"Could Congress have meant 'use' means receipt? We thought we had
much the better of that argument."

By a 9-0 vote, the Supreme Court agreed. Justice David H. Souter,
writing the Dec. 10 opinion, said the government's position that
Watson "used" the pistol by receiving it for narcotics "lacks
authority in either precedent or regular English."

Souter wrote: "A boy who trades an apple to get a granola bar is
sensibly said to use the apple, but one would never guess which way
this commerce actually flowed from hearing that the boy used the granola.

"Law depends on respect for language," Souter noted in his opinion.

One of the students in the clinic was Lisa Helvin, now clerking for a
4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Baltimore. "Just to have
them agree to hear our case was more than we hoped for. To win 9-0
was beyond our wildest dreams," she said.

Helvin said working on the case as a student and actually affecting a
person's life in a positive way was "terrific. As a defendant, he was
sympathetic. He seemed really deserving of serving fewer years," she
said of the legally blind, 55-year-old Watson.

And, for once, a team of lawyers triumphed by arguing for respecting
English and plain language.

"That is something the law is not usually known for," Stancil said.