Keys To A 9-0 High Court Win: Practicality Over Perfection

The hardest part about winning a U.S. Supreme Court argument, it is sometimes said, is having your case heard in the first place. The court only grants about 1% of the certiorari petitions filed each year;¹ but once it agrees to hear a case, it reverses the lower court more than three quarters of the time.²

So when the Supreme Court agreed to hear argument in our case, Wooden v. United States, we knew we stood a good chance of prevailing — though we didn't know it would end up being a unanimous victory. Our focus from the outset was on getting to a majority, and we believed we had two key factors working in our favor.

First and foremost, we had the stronger legal position.

At issue in our case was the Armed Career Criminal Act, a federal statute that imposes a harsh mandatory minimum sentence for illegal gun possession when the offender has three prior convictions that were "committed on occasions different from one another."