"Storming the Court is a true story of Yale law students and human rights lawyers, including Dean Harold Koh, who challenged the U.S. government on behalf of Haitian refugees who were fleeing Haiti, fleeing persecution," said Brandt Goldstein '92 at a panel discussion on September 30, 2005, titled "Changing the Law through Clinical Work."
Goldstein spent five years writing Storming the Court, and he came back to YLS, the scene of much of the action in the book, to discuss the lawsuit brought by a group of then-YLS students and Koh in the early 1990s. "How do you tell this story?" Goldstein asked. "If I've done my job right, what I've written is a human rights legal thriller. The story of a group of passionate idealists who were determined to hold America to its highest principles, and a collision of those ideals with the often harsh realities of the worlds of politics and the courts."
The other panelists were all important characters in Storming the Court, as they were important actors in the original litigation. Dean Harold Hongju Koh moderated the discussion. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr., who presided over the case, described his understanding of the legal questions raised by the lawsuit. Two students who worked on the case, Lisa Daugaard '95 and Michael Wishnie '93, described why they got involved and how the experience influenced them.
You can view the entire panel discussion online.