Scary, Terrifying, Amazing

Jennifer De Angelis may have made history when she appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, but it was the last thing she wanted to talk about.

“When I left the courtroom that day, The Wall Street Journal reporter and a couple of others came up to me and asked me how it felt to be the first pregnant woman to argue before the Supreme Court,” she says. “I have no way to confirm one way or another, but I just remember thinking, ‘I’ve done all this work and that’s what you want to talk about?’”

De Angelis had just argued Staples v. United States, a case involving a gun seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) at the home of De Angelis’ client. The involved gun was an AR-15 that the government alleged Mr. Staples had modified to be fully automatic, De Angelis says.

“The problem with the prosecution was that the gun was disassembled at the time it was seized. It was then in the hands of the ATF for eight to 10 months,” she says. “It was not properly functioning when Mr. Staples had it. In fact, he never used it. … We alleged in defense that the ATF put a different mechanism, a different bolt, into the weapon which we think altered it and then it became fully automatic.”

As a young lawyer with very little trial experience, De Angelis relied on the help of experts during her preparation. “There are a lot of people to thank on my end,” she says, citing constitutional law professors at the University of Tulsa, as well as her partner Clark Brewster. She and Brewster are partners at Tulsa’s Brewster & De Angelis (formerly Brewster Law), the same firm where De Angelis started her law career in 1987.

But no amount of preparation could have readied De Angelis for what happened the night before the argument.

“One of the most terrifying and interesting experiences of that argument was that the night before the argument, the NRA insisted that I meet with them and talk about the argument that I was going to present the next day. I’m not a gun user, I’ve never owned a gun in my life, I didn’t know much about guns at all until this case,” De Angelis says. “So I get to D.C., I’m pregnant, I’m going up to the NRA offices in the dark of the Washington, D.C., night to talk to them about this argument and, even after 30 years, I remember them telling me: ‘Listen, you know the Supreme Court really isn’t going to care about your individual client. What they want to hear about is how is this going to affect a multitude of people.’ And to some extent, they were correct.” She spent the rest of the night revamping her argument for the next day. “It was a long night,” she says.

Then: the next day. De Angelis remembers the experience as “scary, terrifying and amazing.”

“You’re right there, in front of the most brilliant legal minds there are, to present an argument. I just felt like there was a lot on the line here. There was an innocent man who was going to be imprisoned. I felt pretty strongly that this was a wrongful conviction. So you feel a lot of burden to get up there and do a good job,” she says.

De Angelis finished her argument early to allow time for questions. The justices didn’t ask her a single one. “Turns out, they didn’t ask me any questions because they just thought I was going to get up there and have a baby or something,” she laughs.

That baby, by the way, is De Angelis’ now-30-year-old son Joseph C. De Angelis, an attorney at her firm. “The joke with Joey has always been that he was the first fetus before the court,” De Angelis says. “He’s always had a strong intelligence about the law. I don’t know if it got infused somehow through our experience, but I have three kids and he’s the only one who went to law school.”

On May 23, 1994, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of De Angelis’ client. Staples v. United States is still highly relevant law 30 years later. According to De Angelis, the civil case has been cited nearly 8,000 times and there are 700-plus law review articles citing it. There’s also a 2019 Supreme Court case that relies on it.
“It’s still good law, and I am proud of that,” she says.

Thirty years later, De Angelis still remembers the adrenaline draining from her body and the feeling of relief after she left the court that day. “It’s an amazingly humbling experience for any lawyer, certainly a young lawyer,” she says. “To be in the presence of Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Ginsburg, these women pioneers in the legal profession, there’s no feeling to describe how humbling and amazing that is for a young female lawyer.”