Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called her April 1 argument in Trump v. Barbara, the challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end the guarantee of U.S. citizenship to virtually everyone born in this country, the “most high-stakes and stressful task of my professional life.” On a scale of 1 to 10, she joked, her level of nervousness was “99.” But her nerves melted away, she said, once the argument began.
Wang’s work (and eventual victory) in Barbara was one of the topics that she touched on during a wide-ranging discussion on Wednesday afternoon with Zachary Shemtob, the executive editor of SCOTUSblog, at SCOTUSblog’s term-in-review event, “Executive Power and its Limits.” The event, which was sponsored by the ACLU and co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, also featured a discussion of birthright citizenship by historian Martha Jones, whose scholarship was cited by Chief Justice John Roberts in his opinion in Barbara, and a live taping of the Advisory Opinions podcast, featuring Sarah Isgur, David French, Akhil Amar, and David Lat.
Before joining the ACLU, Wang said, she served as (among other things) a federal public defender in New York – an experience that she described as “incredibly formative.” Although the trial work that she did in that job is different from the appellate work that she does today, she explained, she was standing in front of juries “day in, day out.”
When Wang assumed her current job as the ACLU’s national legal director in 2024, she noted, the Supreme Court’s October Term 2024 had been the group’s “busiest term ever.” But the following term, OT2025, “topped that,” she said, with five cases on the merits.
Those five cases included the voting rights case Louisiana v. Callais, which she described as a “terrible loss,” and the gun rights case United States v. Hemani, in which the court agreed unanimously that the government could not prosecute a Texas man who uses marijuana a few times a week under a federal law that makes it a crime for an “unlawful user” of drugs to have a gun.
Wang characterized the ACLU’s participation in Hemani as “somewhat controversial internally and among ACLU members.” Erin Murphy, who has strong credentials in both conservative and gun-rights circles, ultimately argued the case, prompting Wang to joke that “when you see Erin Murphy teaming up with the ACLU,” it will lead to a 9-0 victory. Wang stressed that although it might seem unusual to see the ACLU defending gun rights, it “is important to me that rights” – including gun rights – “not be taken away” unfairly. And that was a possibility under the government’s interpretation of the law at the center of Hemani, she said.
Turning to Barbara, Wang told the audience that she did seven practice arguments – known as “moot courts” – before the real thing on April 1. As a result, she felt very prepared, although the argument itself “stayed very high-level,” which she described as a “surprise.”
Shemtob inquired about another surprise: the decision by Trump to attend the oral argument, becoming the first sitting president to do so. Wang emphasized that “it didn’t matter to me,” because Trump’s presence in the courtroom “had nothing to do with me” but “everything to do with his agenda.”
Wang described the vote in the case – 5-4 on whether Trump’s executive order violates the Constitution – as a “close call,” but she added that “at the end of the day, a win is a win.” Quoting conservative law professor John Yoo, she said that “this should decide the issue for the next 100 years.” If opponents of birthright citizenship want to try to amend the Constitution in response to the court’s ruling, she said, “good luck.”
Asked about cases on the horizon for the ACLU, Wang told the audience that the group is involved in challenges to a Texas law requiring each public school classroom in the state to post the King James version of the Ten Commandments. There are two different cases, she explained: one brought before the state enforced the law, and one brought after it implemented the law. She indicated that she was hopeful about their likelihood of success, calling the idea that the state can require classrooms to include a display of a sectarian religious text “a bridge too far” for the Roberts court.
Wang concluded with advice to lawyers and law students interested in careers in impact litigation, telling them that there is “no better time to do this work.”
