By: William Kaempffer
New Haven Register
The two University of New Haven students spent a semester studying fire law and the landmark cases that have affected race, hiring and promotions in fire departments across the country.
On Wednesday, however, they witnessed classroom abstracts play out in an actual courtroom - the nation's highest - as the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of one Hispanic and 19 white New Haven firefighters who claim they were wrongfully denied promotion because of their race.
"We've been talking all year about discrimination in employment and promotions, equal protection under the law ... and we've been talking about this case," said Louis Eswood, a fire science major and undergraduate student government president at UNH. "Being a student and 21 years old, it was pretty amazing being able to sit in the courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court and hear a case of this magnitude."
Outside the Supreme Court Wednesday morning, hundreds of people waited in line for precious few seats to observe arguments in Ricci v. New Haven, a case that could change employment practices nationwide. Eswood and fellow fire science major Chris Rinck knew about the case from school, and had written the court asking for 50 seats for their entire fire law class.
The clerk's office responded with an offer of three, which, after successfully petitioning the university for funding, brought the two 21-year-olds to Washington Wednesday. They offered their professor, Martin O'Connor, a lawyer and retired New Haven fire chief, the third.
O'Connor served in the New Haven department for nearly 30 years, and many of the firefighter plaintiffs were hired during his tenure as chief. O'Connor's cousin, Lt. Tim Scanlon, is among the plaintiffs who sued the city in 2004 after it threw out the results of two promotional tests because too few minorities scored well enough to be promoted. O'Connor retired in 1998.
In his fire law class, O'Connor and his students had discussed how fire departments are organized and the problems those who administer them encounter, he said, issues that will become important to his students if they join the profession and become fire officers.
Some of those discussions included O'Connor's experiences in New Haven, where he witnessed a string of hiring and promotion lawsuits that brought civil service practices under judicial scrutiny in what he described as a rather sad history of employment in the fire service.
"We all wish we could get it right, but even at this point in time, we have to go to the highest court in the land to get our issue addressed," he said.
To go to Washington and see the courtroom he had only viewed in pictures and watch the justices walk out and begin arguments was "very moving," O'Connor said.
The experience for the students, they said, was one that can't be learned from a textbook or court transcripts. As a string of lawyers argued their interpretations of the law, the students were surprised at how often the justices abruptly interrupted, often posing hypothetical scenarios and questioning legal rationale.
Some of the more conservative justices seemed clearly more receptive to the argument of the firefighters, while the city's arguments seemed to resonate with the more liberal justices, the students observed.
"As you walked out, you have no idea who did better, the city or the firefighters," said Eswood, of Parsippany, N.J. "Both sides, they just got hammered with questions."
Outside, a phalanx of television cameras waited as the firefighters and attorneys from both sides held press conferences while the students, who want to pursue careers in emergency management or homeland security, stood back and watched.
"I walked out of there and just kind of shrugged my shoulders to Chief O'Connor and Louis and said, ‘I have no idea. I'm glad I don't have to decide,'" said Rinck, a UNH junior from Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Likewise, after following Supreme Court decisions for decades, O'Connor said he had learned enough not to prognosticate.
But he said he did know how hard his cousin studied for the captain's test.
"I feel good for the firefighters, no matter how the case turns out, because they got their case heard," O'Connor said.
