Sidley Partner to Make Supreme Court Debut in Veterans Dispute

Tacy Flint knows she won’t get any questions from the justices that involve pesky raccoons gnawing on a garage door.

But the experience of helping Justice Stephen Breyer brainstorm wacky hypotheticals, like the one he gave in a patent case that was argued during her clerkship in the 2006-2007 term, has made Flint feel better prepared for her US Supreme Court debut on Monday.

“Hugely important to the justices is how a ruling in this case impacts all of the other cases out there,” she said.

The Chicago-based Sidley Austin partner will be arguing against the federal government for combat veterans who say they’re being shortchanged special compensation Congress promised to pay them for their heroism.

“There’s been a huge amount of turnover on the court since ‘06, so there aren’t that many individual justices whom I know from that term, and obviously Justice Breyer has retired, but seeing the process has incredibly informed everything I do,” Flint said.

Only three faces will be familiar to Flint when she steps up to the lectern: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Focused on Impact

Flint is representing Simon Soto, who’s leading a class of over 9,000 veterans in a lawsuit that accuses the US of wrongly limiting retroactive combat payments to six years under the Barring Act.

That statute of limitations doesn’t apply because the law that created this combat-related special compensation authorizes the respective military secretary to settle payment claims, Flint and her team argue in their petition.

Flint, 47, said Soto should be getting about eight-and-a-half years worth of retroactive payments, not six. The former US marine retired with PTSD after two tours in Iraq where he searched for, recovered, and processed the remains of war casualties.

The government argues the combat-related special compensation statute doesn’t supplant the Barring Act’s time bar and a ruling otherwise could expose the Defense Department to all kinds of claims for retroactive payments.

Heading into arguments, Flint’s planning to focus on that alleged impact and how the test she’s proposing isn’t going to create the problems the government says it will.

“We’re not aware of a lot of other statutes that will be read differently if we prevail,” she said.

Unexpected Events

The Massachusetts native first joined Sidley as a summer associate after her second year at the University of Chicago Law. Her summer at the firm, however, got cut short when the cancer she first battled after graduating from Princeton at age 21 came back.

Flint’s second treatment for Hodgkin Lymphoma was more complex and difficult, requiring a stem cell transplant after an intense round of chemotherapy.

Kristen Seeger, Flint’s associate mentor at the time, remembers Flint coming into her office after she got the news her cancer had returned.

“That was over 20 years ago and I actually have a distinct memory of it still,” she said, adding that the two cried a little together and then talked about a plan.

The firm told Flint to do whatever she needed to do. She would get paid the rest of the summer regardless.

“It was really a huge service to me and took a huge weight off my shoulders,” Flint said, explaining the money she earned that summer was what she had planned to live on for the rest of law school.

Flint survived cancer a second time, graduated from law school after taking only a quarter off in her third year, and went back to work at Sidley. Though she left briefly to clerk for Judge Richard Posner, then on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then Breyer on the Supreme Court, Flint’s been at Sidley ever since.

Seeger, who described Flint as a brilliant colleague, said it was instinctive for the firm to respond to her cancer diagnosis the way it did.

“A very large part of our firm culture is the level of care and regard that we all have for our colleagues,” she said.

Sidley was just as supportive when Flint’s mom died in February while she was working on the opening brief in Soto’s case, which Sidley is handling for free as part of its pro bono practice. Flint said the other partners and associates working on the case did the whole thing so she could be offline.

“When I came back after my clerkship, I knew I wanted to come back to Chicago and it was very easy to come back to Sidley,” she said. “The firm, as a whole, and the individuals I knew were so generous to me, and so incredibly helpful, and that’s how it worked this time, too.”

The case is Soto v. United States, U.S., No. 24-320.