Cammarata Wins Unanimous Supreme Court Ruling That No President Stands Above Civil Law

In May 1991, Paula Corbin Jones, an Arkansas state employee, alleged that Governor Bill Clinton summoned her to a hotel room at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock and made unwanted sexual advances. She refused. She later claimed her supervisors retaliated against her because of the rejection. When Clinton reached the presidency, Jones filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking $75,000 in actual damages and $100,000 in punitive damages.

Clinton's legal team moved to defer the case entirely until after he left office, arguing that a sitting president's duties were too demanding to permit private civil litigation. The federal district court in Arkansas agreed to postpone trial, though it allowed discovery to proceed. Jones appealed. The Eighth Circuit reversed, and Clinton then petitioned the Supreme Court.

Joseph Cammarata, a Washington-area attorney who had inherited the case alongside Virginia lawyer Gilbert Davis, prepared the case for briefing and argument. The central constitutional question was whether the separation of powers required federal courts to freeze civil proceedings against a sitting president for unofficial, pre-presidential conduct. Davis argued the merits before the justices.

On May 27, 1997, the Supreme Court decided Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, unanimously in Jones's favor. All nine justices agreed that the Constitution provides no such immunity. Writing for the Court, Justice Stevens held that the doctrine of separation of powers does not require federal courts to stay private civil actions against the president, and that subjecting the executive to the jurisdiction of ordinary law for personal conduct predating his office does not meaningfully threaten his constitutional functions.

The ruling was a complete victory on the legal question presented. The district court's blanket postponement of trial was deemed an abuse of discretion. The Court affirmed the Eighth Circuit, and the case returned to the district court, where the underlying merits of Jones's claims would eventually be litigated. Cammarata and Davis subsequently withdrew from the representation in September 1997, before the case returned to trial.