On my first day at the Constitutional Accountability Center, I worked on a brief about Donald Trump’s disqualification from state GOP primary ballots, a far cry from the normal first day activities. This set the tone for an incredible year as the Douglas T. Kendall Fellow at CAC.

Broadly, one of the best parts of working at CAC was my involvement with a wide variety of issues. In the context of CAC’s major questions doctrine work, I had the chance to learn about net neutrality, climate disclosure rules, the Fair Labor Standards Act, CFPB supervision of financial organizations, and medication abortion restrictions. I worked on a brief defending the guarantees of Title IX and its application to ensuring equal access to bathrooms for transgender students. And in a considerable project to close out the fellowship, I helped draft a brief that we filed at the Supreme Court to protect access to attorney’s fees for civil rights plaintiffs.

Working on CAC’s brief in Garland v. Cargill, a case about the challenge to ATF’s ban on bump stocks, was one of my favorite parts of the fellowship. Rarely do first-year lawyers get to generate new legal arguments. Not so at CAC. Examining the history of gun regulations meant reading dozens of microfilm newspaper articles reporting on these regulations. It meant searching through endless issues of The American Rifleman. It meant going to the Library of Congress to hunt down the only edition of Webster’s Dictionary that has not found its way online—naturally, the one we needed. The opportunity to generate new research and do new textual analysis to put before the Supreme Court felt genuinely meaningful, even if the outcome was not what we had hoped.

I also feel lucky to have gotten to work with colleagues who are not only interesting but also deeply interested in the state of the world. There is no sharp division between our day jobs and the issues we care about in the rest of our lives. I’ve learned as much from informal conversations as I have from researching for briefs. And I’m incredibly grateful for the amount of guidance and support I have received as I have learned to do pretty much everything for the first time.

CAC helps drive the conversation about how law should be interpreted. Many courts claim to look to text and history to support their conclusions. But as I saw last term, actual fidelity to the Constitution’s text and history is unfortunately less common than the frequent invocation of those principles would suggest. CAC not only acts as a counterweight to flawed textual and history-based arguments, but also affirmatively shapes the framing of complicated and significant legal issues in a manner that is both more accurate and more protective of civil rights and liberties.

I’m going to miss CAC—and everyone I’ve had a chance to work with—a great deal as I move on! And I’ll always be happy to know that there’s an organization out there working tirelessly to protect the progressive values of the Constitution.