Sarah Best introduced herself to me in July 2019. She had worked that summer in the General Counsel’s Office at the U.S. Department of Education, and in the course of researching the application of the Indian-law canons of construction to agency interpretations of regulations, she had become interested in federal Indian law. Sarah was already planning to take Federal Indian Law with Maggie Blackhawk, and (at Maggie’s generous suggestion) Sarah wrote to me to discuss possible research topics on the intersection of federal Indian law and education law. “Not only was I fascinated by the sheer complexity of the subject matter,” she wrote, “but I felt deeply invested in educating myself because I had not properly grasped” what a profound effect federal regulatory decisions could have on Native nations. This initial email hinted at some of Sarah’s core traits: her deep love of teaching and education; her powerful mind at work on tough doctrinal problems; her drive for self-reflection; her concern about systemic injustice; and her passionate moral sense.
Sarah’s views of education were shaped by five years—between college and law school—spent as a teacher at schools serving mostly African American students in Tennessee. Sarah mainly taught math courses, as well as at least one Latin course. At Pearl-Cohn High School in Nashville, her students voted her Teacher of the Year. At City University School of Liberal Arts in Memphis, Sarah ranked in the 99th percentile statewide for teacher effectiveness (as measured by state assessments of her students). She was so good at what she did that she repeatedly taught other teachers—in a teacher residency in Nashville and as an instructional coach, and then as a mentor teacher, in two summer institutes run by Teach for America. But Sarah’s own description of her work was reflective and self-critical. In a response paper written for a law school course on COVID and the Law, Sarah highlighted a “problematic obsession with personal responsibility that feels to me a hallmark of American culture.” The concept of “grit,” she suggested, was unduly central to K-12 teaching methods. “It was difficult for me as a teacher to strike the right balance between the personal responsibility/self-empowerment model and truly recognizing systemic barriers and making sure that in my teaching, my mentoring, and my messaging to my students, I was sensitive to that.” One can see, then, how an interest in education policy would have brought Sarah to law school.
Following her internship at the Department of Education, she went on to extern during her 2L year with the Education Law Center, for which she researched various legal issues, handled intake calls from potential clients, and helped to prepare an attorney for an argument with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And she continued to make use of her teaching skills, serving as a group discussion leader and occasional lecturer when she was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course on constitutional law taught by then-Dean Ted Ruger. In recalling her work as his TA, Ted noted Sarah’s unusual “clarity of explication in conveying complex constitutional law topics to non-lawyers.”
That ability to distill and communicate intricate doctrine translated to Sarah’s extraordinary success as an oral advocate. Her 1L Legal Practice Skills instructor, Eleanor Barrett, wrote in 2020: “Sarah is naturally reserved, and she did not relish the thought of standing up in front of a panel of judges. But she practiced relentlessly and ended up delivering one of the strongest arguments I have seen from a first-year student.” Sarah went on to win Best Oralist and, with her teammate Kellen McCoy, Best Brief in the law school’s 2021 Keedy Cup. That argument was particularly memorable for the fact that it was delivered by Zoom during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. So was Sarah’s response when I wrote to congratulate her and her fellow finalists: “Fortunately, the four of us are good friends and were able to pull each other through this.”
Soon thereafter, Sarah—and her Keedy colleague Michelle Wang—argued a case before the Third Circuit on behalf of two plaintiffs who were suing officials in the prisons where they were incarcerated and whose cases had been dismissed by a federal magistrate judge. Sarah’s task was to convince the court of appeals that even though her client had consented to the decision of the case by the magistrate judge, the lack of consent by the not‑yet‑served defendants meant that the magistrate judge lacked power to enter judgment dismissing the case. Appearing by Zoom, Sarah and Michelle argued skillfully before a lively bench. And when the court held in their clients’ favor, it adopted—on the issue that Sarah presented—her key argument concerning the primacy of the statutory text. Sarah and Michelle’s work changed the process in civil rights cases brought by incarcerated litigants in the Third Circuit. That Sarah was advocating so effectively for a client before she even graduated law school would have come as no surprise to anyone who knew her in the classroom.
I taught and learned from Sarah in two classes. In my spring 2020 Federal Courts class, Sarah was on panel for two class meetings before the COVID-19 pandemic started, when we were still having in-person classes. She was notable for her meticulous preparation and calm, precise answers—and also for her instant recall of doctrine she had studied previously. During a discussion of preemption doctrine, another student asked whether Arizona v. United States had relied on field preemption. I responded from memory that I thought it had, but that I would check. Sarah volunteered that the Court held that one provision in the Arizona statute was field preempted and two other provisions were obstacle preempted. When I expressed grateful admiration for her ability to supply the gap in my knowledge, Sarah explained diffidently that she had studied the case in a class the prior semester.
Then COVID hit, our course switched to a Zoom format, and the exam (like all of the law school’s exams) became pass-fail. Faced with such conditions, a student might have been tempted to disengage. But Sarah was consistent in her dedication, and especially thoughtful in contributing advice when I sought student input on the exam format in the changed environment. On the final exam, her responses were clear and commanding—thorough, doctrinally precise, and persuasive.
But that’s not what stands out to me upon re-reading her answer. In the third exam question, I asked students to describe, and then assess normatively, how habeas and Section 1983 doctrines handle changes in the law. In her normative discussion, Sarah decried the general unavailability of new law on collateral review, confessing that she found it “difficult to . . . be open-minded in this particular discussion when I do not seem to appreciate the values of incarceration and putting human beings to death in quite the way that many in this country appear to.” By contrast, “at least in the abstract,” Sarah could “better understand the arguments for qualified immunity, where the interests opposite the individual suffering the violation belong to another individual.” She was “sympathetic to the idea of protecting an officer, who must often exercise discretion while balancing the interests in public safety with personal liberty and who . . . thought he was conforming with what was required by the law.” But, Sarah wrote, “when I see how the doctrine is actually applied and I read that an official who conducts a strip search of a middle school child in a school, as in Safford, is given qualified immunity because for some reason the Court can find it reasonable in 2009 for a school official to conduct such a search lest the child continue to distribute Ibuprofen, I am disturbed. The spirit of the doctrine makes sense, but its application is horrifying.” This was characteristic Sarah—both the instinct to protect a student from abuse, and the deployment of fierce irony where she found injustice.
Sarah worked to make the legal world more inclusive. After law school, Sarah would go on to clerk for three federal judges. When she accepted the first of these clerkship offers, she told me, “I actually teared up a bit because it felt so strange accepting a clerkship when less than a year ago, I still didn’t understand what a clerkship even was.” The following year, when my Federal Courts class happened to be oversubscribed, Sarah wrote to me to ask whether I would be raising the enrollment cap. She explained that, as the academic director for Penn’s Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, she had “been trying to make sure that BIPOC, and especially APALSA members, are at least informed about what clerkships are so that they can determine whether they’re interested in that kind of opportunity.” To this end, Sarah had “been pushing people to take Federal Courts—so they can gauge their interest in those topics.” After graduating, Sarah returned during her first clerkship year to take part in an alumni panel to advise current students on the clerkship application process.
I grieve with Sarah’s husband, family, and friends. And I mourn the absence of her incandescent talent, her critical self-awareness and moral inquiry, and her kindness from a world that grows ever more in need of them.