Baseball players dream of suiting up for the World Series. Actors fantasize about Broadway. For lawyers, arguing before the Supreme Court is the ultimate aspiration.

Third-year Stanford Law School student Paul Spitler isn’t appearing before the Supreme Court, but he will be arguing in front of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court tomorrow.

Spitler started his work during a 2005 summer internship at Stanford’s Environmental Law Clinic under Director Deborah Sivas and Fellow Holly Gordon. He represents the plaintiffs in the case Friends of Hope Valley v. U.S. Forest Service, which centers upon whether the U.S. Forest Service or Alpine County has the right to manage Forest Service-owned land in the rural county just south of Lake Tahoe. The Court’s ruling could affect thousands of federal lands throughout the western United States.

Alpine County claims that a provision in an 1866 mining law gives it jurisdiction over Forestdale Road, which cuts through the federal land. The Forest Service granted the county the right to manage the road, effectively cutting the federally-owned land in two, and setting a precedent that Spitler and the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic believed they had no choice to challenge with Friends of Hope Valley.

“Why this gets important, aside from the individual case, is that there’s literally thousands of these road claims across the western United States and Alaska,” Spitler said. “These include claims in national parks, in wilderness areas, military reservations; any type of federal land you can imagine has some of these road claims. If they were to be validated, you’d have new roads throughout all our parks and wilderness areas.”

Friends of Hope Valley filed the original suit in 2000. In 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California issued an opinion reversing the U.S. Forest Service’s specific management plan for Hope Valley, but upholding their jurisdiction over the road, prompting the appeal to the Circuit Court.

Though not yet a lawyer, Spitler can argue as a certified law student because of the courses he has already taken at Stanford Law School.

Spitler, who earned his bachelor’s degree from UC-Davis, will join two others with a Stanford connection at the trial. Justice O’Connor, one of three judges to rule on the case, received both her undergraduate economics degree and law degree from Stanford. Opposing council Matt Sanders is also a Stanford Law School and undergraduate alumnus.

Spitler said he hopes an opinion will be issued within a year.