Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
The hearing on Vallejos' case began on 22 August 2011, and stretched out until the 24th. David Pannick represented the respondent, the Commissioner of Registration. During the hearing, the courtroom was packed to overflowing with lawyers, journalists, and other members of the public, who took up not just the seats in the public gallery, but also those for defendants and jury members (the latter being unoccupied as the case at hand was not a jury trial but a judicial review). Another hundred people watched the proceedings on a large-screen television in the lobby, while protestors both supporting and opposing Vallejos' case faced off outside the building without incident.
Keys v. Carolina Coach Co.
The match of client Sarah Keys with the young firm of Robertson and Roundtree proved fortuitous, as did the timing of the case, which unfolded during the same two-year period that the Supreme Court of the United States was hearing oral arguments in the landmark school desegregation case, "Brown v. Board of Education". When the US District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the "Keys" complaint on February 23, 1953 on jurisdictional grounds, Roundtree and Robertson elected to bring their case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which they believed might be persuaded to re-evaluate its traditional interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Act, in the same way that the Supreme Court was then re-evaluating its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. On September 1, 1953, two months before Thurgood Marshall and his legal team made the second round of oral arguments in "Brown" before the Supreme Court asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause prohibited segregation, Sarah Keys became the first black petitioner to bring a complaint before the Commission on a Jim Crow bus matter.