U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

Oklahoma Solicitor General Mithun Mansinghani was planning to bring his parents to Washington on April 21 to see him argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that was before his case McGirt v. Oklahoma, among others, was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, Mansinghani's parents will listen from home in Texas while he argues in the case May 11 from his office in Oklahoma City. The high court on April 13 reinstated 10 oral arguments, including Mansinghani's, to the docket to be heard telephonically and made public.

It's a brand-new ballgame in many ways for Mansinghani, 32, a Harvard Law School grad and former associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher from 2012 to 2015. He then entered public service as Oklahoma's deputy solicitor general for two years. Mansinghani was promoted to state solicitor general in 2017. "I decided that a state SG's office was where I could probably contribute the most," Mansinghani said in an interview. He has been "second-chair" for two Supreme Court cases, but the McGirt case will be his first high court oral argument.

He is doing the usual prep work, participating in moot courts hosted by the National Association of Attorneys General and the Georgetown Law Supreme Court Institute, among others—all by telephone. Mansinghani has had some recent experience with teleconferencing, defending Oklahoma's temporary ban on abortions before a federal district court. "It was one judge, not nine," Mansinghani said. "There were a few hiccups here and there, but it went fairly smoothly."

Mansinghani expects he will be alone in his Oklahoma City office without a "second-chair" when his Supreme Court argument takes place.

Mithun Mansinghani.

The court has not weighed in on whether a co-counsel would be allowed to accompany the arguing counsel, as is common during normal oral arguments. But its longstanding guide to counsel states, "Excepting extraordinary circumstances, co-counsel should not pass notes to arguing counsel during argument." That guidance would be hard to enforce if the justices can't see counsel.

Mansinghani said he was not surprised that his argument was one of the 10 that will be heard this term. (The rest of postponed cases have been put over to next term.) "The governance of half of my entire state is at issue," Mansinghani said.

The case will resolve whether the eastern half of Oklahoma should be regarded as tribal reservation land. A precursor case raising the same issue, Sharp v. Murphy, was argued last term but not resolved, in part because Justice Neil Gorsuch recused. "If you combine McGirt with the Murphy case, it makes them the longest outstanding cases on the court's docket," Mansinghani said.

Another reason for scheduling the case this term is urgency.

"We are in a state of limbo where the longer this persists, the worse the problem gets," Mansinghani said. "If half the state is comprised of reservation land, then the federal courts have jurisdiction over criminal offenses involving Native American tribal members that are either defendant or victim or both. But if not, then the state has jurisdiction. Somebody's got to prosecute, and all of those prosecutions are happening under a cloud."

Read more:

Mobile or Landline? SCOTUS Advocates Prep for First-Ever Phone Arguments

Cozen's Biz Van Gelder Has Made Some Discoveries in the Coronavirus Era

'It's Just Been Unreal': Catching Up With Wilmer Hale's Jamie Gorelick

'Unprecedented Need for Information': Inside Lobbying Frenzy Over Covid-19 Stimulus

New Normal Sets In for White-Collar Lawyers in the Virus Era