While most habeas counsel have seen their Guantánamo docket wither, David Remes has doubled down on his. With the backing of his former firm, Covington & Burling, Remes currently represents 17 clients, 16 of them Yemeni, more than any other lawyer or firm. Over the past 11 years, he has represented more than two dozen.
He and others at Covington, among the first to volunteer to take on the habeas cases, were originally assigned 13 Yemeni clients. At a peak in the mid-2000s, more than a dozen lawyers and staff worked on the cases, providing the litigation muscle behind some watershed Supreme Court cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush. Though Covington won five habeas cases in federal district court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit negated those victories.
