Five Emory University law students have achieved something most lawyers never do: They persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to take a case.

Last month, the nation’s highest court granted a petition for a writ of certiorari for the students’ client, an Alabama man who has run into trouble with his bankruptcy case. The justices pluck only a handful of cases for full consideration each year, and the writ is a first for Emory’s three-year-old, student-run Supreme Court project.