The summer before her junior year in college, Kirby West ’15 heard about the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia. At the time, she was interning for a First Amendment advocacy group focused exclusively on the issue of campus speech. The nonprofit firm, on the other hand, was filing lawsuits to defend a broad array of issues, such as private property rights, economic liberty, and school choice.
“I had a light bulb moment: ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I want to do,’” West said. Within eight years, she had made her vision a reality.
West grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where her father was a trusts and estates attorney. As a child, she planned to follow in his footsteps as a lawyer, but in college she joined a student newspaper and decided to become a journalist.
She also began to define herself as a libertarian. Growing up, she had imbibed from conversations with her parents a political viewpoint that emphasizes individual freedom. West’s grandfather had opened a car dealership that became a source of family pride, and she bristled at stories of would-be entrepreneurs stymied by regulations she viewed as arbitrary.
At Bucknell University, West started reading renowned libertarian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, joined the Conservatives Club, and interned at the Charles Koch Foundation. To her, libertarianism represented a concern for “the principles that lead to human flourishing and how we can best empower people to live their lives with the most possible amount of liberty,” she said.
When West read about the Institute for Justice, she felt that it was putting those values into practice. “It was working toward these bigger ideals of economic freedom, free speech, and property rights, but in a way that is representing real clients and having a measurable impact,” she said.
After enrolling at Harvard Law School, she became articles editor for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and joined the Harvard Federalist Society, where she met her future husband, Kyle West ’14. At the same time, she remained set on working for the Institute for Justice.
At an event during her first year, West met a Harvard Law alum who had spent a summer working at the public interest firm. The next day, he contacted colleagues there to recommend her. The following summer, West was accepted for a clerkship. “That’s representative of the HLS network — people are really looking to help younger attorneys, which is such a special thing,” she said.
After graduation, West clerked for Judge Dennis Shedd of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit before joining Baker Botts as an associate, a position she took to help build financial security while her husband held a position in government. Two years later, after having her first child, she realized she wanted to return to her original career goal. “If I’m going to be away from my baby all day, I wanted to be doing something that felt like I’m really making a difference,” she said. In August 2018, West finally fulfilled her dream and joined the Institute for Justice as an attorney.
One of the first cases she worked on was a federal class-action lawsuit that took on the civil forfeiture program in Wayne County, Michigan, which encompasses the city of Detroit. West had long been opposed to civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize property based on a suspicion that it is linked to a crime, regardless of whether the owner is ever charged or convicted. In fact, while at Harvard Law School, she wrote a research paper on that topic. In Wayne County, West and her colleagues found that police officers were using civil forfeiture to seize hundreds of cars each year without bringing criminal charges, and that residents had to pay $1,000 or more to recover them, if they were returned at all.
“If you do something you love … you’re going to be so much happier.”
The program was “vast and extremely abusive,” West said, and the Institute for Justice claimed it was unconstitutional. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit delivered a victory in the case Ingram v. Wayne County, Michigan, unanimously ruling that the program violated car owners’ rights by not offering hearings within two weeks of a seizure. However, less than a year later, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a different case undid that decision.
The class-action suit is still ongoing, and West and her colleagues are planning to file more cases. “We feel there are five justices who might be interested in considering some of the other constitutional arguments we’re making about civil forfeiture,” she said.
In 2023, West advocated for federal forfeiture reform before a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary. “It was very satisfying to get to bring our clients’ stories to people who can do something about them in a real way,” she said. “There was great bipartisan support in the hearing, which is such a refreshing thing.”
At her firm West also litigates cases involving educational choice and First Amendment retaliation. In 2022, she was part of a team that won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that when providing tuition aid, states cannot discriminate against families who choose religious schools; currently, she is the lead attorney in a case defending Alaska’s school choice program. She also won a settlement that included policy reforms in a case against a Wisconsin town that had fined her clients more than $20,000 for minor property violations after they publicly criticized the local government.
Last fall, West returned to Harvard as a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow. On campus, she gave a talk urging students to consider a career in libertarian public interest law. “I wanted to impress upon them that if you do something you love that you feel is making the world a better place, you’re just going to be so much happier,” she said. “You can’t put a price tag on that.”