Missouri Lawyers Awards 2025: Barbara Smith Tyson

Partner, BCLP
St. Louis

When an effort got underway to remove Republican nominee Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado, secretaries of state who disagreed with the move came to Barbara Tyson to make their voices heard.

“That was an important representation for me,” she said, “because it was an honor to represent elected officials on a really important and central question of free and fair elections and how we get to decide who gets to appear on the ballot.”

Proponents of the idea said that the former president could be barred from appearing on the ticket due to the 14^th Amendment’s prohibition against those involved in insurrection. But Tyson, co-chair of the Appellate and Supreme Court Group at her firm, filed an amicus brief contending that secretaries of state were limited only to ministerial reasons for disqualifications from the ballot such as problems with age or residency.

Ultimately, the highest court in the land agreed with that reasoning and kept Trump on the ballot.

Tyson, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, cut her teeth after college in President George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel where she saw attorneys pursuing the kind of work she wanted to do.

“That really inspired me to want to go to law school to understand constitutional law and the separation of powers,” Tyson said.

Tyson also recently represented a German mother in a custody battle with an American father who had taken their child back to the United States. The Seventh Circuit eventually upheld her client’s view that the youngster should be returned to Germany.

The appeal, which she handled pro bono, was one of about a half dozen “Hague Convention” custody matters that she has done when parents flee to other nations.

“Those are emotionally tough cases but really important ones,” said the 39-year-old Stanford University graduate, “because often those parents are foreign citizens and they don’t have access to or understand the way the US courts work so being able to represent someone seeking the return of their child is one of the most important things I think I can do as a lawyer.”