I was honored to have been included in the delegation from New England Law | Boston at the United States Supreme Court proceedings to admit alumni in good standing to the Bar of the highest court in the land.
The excitement and anticipation of those to be admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court grew throughout the weekend we were together in Washington, DC during the first week in April 2011. There was terrific energy at the Saturday evening reception that kicked off the proceedings that continued into Monday morning while the group gathered in the hall way and was repeatedly reminded that “This is a working building,” by the guards and Secret Service officers on hand to protect the building and its occupants. There were two metal detectors and a climb upstairs to the floor where the Court sits to our holding room featuring oil paintings of President/Chief Justice William Howard taft and his contemporaries.
We awaited instructions from the Clerk of the Court with anticipation of being seated before all nine Supreme Court Justices. Thirty minutes before the Court convened we were led to the courtroom seated formally with guests behind the brass rail while those who had been been admitted and those about to be were seated in front of the most famous “bench” in the country. At five minutes before 10:00 a.m., a Secret Service agent gave us stern instructions to be seated and silent until the Court adjourned. Precisely at 10:00 a.m., the nine justices entered the room. They sat in their high-backed black leather chairs by seniority with Chief Justice Roberts in the center flanked by Associate Justices Scalia and Kennedy with newest associate justices Sotomayor and Kagan to the furthest left and right, respectively.
Roberts gaveled the court into session and two opinions were read. one was a California death penalty case where the court reversed the California Supreme Court effectively sentencing a man to death on procedural grounds, and then reversed an Arizona court’s ruling upholding the claims of taxpayers that they were damaged by a state tax break for families that pay for private education. in both cases, the women on the court dissented sending us a signal that Kagan, Sotomayor and Ginsburg were a minority bloc of votes that would have to contended with in the future.
At that moment the formal petitions to admit the attorneys who applied arrived. swiftly and formally the leader of each delegation requested their admission, “if it pleased the court” and their names were read into the record. In all cases there was no variation from the script and in each case, the Chief Justice said simply, “your petition is granted. They will be admitted.” And that was that. Court was adjourned and were retraced our steps.
The precision, grace and formality were reassuring and impressive. There was no missing the point that this was a place of serious, sober business that was conducted by rules and protocol with little to no tolerance for inexactitude or disrespect for the precedents that led us to this place and time.
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