The Blog

Supreme Court Satire

2:31 PM, Nov 18, 2008 • By JOHN MCCORMACK
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Chief Justice John Roberts has been known to liven up his dissents by writing like a crime novelist. Jan Crawford Greenburg notes that his predecessor, Chief Justice Rehnquist, had a penchant for the theater:

Rehnquist, who had a flair for drama (remember the gold stripes he'd later add to his robe?), also proposed a skit or variety show by the clerks. It was something he eventually would institute.

"I would enjoy seeing what each annual crop of law clerks, together with such help from the Justices that they might wish, could do in the way of a gridiron show or other parody or satire on the court," he wrote.

This tidbit was discovered in the small portion of Rehnquist's papers which were just opened up to the public. Greenburg writes that Rehnquist dictated that his "papers would not be publicly released until the death of every justice who was sitting with them in a particular term. ... That means we only have access to cases over a three-year period, since John Paul Stevens joined the Court in 1975."

Greenburg has more here.

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