Being the one branch of government most removed from the chattering masses (the internet, in other words), the Supreme Court had never once held a live video webcast—until Friday afternoon, that is.
The Supreme Court Bar honored Justice Antonin Scalia with grateful tribute from his former clerks—the Clerkaratti, as he called them. The memorial streamed on supremecourt.gov and on C-SPAN, an unprecedented openness “shocking” to one longtime Supreme Court transparency advocate. The contents of Clerkaratti’s tributes, though, only showed how well the event’s openness fit the much-admired style of its honoree.
Kristin A. Linsley, a 1989 clerk and now a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, remembered her loyal friend and indispensable mentor’s open-mindedness on the rare occasion that she or another of his clerks convinced him to reconsider a case.
“He wanted us to question, to test his views, and help him get it right,” she said, “This was not personal, that this was not about his ego or ours.” And the intellectual clarity of his textual approach, she noted, has made federal law “more predictable, evenhanded and open to non-specialists.”
Time Warner’s general counsel Paul T. Cappuccio described conferences in Scalia’s chambers, boisterous affairs in which the clerks and the justice would “debate the upcoming week’s cases, often loudly, always passionately, and usually puncuated by the justice’s infectious laughter.”
The Clerkaratti (they’ve earned the title, having argued one of every four Supreme Court cases in the last term, Cappuccio said) lovingly counted their debts to the master linguist.
In the February 29th issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Andrew Ferguson praised Justice Scalia’s writerly gifts, and his vivid humor:
Law students love it, George Washington University law professor Bradford R. Clark told those of us who’d tuned in. Through their study of his lively arguments, Scalia continues to “mix it up with law students,” always a favorite pastime, Clark said.
Cappuccio recalled comparing his mentor’s legacy to a star so big and bright it alters all others’ orbits. “When I finished [speaking], he looked at me with that look of equal parts slyness, contempt, self-satisfaction, and affection and said, ‘You are wanting to describe me as a large mass?'” Justice Scalia “routinely won the Court’s funniest justice as judged by the court reporter’s need to note ‘laughter’ in the oral argument transcript,” Cappuccio added. There, the C-SPAN transcript notes “laughter.”
During the memorial, more laughter echoed through the marble hall than there may have ever been in so serious a setting—more laughter than there’s been since February, anyway.
