A New Year With The New Normal Continuing | How Lawyers Prepare For Remote Appearances Before SCOTUS
January 4, 2021
WHAT A YEAR WHAT A YEAR
|In his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary, CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS patted the courts on the back for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. “For more than a century, the courts have not had to respond to such a widespread public health emergency,” Roberts wrote. Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports on the year-end tradition and notes, “By some measures, though, the court’s workload is dropping. An appendix to the chief justice’s report said the court issued only 53 signed opinions in argued cases in the term that ended in July. That is the smallest number since the 1860s. The current term seems poised to yield a similarly small number of opinions. During the Spanish flu epidemic, in the term that started in 1918, the court decided 163 cases, or more than three times as many as the current court.”
A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE
|Jess Bravin with The Wall Street Journal also covers CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS’ year-end message in which he noted the Supreme Court’s history of navigating other dangerous illnesses and outbreaks. Three years after the high court’s first term, CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN JAY had to adjourn SCOTUS “from sitting in Philadelphia due to the yellow fever epidemic that killed 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 residents.”
CALL ME MAYBE
|Matt Grossman with The Wall Street Journal reports on the ways in which lawyers are handling their remote appearances before the Supreme Court and how they’re preparing for the unprecedented sessions hosted via telephone. Grossman writes, “For the nation’s Supreme Court lawyers, being freed from the decorous norms of appearing in person before the high court has brought a new set of questions. Where to work? What to wear? What kind of phone to use? And how to stay in order in a telephone courtroom? Some advocates have tried to replicate the high court’s pomp, dressing in business attire and setting up mock courtrooms to evoke the real-life setting. Others have donned sweatshirts and planted themselves behind messy desks.”
WHAT GOES AROUND
|Josh Gerstein with POLITICO reports that although liberal law professors and civil rights groups have cheered courts for swiftly killing off PRESIDENT TRUMP’S challenges to election outcomes, “the procedural tools and theories used to scuttle the Trump cases are sure to be deployed against Democrats and civil rights groups in the coming months and years.” Gerstein explains, “Nearly every decision now stands as precedent that Republicans or state officials can seek to wield against Democrats or civil rights groups in the endless legal wars that surround the U.S. electoral system. Lawyers who handle such cases have no doubt the turnabout is coming, although they differ over its significance.”