Romanette, Revisited

Last month we reported here that during a Supreme Court oral argument, a lawyer taught Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. a new word: romanette, the term for a lower case roman numeral. When Assistant to the Solicitor General Nicole Saharsky offhandedly used the word to refer to a regulation's subsection, Roberts said quizzically, "Romanette?" "Oh, little roman numeral," she said, and Roberts replied, "I've never heard that before." Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, blogger extraordinaire Eugene Volokh picked up on the exchange, triggering dozens of comments about the word, and how common or rare it is among practitioners in different fields of law (apparently, tax lawyers throw it around all the time.)

On Tuesday, Roberts apparently could not resist showing off his new vocabulary word. We weren't in the courtroom, but several impeccable sources -- including law.com colleague Laurel Newby, who was in attendance -- say that Roberts used the word in an exchange with Thomas Goldstein, the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld partner, during arguments in Cone v. Bell. The unofficial transcript (see the top of page 6 here) reports it as "Roman xi," but our tipsters say Roberts said "romanette i." There were several knowing smiles in the courtroom, but no other ado. Interestingly, the page in Goldstein's brief that Roberts was referring to had no page number on it at all, though "romanette i" could be inferred from the fact that the next page is numbered "ii."

Footnote: In researching this important blog post, we came across another use of the word: Kirkland & Ellis' legal trivia team is called "The Romanettes," and it won second place in a match recently, according to this blog. We contacted K&E appellate head Christopher Landau, who acknowledged the team name was inspired by the November Supreme Court colloquy. "We had never heard of the word before, but we were all delighted by it," said Landau, a former clerk to Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.