At the Supreme Court, Life is One Big Vocabulary Lesson

We've written in the past about an advocate before the Supreme Court who taught Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. a new vocabulary word: romanette, an obscure but self-explaining word for lower-case roman numerals.

This morning, the new word du jour was "orthogonal," a mainly mathematical term for things that are perpendicular or at right angles to each other. University of Michigan law professor Richard Friedman, arguing for the plaintiffs in the Confrontation Clause case of Briscoe v. Virginia today, used the word in a broader sense to signify propositions that are extraneous or irrelevant to each other.

Friedman, who has made his name studying and arguing for the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, was vigorously defending the doctrine this morning when Justice Anthony Kennedy asked a hypothetical question. Friedman acknowledged Kennedy had raised a valid issue that will be raised in a future case, but it was not pertinent to the case at hand. "I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here," Friedman said.

Roberts interrupted. "I'm sorry. Entirely what?"

As if reading from a dictionary, Friedman replied, "Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant."

"Oh," said Roberts, and Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in, "What was that adjective? I liked that."

Sheepishly, Friedman repeated it, and Kennedy said with a smile, "I knew this case presented us a problem."

As laughter rose, Scalia said, "I think we should use that in the opinion." Roberts interjected, "Or the dissent."

Friedman confessed, "That is a bit of professorship creeping in, I suppose."

But then he deftly got the argument back on track.  The exchange was a welcomed break in the somewhat technical arguments of the morning, and in the end probably won't impact the outcome. In fact, you might call the whole thing orthogonal.

More later today on the oral arguments in Briscoe at nlj.com.

UPDATE: This post was corrected Jan. 12 to reflect that Roberts, not Scalia, said, "Or the dissent" in the exchange above."

Comments

[Janet Byron Anderson]

Very interesting! But can I be picky? Orthogonal means right-angled. And yes, it's
true that "no amount of going East will get you any further North". East and North would be like the two arms of an angle, but you can't get a 90-degree angle unless these arms meet at the vertex. There has to be a connection at some point. We're told of this humorously instructive aside that ultimately it "probably won't impact the outcome". Thank goodness, because it IMPLIED the exact opposite of what the Prof intended! (I tweeted this @janetbyronander.

[David Schwartz]

Actually, it is a subtler word than irrelevant. Two issues are orthogonal if they appear to be related to each other superficially, but movement along one issue does not change your position on the other. Kind of like how going North and going East are similar operations, but no amount of going East will get you any further North.

Programmers sometimes use it when two problems appear similar but are actually (for an unobvious reason) unrelated in the sense that fixing one will not help fix the other.

Examples found online:

"Web caching is an orthogonal issue to web design." That is, they're related. But good design won't make up for bad caching and bad caching won't make up for good design. You can do one right without getting the other right.

"Separation of church and state is an orthogonal issue to the fore mentioned non-profit status of most churches and/or religious groups/cults/organizations." That is, while these are related issues, your response is about church and state while my argument was about the consequences of their non-profit status. Your argument doesn't address my issue.

[ohwilleke]

It is particularly funny because Professor Friedman is one of the least stereotypically professorial individuals at Michigan.

His personal demeanor is closer to that of a stereotypical prosecuting attorney than it is to the classic tweedy ivory tower type.