This week’s Supreme Court Insider (register here to receive the weekly newsletter free) offers several features that take you, well, inside the Court and some of its lesser-known operations, as well as up-to-the-minute developments. Among them:
-- The final installment of a Q&A interview with Frank Wagner, the Court’s reporter of decisions, who is retiring at the end of the month. (More on the interview later.)
-- A video discussion with David Frederick, partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, about arguing before the Supreme Court. The second edition of his book on the subject has just been published.
-- A story about Kiwi Camara, our appellate lawyer of the week. The Houston lawyer, who once was the youngest person to enroll at Harvard Law School, has filed the first petition with the Supreme Court on illegal music downloading from the Internet.
-- A report on a rare writ of mandamus filed in a post-Katrina case in which action by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has been stymied by a large number of recusals.
-- A chart detailing the law schools that justices visited last year to speak and teach, according to their financial disclosure reports.
One footnote on the interview with Wagner: Since he is the person responsible for preparing the Court’s opinions for official publication, he is keenly aware of justices’ stylistic preferences. Inn the interview he talked about one difference of opinion among the justices that he has not seen the need to resolve: the use of apostrophes when making certain words that end in "s" possessive. Do you add an apostrophe and an "s" or just an apostrophe? (Example: should it be Congress’ or Congress’s?) Wagner has let the justice authoring the opinion dictate which style is used in that opinion, rather than imposing a single rule.
Wagner was too discreet to name names, but we did a quick Westlaw search to discern the justices' preferences. We could not find a definitive answer for all nine, but determined that the following justices are prone to using the apostrophe only: Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito Jr. On the other side of the divide, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg seem to prefer adding an apostrophe and an "s", and Anthony Kennedy, fulfilling his role as swing vote, has gone both ways.
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