Hypotheticals From Bygone Days Date S.C. Justices to Pre-YouTube Era
With the average age of U.S. Supreme Court justices coming in at about 70, court watchers aren’t much likely to hear contemporary references when justices reach back for hypotheticals to help them frame questions for appellate advocates.
Indeed, oral arguments this term have, “offered a series of reminders of how old-fashioned this court is and how whimsically dated its reference points can be,” writes Supreme Court reporter and author Joan Biskupic for USA Today.
Biskupic asserts that hypothetical questions of late have “recalled an era, when, say, men sported fedoras, listened to old-time radio shows and kept Dale Carnegie’s 1936 tome on winning friends and influencing people on the shelf.”
As an example, she notes that in a recent case exploring the extremes of “honest services,” John Paul Stevens, 89, and Anthony Kennedy, 73, raised hypotheticals that involved skipping out to catch a baseball game. None of the justices, however, relied on a more contemporary scenario of shopping online while on the clock.
In a fairly recent case involving business method patents, Sonia Sotomayor, 55, showed her “relative youthfulness” with this question: “If we don’t limit it to inventions or to technology … then why not patent the method of speed dating?”
Biskupic says none of the other justices followed up on that hypothetical.
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