Supreme Court

This time last week I was sitting in the Supreme Court chambers waiting to listen to an argument in a case I was tangentially involved with. Warren Binford, a professor at Willamette University College of Law, asked me late last year to edit an amicus brief she was filing on behalf of the Dutch government as part of a child pornography case that was about to go before the justices. The issue they were deciding was whether victims of child pornography have to prove that they are harmed each time someone downloads their image and how much restitution the viewers should be expected to pay.

(I'm sure I mangled the above, but that's the gist of it).

Anyway, Warren had a bunch of her students work on the brief and brought them to D.C. to listen to the case. She also brought former Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul De Muniz, whom I've known for a long time, to listen to the arguments, too. Warren stayed one night with us; the rest of the time she was at a swanky hotel in the District. She invited me to stay with her the night before the arguments so I wouldn't have to get up absurdly early, so I did. As it happened, that was the night we got the ungodly amount of snow we did and I had to cut a trail from our house to the Metro station. So, I was glad to have a place to crash.

The next day we got up early (Warren had stayed up late the night before to go through her emails from her students, so we ended up going on 5 1/2 hours of sleep, and thank heavens I didn't have to actually file a story about the proceedings) and took a cab to the court. She and Paul whisked me inside and, luckily, my neighbor Carol, the FBI agent in charge of monitoring terrorism in the D.C. area, had set me up to be met by one of her employees. He found me immediately, instructed me to wait for him in the cafeteria, then he came and got me at the appointed time and escorted me upstairs. He even gave me a quarter for the lockers where I had to deposit my backpack! I had to go through TWO security checks before I was finally allowed into the courtroom. Big bonus: No standing in line out front in the bitter cold.

The justices were surprisingly human and asked questions that I could actually follow. The room was really magnificent -- crimson curtains edged by mustard-colored fringe, marble everywhere -- I almost pinched myself to reassure myself that I was really at the Supreme Court, listening to arguments about a case I was somewhat involved in. After it was over, we left, and I hung around the building to look at the displays on the walls outlining the history of the court. (One cool thing about D.C. is that even the mildly historic buildings have displays inside that are the equivalent of mini-museums). Then I grabbed lunch and waited to meet Warren at the National Gallery, where we looked at Impressionist art for an hour. We headed to a lecture at Georgetown she'd helped arrange, then Paul took us all over to Old Ebbit Grill, which I've been dying to try. It's a D.C. institution and the food was actually a lot less expensive than I'd expected.

Then Warren and I took a taxi back home and stayed up with poor Drew until 2 a.m., talking. End result was that the next day I had to get both Warren and Rachel out of the house (Rachel had a two-hour late start) by 10 and 11, respectively, then start building a story memo for The Boston Globe, where I'm freelancing for a while. Instead, I tried to fight off a cold by sleeping (didn't work, I was too wound up), so I ended up catching a really nasty bug that knocked me out for Friday and most of the weekend.

And that is why I haven't been writing on the blog. Now you finally know how the Supreme Court thing went. It was AWESOME.