“This justice is for me,” he says. Then he looks up at all of us. “I want you to find out everything you can about the justice in your hand. Childhood. Personality. Philosophy about the law. Anything that might give us an advantage when we walk into that courtroom.”
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on the law?” Jaesang asks.
“It’s not just a legal argument we’re trying to win,” Mr. Kalman explains, “but the hearts and minds of nine human beings. Maybe you’ll discover something in their biographies that will make them sympathetic to the cause. Remember, Supreme Court justices were once kids just like you.”
He steps to a whiteboard he had sent up from a conference room. He draws three columns on it.
“As soon as you’ve done your research, we’ll divide the justices into three categories.”
He labels each column: “On Our Side,” “Not Sure,” and “Heaven Help Us.”
“Any questions?”
Alistair has one. “Can we work in partners?”
“Sure, why not?”
That’s another difference between homework and hotel work. Here you’re part of a team.
So we get to work. Sean uses his cell phone as a mobile hot spot because he doesn’t trust the hotel’s Wi-Fi. After all, this is the Watergate. We have enough iPads, laptops, and smartphones to do our “preliminary round of research.” Later, if we need it, there’s the law library at Georgetown University. Mr. Kalman can get us in.
I look down at the face on my card. Justice Gaylor S. Rauch. Justice Rauch, “Gorch” to his friends, is the newest justice on the Supreme Court. He seems like a pretty strait-laced guy. He grew up in Colorado and went to Catholic school and has two school-age daughters. Both his parents were lawyers, and his mom was the first woman to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
As a boy, Justice Rauch studied a lot, but he also liked to play outside. According to him, “There are few places closer to God than walking in the wilderness or wading in a trout stream.”
Sounds like he’d be pretty receptive to a kid who wishes he could walk in the wilderness or wade in a trout stream but has to do homework all day.
On the other hand, Justice Rauch got straight As all the way to Harvard Law School. Plus he went to Oxford for a philosophy degree. What’s he going to say to a boy who got suspended?
Since he’s brand-new on the court, I have to dig into some of Rauch’s decisions on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s where I find out something that really warms my heart.
Justice Rauch believes in a kid’s right to burp!
This seventh-grader in New Mexico wanted to crack up the kids in gym class, so he started fake-burping really loud. The teacher told him to stop. He kept on burping. She sent him into the hall with the door open. He kept on burping. The burps got louder and louder and funnier and funnier. The coach got angrier and angrier. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she called the resource officer, a.k.a. campus cop.
In New Mexico it’s a criminal offense to disrupt a school activity. Most people take “school activity” to mean an assembly, a graduation, or a college president’s workday. But this school took it to mean any school activity, even a boring PE class. They could have given the burping kid detention or even suspended him for a few days. But they wanted to make a point. So the resource officer handcuffed the kid and drove him to Juvy. His mom sued, claiming the punishment was way too harsh. She lost, appealed, and lost again in the Tenth Circuit.
Justice Rauch wrote a dissent, siding with the kid and his mom.
Sometimes the law can be an ass, he wrote, quoting Charles Dickens. If a seventh-grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what’s a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal’s office? Maybe. But then again, maybe that’s too old school. Maybe today you call a police officer. And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now compliant thirteen-year-old to the principal’s office, arresting him would be a better idea. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option. Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded.
Bottom line: He sided with the kid. Maybe he’ll be on our side, too.
We go on with our research. Alistair’s room service feast comes and goes. And the hotel suite gets quieter than a classroom during the CAASPP test. Only instead of the scratch of number 2 pencils and the creak of erasers on answer sheets, you hear keyboards clicking and papers shuffling. It’s so quiet I can hear Mr. Kalman take a sip of coffee.
I look over and see Sadie reading a New York Times article on her iPad. The headline says, “No Argument: Williams Keeps Seven-Year Silence.”
Sean is reading something called “The Boundaries of Privacy” by Daniel DeFazio, and Catalina is looking at a Google Earth image of some buildings near Yankee Stadium. Mr. Kalman flips through an illustrated biography of RBR, Rachel Braun Rosenburg. Alistair and Jaesang are studying the Constitution.
Meanwhile Mom and Dad are doing something their parents did back in the 1960s—demonstrating. Mom FaceTimes Sadie from the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court.
“What do we want?” Mom shouts.
“Family time!” the others shout back.
“When do we want it?”
“After four!”
That’s one argument that really convinced Mom. Kids spend so much time on homework, they don’t sit down and eat with their families anymore.
But down the block, there’s another point of view. Teachers are chanting, “Supreme Court justices, watch your reach. Students gotta practice what teachers teach!”
And this from another group of teachers: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, this laziness has got to go!”
If we’re so lazy, how’d we make it all the way to the Supreme Court?
We’ve been working for so long that Alistair gets hungry again. He and I ask Mr. Kalman if we can take a break and
