SCOTUS Gets Down to Business in Opening Session

ABC's Terry Moran reports from New York:

“Oyez, oyez.”

The old word (Middle English for “listen up!”)  rang out once again this morning through the hushed and hallowed precincts of the Supreme Court of the United States, as the justices formally got down to business for the October 2009 term.

Change is in the air; the High Court is a court in transition. There was the newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, way over at the far end of the sweeping bench, firing questions at the lawyers in the first case of the term (though she’d already made an appearance on that bench last month in a re-hearing of the critical campaign-finance case from last term, which she will now help decide). The first case of this new term is a case about Miranda rights. The issue: once a suspect asks for a lawyer and a police interrogation stops, can it resume two years and seven months later, or does a person’s invocation of their Miranda rights last, essentially, forever? The closer you look at the case the messier it gets (the Supremes only get the messy ones), and Sotomayor seemed entirely at home up there.

Towards the other end of the bench, there was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who underwent surgery earlier this year for pancreatic cancer. She was also hospitalized late last month briefly for an iron deficiency, and so there has been some concern about her health and her capacity to continue on the Court. But she seemed right on top of her game, too, to me anyway. Same carefully phrased, incisive questions; same courtesy; same rigor; same slight frailty in her voice. All good.

And sitting right next to Chief Justice John Roberts in the middle of the bench, there was Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court’s longest-serving member. He was nominated by President Gerald Ford in 1975.  Bill Gates was 19 years old at the time. Cal Ripken Jr. was in high school.  The first mobile phone call in the US had just been made. And this coming April, Justice Stevens will turn 90 years old. He’s only hired one clerk for the term that begins next October (the justices customarily hire their clerks a year in advance), so there is a lot of speculation that Justice Stevens is planning to retire next spring. But today, at least, he was all business, offering a typically individual (some might say quirky) take on the case in question. Let’s hope we’re all as sharp as he is when as we enter our tenth decade of life.

So while there is a great deal of speculation about the Court’s membership (it was ever thus), the justices set out today on a term that promises some important rulings on free speech, church-state relations, business regulation, and national-security law. And they go at it with gusto; it’s a “hot bench,” as lawyers sometimes say. That means that the opposing counsel who argue the case get peppered with questions, and can hardly catch their breath up there.  It’s quite a show, quite a spectacle. In a time when ranting and raging and anger and contempt seem to dominate our political discourse, the Supreme Court of the United States remains one place where great public questions are intensely explored and debated, with real facts, creative arguments, intelligence and civility. Think of that.