Legal News

Rehnquist Papers: Bush Beats Kerry, Breyer Pays Thomas

By Ashby Jones

We haven’t done much on this so far, but Tony Mauro over at the National Law Journal has been doing a nice job digging into the papers of former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, for some interesting little nuggets. The papers were released earlier this month at Stanford’s Hoover Institution Archives.

The latest installment from Mauro concerns a host of messages Rehnquist received after he discovered he had thyroid cancer in late October 2004.

Reports Mauro:

“Top priority at Court,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is “to have our Chief back with us, steadily on course toward a cancer-free future.”

Justice David Souter reported to the chief that, after an overly long discussion among the justices of a minor case in Rehnquist’s absence, “I could hear Tony [Kennedy] muttering under his breath, ‘Five minutes on [the case]. The chief better get back here fast.’” Souter added, “That’s certainly the sense of the Court as we all pull for you in your ordeal.”

From Justice Stephen Breyer also came a handwritten note: “You are missing nothing here! The cases are routine; our lunchtime discussions need your input — particularly on recent films.” Breyer did joke that Rehnquist had missed a chance to win some money from him in the justices’ apparently low-stakes wagering over the presidential election. “I paid $1 to CT [Clarence Thomas],” Breyer said. It’s a safe bet that Breyer had put his money on John Kerry and Thomas on George W. Bush.

As Mauro writes, “the get-well letters, among many others, stand as testament to the power of a chief justice to shape the Court he leads — and how the Court suffers when he is ill.”

But to us, the notes illustrate something else as well — aside from the fact that it’s a bit odd that any money at all was paid over a bet on the 2004 presidential election. It’s sometimes hard to believe the old line about how collegial the court is, given the stakes of what the court does and how pointed so many of the opinions and dissents can be. But these notes, and others quoted within Mauro’s story, really do reveal a collection of people that somehow manages to legitimately enjoy each others’ company.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).