Amusing MJ

Or more accurately titled: my older brother’s day in the court.

Sorry I’ve been a little MIA this last week.  I took some time off for Thanksgiving with my family, then we took another family vacation to Washington DC because my older brother was able to argue his first case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Or in legal jargon… SCOTUS.  Here’s the deal… my brother is a borderline genius and unbelievably hard worker.  So his resume as a young lawyer is pretty impressive: Stanford Law School and Clerk for Justice Scalia just to name some of the highlights.  He’s been working for a firm named Bartlit Beck for about 4 years and one of the cases he’s been working on made it onto the Supreme Court’s docket for Dec 3rd.  And he wrote the brief and was chosen to argue the case for his client.

Since this is a pretty huge deal, my family decided to all fly out and watch.  Jameson has some pretty fantastic friends who helped arrange for us all to have tickets in the gallery to watch. (although neither case for that specific day were all too controversial or popular among non-legal types, so there is a chance we could have gotten in on public tickets, it would have just been more uncertain and we’d have had to wake up earlier).  If you get the chance to ever watch arguments at the Supreme Court, it is worth it.  There is a lot of tradition and respect involved in the court proceedings so it is fascinating to watch.  You can really see each judge’s personality show through in their questioning and they clearly expect a high level of intelligence and response out of the lawyers arguing.  I’d have been scared out of my mind, but my older brother was calm cool and collected.

I’m not much of a legal type, but I had read enough about Jameson’s case to understand what was going on.  He is the lawyer for Static Control Components and the issue for the lawsuit is whether or not they have standing to sue Lexmark, the printer company.  If you are interested you can read the transcript here.  The most entertaining part of the morning revolved around Justice Breyer, who is somewhat notorious for coming up with entertaining hypothetical questions during oral arguments. In this particular case he decided to talk hypothetically about an ice cream shop and poisonous chocolate, so I spent most of my morning craving a milkshake (minus the poison).

Here is my family as we were headed into court to watch him:

They don’t allow electronics into the court, you have to put them in lockers complete with the little orange keys, so unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the inside.  It was an amazing day and such a privilege to watch my older brother! The decision likely won’t come out until the spring, but according to the SCOTUS blog and my interpretation of how the oral arguments went down, I think it is likely the court will rule in SCC’s favor.

Later in the day we were still wandering around Capitol Hill when Jameson joined us, so we took the opportunity to take a few more photos in front of the Supreme Court building.

Jameson’s wife had already headed back home to take care of my niece, but we got the rest of the family in a great picture!

Stay tuned Monday, I’ll be posting about our whirlwind DC trip and some of my favorite things to do in the city!