Last week, Justice Kennedy gave the keynote address at the George Washington Law Review symposium on judicial review. A story about the address in the Daily Colonial contains this nugget:
Kennedy was a particularly notable choice for the event’s speaker because of his influential central position on the court. Kennedy’s opinion is often the swing vote when the court is split.
“I never read a brief I couldn’t go down the middle on,” said Kennedy.
I attended the address, and I believe Justice Kennedy’s actual statement was “I never read a brief I couldn’t put down in the middle.” That is, he wasn’t celebrating his ability to reach compromise. Rather, he was suggesting that legal briefs tend to take too long to make their point, and as a result they can be somewhat tedious to read.
jsimmons says:
I am thankful, at least, that they did not take his “one-sixpack and two-sixpack briefs” quote out of context.
I don’t believe there was a single story in which I was quoted by the student newspaper at my undergraduate university in which I was not taken out of context or misquoted entirely. Using shorthand to take down exact quotes is apparently a rare and incredible talent journalists do not acquire until well after leaving college.
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October 20, 2009, 12:32 pmanon says:
If you’re correct, then that misquote doesn’t seem funny in the slightest.
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October 20, 2009, 1:50 pmTuesday round-up | SCOTUSblog says:
[...] Orin Kerr at Volokh posted an afternoon follow-up to the above-referenced Daily Colonial article. Kerr, who attended the conferences, believes [...]
eyesay says:
Does “go down the middle on” have anything to do with a giant sucking sound? Or, a Slippery slope? Or Foreign Affairs?
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October 20, 2009, 2:28 pmscotus_ant says:
That GW journalism department. Top of the list those kids...
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October 20, 2009, 2:50 pmGoat Scape says:
Rather, he was suggesting that legal briefs tend to take too long to make their point, and as a result they can be somewhat tedious to read.
Most judges will tell you that the vast majority of briefs are way too long. They’re verbose & repetitive, and they’re chock full of legalisms. Their style is designed to be sleep-inducing.
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October 20, 2009, 2:53 pmcboldt says:
– Rather, he was
suggesting that legal briefs tend to take too long to make their point –
Or that by the time he read half way, he got the point. The second half being repetition.
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October 20, 2009, 3:37 pmAnon Y. Mous says:
Fake, but accurate?
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October 20, 2009, 3:42 pmkrs says:
The reporter’s psychic abilities keep interfering with his/her reporting...
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October 20, 2009, 4:17 pmMalvolio says:
Most lawyers are paid by the hour, not by the victory.
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October 20, 2009, 5:01 pmLeo Marvin says:
Every Californian forced to winter in D.C. laments the length of the briefs.
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October 20, 2009, 6:30 pmBleepless says:
Are you sure the operative word was not “muddle?”
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October 20, 2009, 6:41 pmMike McDougal says:
Most judges are idiots who barely read the briefs in the first instance. Once you get outside of federal practice, you’re lucky if the judge applies a bar-exam level of legal knowledge to the case.
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October 21, 2009, 11:41 amDonald Clarke says:
I was there, too, and heard the same thing that Orin did, although I thought his point was a little different: that briefs by their nature aren’t the most riveting of reading. After all, never? That suggests the problem is in the genre, not in the lawyers who write them, at least a few of whom must be very, very good at it.
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October 22, 2009, 6:00 pmKennedy’s School-Press Incident Wasn’t the First « My Daily Joe says:
[...] The Colonial removed the passage from its Web site but Prof. Orin Kerr, a former Kennedy clerk, preserved it in a blog post. [...]
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December 2, 2009, 10:13 pm