I was reminded recently of this remarkable story, from Woodward & Armstrong’s excellent The Brethren. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Court’s obscenity doctrine essentially called for case-by-case Supreme Court decisionmaking about whether various films were obscene. Those Justices who took this view therefore watched the movies, together with the clerks. Here’s one item that stuck in my head:
During his later years, Harlan [who was by then nearly blind -EV] watched the films from the first row, a few feet from the screen, able only to make out the general outlines. His clerk or another Justice would describe the action. “By Jove,” Harlan would exclaim. “Extraordinary.”