Neck Doilies and Foot Pillows

As the first day of oral argument on October 4 draws near, the Court will reassemble for its annual “Long Conference” on September 27 and  the investiture of Elena Kagan on October 1.  Somewhere amid this preseason activity, the justices will pose for their class picture, taken only when a new justice joins the Court.

The Oyez Project has these photos going all the way back to the early Chase Court of 1865.  Through the class pictures, the Court’s institutional continuity is set before us in plainly human terms.  Young men and women share the stage with their elders, only to become elders themselves.  Sometimes a single justice links generations disappeared and developing, such as John Paul Stevens, William J. Brennan, William O. Douglas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Stephen J. Field.

Naturally, all eyes will be on Justice Kagan for this year’s class photo, as they were on Justice Sotomayor for last year’s.  But a question for both comes to mind: neck doily or no neck doily?  For Sotomayor’s investiture and the class photo, she wore the neck doily–or jabot–that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor had long donned.  Sotomayor kept the jabot on for Citizens United, her first oral argument, but when the Court reconvened a month later, she had done away with the doily for the unadorned black robe.

So will Sotomayor reapply the doily for this year’s class photo?  And what about Kagan?  Going without it is not without precedent: although O’Connor introduced the jabot, she went without it for every class picture until Ginsburg joined the Court.  But surely neither Sotomayor nor Kagan will want to return Ginsburg to her lonely doilihood of the O’Connor-Sotomayor interregnum.

Speaking of Ginsburg, this year’s photo will be her first seated in the front row.  Given her diminutive height, another question emerges.  If her feet don’t touch the ground, will she bring back the Fuller Foot Pillow?