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When Past Spoke

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05/10/2026

On July 5, 1988, Arnold I. Burns sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and delivered testimony that made him a singular figure in the annals of the Reagan Justice Department: a sitting Deputy Attorney General who had resigned his post four months earlier and was now publicly urging Congress to consider criminal charges against his former boss, Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Burns, a Brooklyn-born lawyer who had spent twenty-five years building a Park Avenue corporate practice before joining the Justice Department in 1985, had been confirmed as the Department’s second-ranking official in July 1986, succeeding D. Lowell Jensen, a former Alameda County district attorney who had worked alongside Meese in the 1960s and who left the Deputy Attorney General’s office that summer for a federal judgeship in California . The professional paths of Burns and Jensen had crossed only briefly in the Department’s upper tier, but Burns’s tenure would end in a manner without recent precedent. In March 1988, Burns resigned alongside William Weld, the head of the Criminal Division, and four other aides, citing what they regarded as improper conduct by Meese, including personal financial indiscretions . The resignation itself was a calculated act of conscience, but the testimony that followed transformed it into something more: an extraordinary public accounting by a former senior law enforcement official who had concluded that the Attorney General’s actions warranted scrutiny by the same criminal justice system Burns had helped oversee. The special prosecutor assigned to the Meese investigation ultimately declined to file charges, a decision Burns accepted without public complaint even as he and Weld appeared before Congress to argue that the evidence supported prosecution . Meese resigned from office later that July, weeks after the testimony, bringing to a close a chapter that had tested the institutional boundaries of the Justice Department. For Burns, the episode was neither a career ambition fulfilled nor a political calculation, but rather the consequence of a decision made in the quiet of an office he would soon vacate, one that placed a lawyer’s obligation to the rule of law above the ordinary bonds of professional loyalty.

05/10/2026

On November 16, 1984, President Ronald Reagan sat down in the Oval Office for a scheduled meeting with two senior officials whose disagreement had reached his desk, Deputy Attorney General Carol E. Dinkins and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The dispute centered on a criminal antitrust case that the Justice Department was pursuing against Britain's Laker Airways, and Dinkins, as the second-ranking official at Justice and a former Assistant Attorney General who had built her reputation on vigorous, even-handed enforcement of the law, came prepared to argue that the case must proceed on its legal merits. Shultz, the seasoned diplomat and former Treasury Secretary under Nixon, countered that the criminal charges threatened to poison the broader relationship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government, an alliance Reagan considered far more consequential than any single commercial dispute. The two officials represented different institutional loyalties within the same administration: Dinkins stood for the principle that an election does not amend federal law, a position she had articulated firmly when she ran the Environment and Natural Resources Division, while Shultz embodied the strategic calculation that foreign relations sometimes demand accommodations that domestic enforcement priorities cannot afford. Reagan listened to both sides and then decided in favor of foreign relations, closing the case with a single directive. The decision carried no hint of personal animus between Dinkins and Shultz, only the kind of institutional collision that occurs when two respected public servants hold irreconcilable views about which harm matters more. For Dinkins, the episode was a rare instance of losing a case not on its merits but on the weight of competing national priorities, and it came during a tenure in which she had already made history as only the second woman to serve as Deputy Attorney General, a position she held while managing more than 60,000 employees and occasionally acting as Attorney General during Cabinet meetings. The Oval Office meeting remains documented in Reagan's own diary, a brief entry that captures the mechanics of governance at the highest level: two officials, one dispute, and a president who chose diplomacy over prosecution, leaving the case closed and the relationship with London intact.

04/10/2026

In December 1996, as her appointment to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission awaited confirmation, Carol E. Dinkins and her husband, O. Theodore “Ted” Dinkins, made a quiet decision that would become the most distinctive fact of her seven-year tenure. Ted Dinkins, a geophysicist and oilman, and Carol, a Houston attorney who had already served as the nation’s first female Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division under Ronald Reagan, would visit every state park in Texas during her term. Governor George W. Bush appointed her to the commission on February 3, 1997, for a term expiring February 1, 2003, and she was confirmed as the commissioner representing Harris County. Over the years that followed, the Dinkinses traveled the state’s 130-plus parks, from the piney woods of East Texas to the Chihuahuan Desert of the Trans-Pecos, from coastal marshes to the canyons of the Panhandle. For a commissioner based in Houston, this was not a casual undertaking: the drive from Houston to Big Bend Ranch State Park alone spans more than 600 miles across some of the most remote terrain in the continental United States. When she visited parks, she came not as a dignitary on a schedule but as a visitor with her husband, sleeping in park cabins and campsites, meeting superintendents and maintenance crews, and seeing firsthand the difference between the parks on paper and the parks on the ground. By the time she resigned her seat on December 21, 2002, citing the demands of her law practice, she had become the only commissioner in the history of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to have visited every state park in Texas. The distinction was noted in her Texas Women’s Hall of Fame citation and in the commission’s own records. Ted Dinkins appears in none of those official citations, yet the shared miles and nights in park campsites were an inseparable part of the record: a marriage that turned public service into a pilgrimage across the state they both loved, one park at a time.

04/10/2026

In August 1981, John G. Roberts Jr., a 26-year-old fresh from a Supreme Court clerkship, walked into the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith and immediately became a backstage architect of the Reagan administration's fight over the Voting Rights Act. That fall, as Congress moved to strengthen the landmark 1965 law by banning voting practices with discriminatory results, not just those with proven intent, Roberts drafted memos and op-eds arguing that such a "results test" would prove nearly impossible to administer and would open the door to federal intrusion on a massive scale. In a December 22, 1981 memo, frustrated that the administration's position wasn't being forcefully presented on Capitol Hill, Roberts wrote that something had to be done to "educate the senators on the seriousness of this problem". He helped ghostwrite an op-ed defending the administration's narrower approach, even drafting language to close out the piece responding to criticism from Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League. His private prediction was that a results test would create a minority entitlement to representation "proportional to their population in the community," a view that placed him squarely against the bipartisan coalition then assembling behind the legislation. Despite the administration's efforts, Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized and expanded the Voting Rights Act in 1982, explicitly rejecting the intent standard Roberts had defended. Two decades later, during his 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Senator Edward Kennedy pressed Roberts on those memos, and Roberts replied carefully that he had been "still working for the administration" at the time and would confront such issues as a judge, not a staff attorney. When the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court again in 2009, Chief Justice Roberts wrote a narrow opinion that left the law standing while questioning whether its most demanding provisions were still justified, asking during oral argument whether Southerners were "more likely to discriminate than Northerners". Four years later, in Shelby County v. Holder, he wrote the majority opinion that struck down the law's preclearance formula, effectively ending the federal oversight regime he had spent his first year in government trying to weaken.

04/10/2026

On November 6, 1964, in San Francisco, William French Smith married Jean Webb Vaughan at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where she had briefly worked in the public affairs office. The ceremony marked the beginning of a partnership that would carry Smith from a prestigious Los Angeles law practice into the highest reaches of American government. By that date, Smith had already lived a full life: born in Wilton, New Hampshire, on August 26, 1917, he graduated summa cm laude from the University of California in 1939, earned his law degree from Harvard in 1942, and served in the United States Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He joined the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 1946 and built a career as a corporate lawyer specializing in labor relations. His first marriage, to a woman named Marion, had produced four children, three sons and one daughter. Jean, for her part, had been married to George William Vaughan, an auto dealer who became assistant secretary of defense under President Eisenhower and died in 1963; she had risen through the Junior League to serve as its national president from 1958 to 1960. The couple met at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and their union in 1964 merged two lives already marked by public service and personal loss. What neither could have known then was how central their marriage would become to one of the most consequential political friendships in modern American history. Smith had first met Ronald Reagan in 1963 or thereabouts, before Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor, and soon became the future president’s personal attorney, investment adviser, and a member of the informal “kitchen cabinet” of California millionaires who guided Reagan’s political rise. Jean Smith, as the wife of that trusted counselor, entered a world of Republican politics and Washington governance that would define the next two decades. When Reagan nominated Smith as the 74th Attorney General of the United States on December 11, 1980, and Smith assumed the post on January 23, 1981, Jean stood beside him as he pursued an aggressive anti-crime agenda, helped engineer the historic nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman on the Supreme Court, and served until February 25, 1985. After Smith died of cancer in Los Angeles on October 29, 1990, at the age of 73, Reagan issued a statement mourning the loss of a “valued and trusted friend and adviser,” and Jean Smith continued her own distinguished record of public service on boards including the United Way and the National Endowment for the Humanities until her death in 2012 at 93.

04/10/2026

In October 2003, making his first argument before the Supreme Court he had once served as a law clerk, Ted Cruz felt the justices “were ripping me limb from limb.” The case was a states’ rights dispute over a Texas Medicaid consent decree, and Cruz, then the state’s newly appointed solicitor general, argued that Texas could ignore the settlement. Justice Antonin Scalia was openly skeptical, asking from the bench why the other side would ever accept such a decree, calling the premise “crazy.” Cruz later wrote that he felt “like a chunk of tuna thrown to a school of sharks,” and the Court ruled against him 9-0 . The humiliation might have ended a conventional appellate career, but Cruz’s connection to the Court ran deeper than one argument. Seven years earlier, during the 1996 term, he had clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the conservative icon he revered and whose chambers he described as an intellectual home. That clerkship, one of the most coveted credentials in American law, placed him inside the Court’s marble temple at twenty-six, drafting opinions and watching the justices up close. Richard Garnett, a fellow clerk that term, remembered Rehnquist’s chambers as unpretentious, where the Chief loved cheeseburgers and weekly tennis games and told clerks to drop the “your honor” formality . Cruz was the most ardent death penalty advocate among Rehnquist’s clerks that year, and his writing style became recognizable around the building . He also carried a lighter memory from that term: when the Court needed to understand internet po*******hy for a pending case, the librarians set up tutorials for two justices at a time with their clerks. Cruz found himself standing behind a computer with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, watching a librarian deliberately misspell a fruit’s name and unleash a flood of explicit images. O’Connor, he recalled, lowered her head and muttered, “Oh, my” . The clerkship did not guarantee courtroom mastery. When Cruz returned to the Court in 2003 as an advocate, he had argued only two cases in any court before, and the Medicaid loss exposed his inexperience . But the education inside Rehnquist’s chambers proved durable. Over the next five years Cruz argued eight more Supreme Court cases, grew more polished, and won significant victories, including a 6-3 ruling in Medellin v. Texas that President Bush could not order Texas courts to comply with a World Court decision . The man who had once watched O’Connor grimace at a computer screen now stood before the bench he had learned to navigate from the inside, transformed from clerk to advocate.

04/10/2026

On October 27, 2020, in the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court Building, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administered the Judicial Oath to Amy Coney Barrett, completing the constitutional and statutory requirements that made her the 103rd Associate Justice of the United States. The ceremony was private, attended by members of the Court, and Barrett’s husband, Jesse M. Barrett, held the Bible on which she swore the oath. Her seven children were not present, a deliberate choice that kept the moment focused on the institutional weight of the occasion rather than the family tableau that had dominated her White House swearing-in the previous evening. The contrast between the two ceremonies was striking: the South Lawn event hosted by President Donald Trump had been a public spectacle, with Justice Clarence Thomas administering the constitutional oath before an audience that included senators and political allies; the Supreme Court ceremony was quiet, almost severe, conducted among the justices she would now join. Barrett’s path to that room had been compressed into an extraordinarily brief window, from her nomination in late September following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Senate confirmation on October 26 by a vote of 52 to 48, just eight days before the presidential election. In remarks that evening, she had emphasized the distinction she saw between the roles of senator and judge, saying that a judge must resist policy preferences and that the oath meant she would do her job without fear or favor and independently of the political branches and her own preferences. The private oath ceremony the next morning carried its own symbolism: by taking the judicial oath at the Court rather than at the White House, Barrett formally crossed the threshold from nominee to member of a coequal branch of government, beginning her service at a moment when the Court was already weighing emergency requests related to the election. Nearly a year later, on October 1, 2021, the Court held a formal investiture ceremony in its courtroom, a traditional but purely ceremonial occasion that had been delayed by the pandemic. Barrett sat in the same chair used by Chief Justice John Marshall in the early nineteenth century, a piece of furniture employed for every investiture since Lewis F. Powell Jr. in 1972, as Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco presented her commission and Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath once more. After the session adjourned, Barrett and Roberts walked down the front steps of the Supreme Court to the plaza for photographs, and then Jesse joined her there, completing the public record of a justice whose tenure had begun in a small room with a family Bible and her husband’s hands steadying it.

04/10/2026

On February 1, 2006, inside the East Room of the White House, Samuel Alito stood before Chief Justice John Roberts to take the constitutional oath as the 110th justice of the Supreme Court, and seated nearby were the three people who had shaped the quiet, private life he was about to place in the national spotlight: his wife of nearly twenty-one years, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, and their two children, Philip and Laura. The moment marked the end of a bruising confirmation fight, but it also marked something more personal, because Alito had married Martha-Ann in 1985, five years after meeting her in a law library where he had gone to research cases as a clerk and where she worked as a librarian. He was so reserved that it took him thirteen months to ask her out, and the couple dated for a year before his career pulled him to Washington in August 1981, when he accepted a position in the solicitor general’s office. They married four years later and built a life largely out of public view, raising Philip and Laura mostly in New Jersey while Alito served on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, until President George W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court in October 2005. The confirmation process that followed was unusually contentious, and Martha-Ann later described the two months preceding her husband’s swearing-in as “the horrible part of our life,” a remark she made while introducing him at an awards ceremony in 2007. When Alito finally took the bench, however, the new justice did not begin with a grand address or a sweeping statement about his jurisprudence. On February 16, 2006, during his formal investiture ceremony in the Supreme Court’s courtroom, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales presented the commission signed by President Bush, and Alito then took the judicial oath, pledging to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich”. The words were ancient and formulaic, but the scene itself was documented in a photograph that preserved the personal stakes behind the constitutional ritual: Martha-Ann, Philip, and Laura seated together, watching the man who had once been too shy to ask a librarian for a date assume a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court.

04/10/2026

September 29, 2009, was a bright Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., and for the first time since her confirmation that summer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor walked into the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building to take her place in the court's official group photograph, a ritual repeated every time a new justice joins the bench. The Associated Press photographer Charles Dharapak captured the arrangement: Sotomayor, the 111th justice and the first Hispanic American to serve on the court, stood in the back row on the far right, directly behind two of the most conservative members of the bench, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas . The Los Angeles Times noted the visual irony that same day, observing that she was standing behind Scalia and Thomas but adding, "No one expects her to vote that way" . That photograph followed an investiture ceremony three weeks earlier, on September 8, when Chief Justice John Roberts administered the judicial oath to Sotomayor in a proceeding that lasted roughly four minutes, with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden looking on . The court had convened a special summer session so the new justice could hear her first oral argument the very next day in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a case that would reshape campaign finance law . At the September 8 ceremony, Sotomayor wore a white jabot made in Quebec, a gift from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had learned from Sandra Day O'Connor that feminine judicial collars were nearly impossible to find in the United States . Years later, at the University of Minnesota in October 2016, Sotomayor described the complicated relationship she developed with Scalia, the colleague positioned nearest her in that 2009 photograph, saying, "There are things he's said on the bench where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it," before adding that losing him felt like losing a family member and that working intimately with someone revealed "the really personal good side of them" . The court's first Latina justice, standing behind the court's most vocal conservative in her first official portrait, would go on to serve alongside Scalia for nearly seven more years, sparring with him in opinions and arguments until his death in February 2016 .

04/10/2026

In September 1986, when Antonin Scalia appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he did not come alone. Seated behind him in the hearing room were his wife Maureen and all nine of their children, a visible tableau of the family life he had built alongside his legal career. The decision to bring the entire family was not a calculated political gesture but a reflection of the central role they played in his life. Scalia, who died on February 13, 2016, at the age of 79, often described his marriage and his nine children as the foundation of everything else he did. He met Maureen McCarthy while both were students at Harvard Law School, and they married in 1960; over more than five decades together, they raised five sons and four daughters: Ann, Eugene, John, Catherine, Mary, Paul, Matthew, Christopher, and Margaret Jane, known as Meg. The household in McLean, Virginia, was governed by firm rules rooted in the Catholic faith and a conviction that the Scalia family should maintain its own standards rather than follow the culture around it. Wearing blue jeans to school, for instance, was initially forbidden, a restriction the children eventually wore down, but only after their parents repeatedly asked why they would want to be like everybody else. Scalia drove the family an hour each week to St. Matthew's Cathedral in downtown Washington for a traditional Latin Mass, a ritual he considered one of his greatest sources of pride. He acknowledged that his demanding career kept him from attending soccer games or piano recitals, and he did not apologize for it; his own parents had never attended his events, and he did not take their absence personally. But the family remained his most deliberate project. When asked about his life, Scalia called Maureen "the product of the best decision I ever made" and credited her with raising their children "with very little assistance from me," adding with characteristic warmth that there was "not a dullard in the bunch". In a 2016 memorial resolution, the Colorado General Assembly noted that he and Maureen took great pride in their nine children, raising them in the same devout Catholicism of his upbringing. By the end of his life, the family had grown to include dozens of grandchildren, and the children had become lawyers, a priest, a poet, an Army major, and parents themselves. Scalia's public identity as a jurist was sharp and combative, but the private architecture that sustained him was simple and steady: a wife he married in 1960, nine children whose names he listed with evident satisfaction, and a faith he practiced every Sunday with the family gathered around him.

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