I had a different reaction to Supreme Court Public Information Officer Patricia McCabe’s comments about Beyoncé than Josh Blackman did – I thought it was probably just McCabe A well-intentioned but strange comment from Cabe herself, rather than evidence of an evil quid pro quo in the dispute between Beyoncé and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson – but I want to focus on one comment from Josh that I feel This is unlikely to be true:
For all the anger at Judge Thomas, nobody It is doubtful that he and Harlan Crowe were true friends. They met nearly thirty years ago and formed a close friendship. Whatever generosity Crow shared with Thomas was based on kinship and connections developed over the years.
I have no particular reason to suspect that Justice Thomas and Harlan Crowe were very close friends. Having said that, it seems wrong to say that no one doubts this. Many people do this. To me, this raises an interesting question: Do Supreme Court justices have real friends? Or, more specifically, if you were a judge, how would you know who your true friends were, and how would you know who had decided to “become friends” with you for personal or political reasons?
Of course, if you have an old friend you’ve known since childhood, or a law school roommate you’ve kept in touch with over the years, that’s probably a true friend. If you were friends with someone before becoming a significant other, you can probably trust the friendship.
It seems to me, however, that new justices should be, and generally should be, quite wary of those seeking friendship. Many people who are interested in politics are willing to become friends with the justice. For some, it might just be a fascination with power. Justices have many of these powers, and they also have lifetime terms.
Some of these interests may have an agenda. My sense is that when judges arrive in Washington, D.C., or if they’re already in Washington, D.C., when they get to the courthouse, there’s usually a group of people who are very eager to be friends with them, and lo and behold, they may just have one that they hope to eventually give Impress new friends. I guess if you were in court, it might be reasonable to be skeptical of your new “friend.”
In a largely but not entirely unrelated way, I wonder what it’s like to visit law school as a judge. I understand that when a school is lucky enough to have a Lord Chancellor visiting, it is common for the Lord Chancellor to be treated like royalty. What to think when (as I have seen in several places) the dean arranges for a judge to meet with several current 3Ls during their visit (who happen to be at the top of their class and are preparing to submit clerkship applications to the court) ? I think the judges understood what was going on because it wasn’t that subtle. Maybe, when people in your field interact with you this way for a long time, it becomes somewhat normal. It must be weird, though.
