All of the visual elements familiar today fell into place when the first officially approved group photograph was taken, in color, in 1965. Since 1941, the group photograph has been taken in the Supreme Court Building, which helped standardize it even further.
The Court eventually settled on some ground rules-for example, posing together only after a new Justice arrived, and in an arrangement based on seniority. While this custom probably began at the urging of Washington photographers interested in print sales, it ended up becoming one of the Court’s most popular and enduring traditions.įor 75 years after the first group photograph in 1867, the Justices gathered occasionally for a succession of several talented photographers who had just as many approaches for portraying the Justices.
They are a fleeting hint at what we have missed over the past century as well as what we lose with each passing term.Few visual cues say “Supreme Court” as well as its group photograph. They display an intimacy that is missing in the public’s access to the court, and offer us a brief connection to our Constitution in action by opening the doors of our government to more than the fortunate few who get to fill the courtroom’s 250 seats. These images, moreover, tell us that there is much to be gleaned from even still photographs. Justice Scalia recently argued against cameras by suggesting that watching the Supreme Court would be boring since the justices “just sit there like nine sticks on chairs.” The lines of would-be spectators stretching outside the courtroom before every argument suggest the public feels otherwise. On the far left sits Justice Owen Roberts, the author of “the switch in time that saved nine,” who put a halt to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing plan. The justices captured here are members of the 1937 court that ended what lawyers refer to as the “Lochner Era” through a series of decisions that upheld the New Deal.
The edges of the photo are framed in black, presumably from the cutouts of the purse, giving the tunneled feeling of traveling back in time-which, of course, is exactly what the photo allows us to do.
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