When (if ever) it's appropriate to make jokes before the US Supreme Court

The post says that "Attempts at humor usually fall flat" but also that it's not humorless. If you've listened anytime recently, oral arguments can have semi-formal tone. Of course there's requisite formality of procedure, and I can't even recall an occasion when that has lapsed, but because these are actual discussions, there is a good amount of rather straightforward talk. Justices regularly construct absurd scenarios to test the limits of arguments, and some of the following argumentation can be pretty funny. It's worth a listening from time to time.

You'll see many comments here complaining about the corruption or partisanship of the Supreme Court. Notably, though, no actual accusations of bribery (gifts to judges from people not involved in cases is not bribery), nor are any opinions articulated on mistakes made by the court in its majorities. Which is to be expected, Hackernews is not populated by lawyers, after all!

I can certainly empathize with people who don't like the outcomes of some recent SCOTUS decisions. I don't like the outcome of Dobbs for example. But picking outcomes is emphatically not the job of the judicial branch, that is Congress' job. The judicial branch is supposed to interpret laws and the Constitution as accurately as possible, but not write them.

N.b. some interesting stats: in the 2024 term, for example, ~40% cases were unanimously decided, and only about 1 in 11 were split along ideological lines, according to this study from scotusblog (ideology calculated as Martin-Quinn score): https://cdn.sanity.io/files/pito4za5/production/d8301fc26d15...

All that precise language when addressing usually some old guy in black robes (I intentionally put it that way, I'm not in front of the court) reminds me a lot of Japanese formality rules.

It drove me crazy to try to remember and assess not just how to say it in Japanese, but how to change the subject to be honorific, or extra honorific. Or change my own pronoun to ore, boku, watashi, watakushi depending on whether I wanted to try to be intimate or not. Or, remember that damn conjugation rules around converting the sentence to passive, or whatever.

Those rules made me constantly insecure when talking to peers, even when they weren't technically peers. When I did aikido, I was starting as a 1st year in aikido, though I was a 3rd year in college. So, many of my "senpais" were younger but I had to address them a certain way, even when we weren't in the dojo.

All these rules from this article seem like they are designed to give the judges power over the people addressing the court. That seems really strange when I think about it that way. Why do we need to lionize the people, can't their brilliant legal minds carry the full weight of the arguments and decisions?

A growing portion of the population couldn't care less about what's "appropriate" at SCOTUS anymore.

When you basically let your institution be co-opted as a part of a man's effort to run the federal government as a private company intended exclusively for the benefit of himself and his associates, you can expect jokes.

Chief Justice John Roberts states the supreme court isn’t partisan.

I'd prefer SCOTUS to blog about when it is appropriate for a justice to fly treason flags supporting insurrectionists or decline to recuse themselves from cases involving their insurrectionist family members.

You don’t need to. The Supreme Court makes its own jokes.

The US Supreme Court currently is a joke itself with their Kavanaugh stops laws and other agenda driven politics and mostly in the way the cowardly justices aren’t even providing reasoning or guidance on any of their brain dead rulings to lower courts.

The current Supreme Court has no regard for law and justice for the people of the USA. What a joke.

The Supreme Court is the joke… it has lost all credibility with partisan inconsistency and overt bribery.

The Supreme court currently is itself a joke. They are bought and paid for agents of Trump.

It used to matter if you would say such things in court. It does not matter now when the court is loaded with unintelligent purchased ghouls.

Are all 4 existing comments here from bots? They’re basically all saying the same thing..

In modern politics the end justifies the means.

Are you pro abortion? The end justifies the means, because you are saving women.

Are you pro live? The end justifies the means, because you are saving babies.

As long as the playing field is good vs evil there can't be a rational discussion.