Paul Levine - Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor

Despite the uproar, the Senate had confirmed him, and if the 53-47 vote was not exactly a resounding vote of confidence, it should no longer matter. He was appointed for life, or more precisely, in the words of the Constitution, during “good Behaviour.”

With a capital B.

Sam Truitt intended to lead an exemplary life on the Court. He would do nothing to attract the attention of the Family Values Foundation, which had begun a “Truitt Watch,” promising an impeachment petition at his first lapse. He had a single blemish in his past “Behaviour,” one that attracted the attention of the FBI when he was on the president’s short list for the nomination. Ten years earlier, a law student named Tracey had filed a sexual harassment claim against him after he slept with her, but nonetheless gave her a C in constitutional law. He had remained true to his academic virtue-if not his marital vows-but Tracey believed he had not held up his end of the unstated bargain.

In truth, she had seduced him, but still, he had violated university rules. Stupid.

With a capital S.

In case he didn’t know just how stupid, his wife, Connie, had fixed him with that icy, New England smile and said, “Next time you screw a student, Sam, spare me the humiliation and give her an A.”

Before the misconduct claim could be heard, Tracey dropped out of law school, sparing him an ethical dilemma. Would he have told the truth?

Sure I screwed her, but she wanted it.

Oh, brilliant. Just brilliant. Want some more, Dean? The Veritas , the whole Veritas, and nothing but the Veritas.

While I was grading her paper on the legality of strip searches at border patrol stations, she came into my office and pulled up her skirt. “Want to pat me down, Officer?” She was young and willing and hot, and God help me, I’m just a man.

With a small m.

Or would he have lied?

I never touched her. She is obviously a deeply troubled young woman with an overactive imagination.

That would have violated his principles, but thankfully, he never had to confront the question. Ironic, he thought how his personal life did not live up to his professional standards.

Now, he had taken a vow of monogamy, which in his marriage was akin to a vow of chastity. When he told this to Connie, she laughed and said, “Don’t forget poverty. You’ve taken that vow, too, and dragged me with you.”

Poverty to Connie meaning the inability to afford a summer home in the Hamptons.

But he was serious about living a blameless life. No scandals in or out of Court. No ammunition for the Foundation’s muskets. He wanted a long, productive career, writing cogent opinions that would live forever in our jurisprudence. He wanted to join the thirty-year club with Marshall Story, Holmes, Black, Douglas, and Brennan.

I’ll drive my enemies crazy and then out-live them.

But that morning, Truitt was worried about getting through his first day, not his first decade on the Court. He felt as if he had sneaked into the ornate building. Just after dawn, he’d come up the steps and paused before the giant six-ton bronze doors. Even earlier, he’d sat on a bench on the oval plaza, the Capitol glowing behind him in the rosy early morning light. At the base of the flagpoles, he’d noted the scales of justice, the sword and book, the mask and torch, the pen and mace. He’d gazed up at the two marble figures flanking the steps, seated as if on thrones, Justice on one side, Authority on the other. Above him, sixteen huge marble columns supported a towering pediment with a sculpture of an enthroned Liberty guarded by other symbolic figures. Atop it all was engraved the lofty phrase, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

In a place where the figures were carved from marble, he had feet of clay.

It was a building to be entered triumphantly on the back of an elephant, following a cavalcade of golden trumpets and shimmering banners. Instead, he felt like a thief in the night.

And now, Samuel Adams Truitt-at least the name sounded like he belonged here-sat in Holmes’s chair at the wing-shaped bench of gleaming Honduran mahogany, looking toward the heavens, or at least toward the four-story-high coffered ceiling, when he heard the voice of God.

“Justice Truitt!” the voice boomed.

Chief Justice Clifford P. Whittington both sounded and looked like God, if you pictured the Creator as a sixty-seven-year-old Iowan with a barrel chest, a rugged profile that, like the statues, could be carved from marble, and long, wavy white hair swept back and curling up at the neck.

Startled, Truitt swiveled toward the front of the courtroom. “Chief,” he answered.

The chief justice strode toward the bench. He looked vigorous enough to vault the bronze railing that separated the public section from the lawyers’ gallery.

“Getting a little head start on the rest of us?” the C.J. bellowed, his deep voice resounding in the cavernous chamber. “Or just walking the field before the game?”

The game.

The sole point of common ground between the two men, Truitt thought, was that they both had played football in college. Whittington had been a lineman at Yale in the days before face masks-though some liberal academics claimed he played too long without a helmet-then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was a Renaissance man, a throwback, a midwestern farm boy who beat the eastern intellectuals on their turf at their game. He liked to think of himself as a common-sense judge with traditional values. Truitt considered him rigid, small-minded, and mired in the past.

Truitt also knew that the chief had huddled with Senator Blair, feeding him damaging questions for the Judiciary Committee hearings. If there was one man in America that Whittington did not want on the Court, it was the glamour boy from Harvard who appeared on even more news shows than the biggest publicity slut on the Court, Whittington himself.

“It’s customary for the chief justice to chat privately with a new member of the brethren,” Whittington said, somewhat ceremoniously. By this time, Truitt was making his way down from the bench. It didn’t seem proper to have the chief looking up at him.

“Can we still call ourselves brethren when we have two women on the bench?” Truitt asked with a smile.

“I don’t know,” the chief replied with a malicious grin. “I hear you’re the expert on sexual harassment, Professor.”

Touche.

“I just figured you were doing some field research,” the chief continued, eyes twinkling.

“Actually, I’ve written extensively about sex discrimination,” Truitt said.

“So you have. I read your piece on the male-only military college case. You didn’t much care for my dissent.”

“I just thought it was too late in the day to allow a public college to bar women. The states can no longer discriminate based on gender, race, or sexual preference.”

“‘No longer’? I rather like that term. It implies that the Court has changed, which it damn well has. But the Constitution hasn’t changed, except for those twenty-seven amendments. So, how do you explain it Sam? How did we get so far from the framers’ original intent?”

“We haven’t. They simply weren’t faced with these questions in the context of the current era. If Madison or. Jefferson were alive today, I doubt they’d disagree with giving women the right to vote which took an amendment to their Constitution. I wrote a piece called, ‘Whose Original Intent?’ in which-”

“Read that one, too, and didn’t agree with a damn thing. As for your forays into legal realism, inviting judges to ignore precedent and use the social sciences to shape our lives, well it’s just plain dangerous. Then there’s your essay on legal pragmatism. There are no grand foundational principles, eh Sam.” The chief raised his bushy eyebrows. “Being a legal pragmatist means never having to say you have a theory.”