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6 things you probably didn't know about the Supreme Court class photo
6 things you probably didn't know about the Supreme Court class photo
Ashley CollmanDec 11, 2018, 01:27 IST
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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Whenever a new judge enters the Supreme Court, the justices gather for a class photo.
For decades, the shot has taken place in the east conference room of the court, with the justices dressed in their traditional black robes.
Today, news photographers only have 120 seconds to capture the moment.
Justice Clarence Thomas makes it hard to get a good shot because he jokes with the justices sitting next to him.
In November, the Supreme Court justices gathered to take a new group photo after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court.
It's a class photo steeped in decades of tradition, down to the red velvet-draped room where the picture is taken and the way the winning photo is selected.
The Chief Justice is seated in the middle, with his four longest-serving colleagues on either side, while the four junior justices are relegated to the back.
But there are other facts about the photo that many will find surprising, which The New York Times revealed in a report on Monday. Here are six things you might not know about the Supreme Court class photo.
1. The Supreme Court generally gathers to take a class photo whenever someone new enters their ranks — but that's not a hard-and-fast rule.
In 2003, the justices decided to take a new photo because they had served together nine years without any changes to the court. A photo from that session is seen above.
2. Until recently, the justices would vote on which photo they would release as their official group shot.
Last year, that changed slightly thanks to advances in digital photography.
For the 2017 photo, as seen above, each justice was able to choose which photo they looked best in, and each of those shots was edited into the final photo.
In reality, the shot is actually a composite, instead of a photo, but it's impossible to tell.
3. News photographers only have 2 minutes to take a photo of the justices together.
After a Supreme Court photographer takes the official picture, news photographers are let into the east conference room to take photos as well.
For decades, news photographers were given just 3 minutes to take their pictures. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist thought this was too long and cut the time down to 2 minutes.
During November's photo, the Supreme Court's public information officer used a stopwatch to count off the 120 seconds that photographers were allowed to take their pictures.
4. Photographers say jokester Justice Clarence Thomas makes it hard to get a good shot because he's always distracting whoever is next to him.
"Our nemesis is Thomas, because he’ll start laughing and joking with whoever is next to him," Dennis Brack, who photographed the justices for many years for Black Star Publishing Company, told The Times.
"If you’re doing a group picture, you want everyone looking at you and looking serious."
6. It's long been rumored that the justices didn't sit for a photo in 1924 because anti-Semite Justice James C. McReynolds didn't want to sit next to the court's first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis.
While McReynolds' anti-Semitism is well documented, the story is false.
According to a 2015 essay by Franz Jantzen, one of the court's photographers, it was all a misunderstanding based on a letter that McReynolds sent to then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
McReynolds said he didn't want to "go through the bore of picture taking until there is a change in the court." He doesn't mention Brandeis at all.
And in fact, Jantzen says McReynolds "showed up for all 10 sittings during his tenure when the new group photograph was to be taken."
"At nine of these 10 sittings there was at least one Jewish justice on the court — first Brandeis, then Benjamin Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter — and although the seating arrangement never called for him to sit beside a Jewish justice, at three of these sessions either Cardozo or Frankfurter stood directly behind him," Jantzen wrote.
