Law school commencement speakers have a tough gig, coming up with original pearls of wisdom for people who already know it all. We wish this year's crop of speakers luck! The TaxProf Blog has a list up of the chosen few here (also available after the jump).

ATL has a top ten list for you, with the reason he or she made the cut. In no particular order:

1/2/3. Stephen Breyer, at American University / Samuel Alito, at Catholic University / Stephen Breyer, at Northeastern

Breyer- 2. Alito- 1. The rest of SCOTUS- 0.

4. Jerry Springer, at Northwestern

For the ability to generate a comment clusterf*ck. Our question: Will there be midgets?

5. Timothy Finchem (Commissioner of PGA Tour), at UVA

Maybe he'll offer golf swing advice. That's probably more useful than the usual commencement speech wisdom.

6. Scott Turow (legal novelist), at Loyola-New Orleans

As suspenseful as his novels are, we bet he can craft an exciting graduation speech.

7. Sandra Day O'Connor, at William & Mary

As good as a sitting justice? Maybe better, since she can spill more dirt.

8. Ted Turner, at Baltimore

Perhaps the CNN founder will talk about how Nancy Grace has changed the face of justice reporting. Her report on an 18-month-old forced to smoke a marijuana pipe. Wow. Inspirational.

9. AG Michael Mukasey, at Boston College

No Founder's Medal for you!

10. Ohio AG Mark Dann, at Case Western

We hope he rolls up in the "Sunshine Express," his SUV with flames down the side. And brings his trouble-making posse.

Law School Commencement Speakers [TaxProf Blog]

Last week, speaking before a class at Harvard Law School, we vowed that we would track down the two missing Alito clerks for October Term 2008. As President Bush might say, "Mission Accomplished."

These two gents will be clerking for Justice Samuel A. Alito in October Term 2008:

1. Michael Park (Yale 2001 / Alito)

2. Andrew Oldham (Harvard 2005 / Sentelletubby)

For those of you keeping track at home, the list of OT 2008 Supreme Court law clerks is now complete. Jaynie Randall, identified as a future Alito clerk, has been moved to October Term 2009 (which is when she'll be clerking for SAA, we've been told).

Both Park and Oldham are currently attorney-advisors at the DOJ's super-powerful and prestigious Office of Legal Counsel. They don't call OLC the Finishing School for the Elect for nothing!

Yesterday we raised the possibility that Messrs. Park and Oldham, in laying low as SCOTUS clerks, were being a bit "precious." We have nothing against preciousness -- it's our stock in trade here at ATL -- but we take back the suggestion with respect to Park and Oldham. The reason the word about them took so long to get out is that they were initially told to keep the good news to themselves -- which they did, showing the discretion to be expected of Supreme Court clerks.

While we're on the subject, we reiterate this recent request, related to our attempt to build a demographic portrait of the incoming clerk class:

If you know of either (1) a clerk who is a racial or ethnic minority or (2) a clerk whose gender is not revealed by their name (we already know that incoming AMK clerk Ashley Keller is a guy), please let us know, preferably by email (subject line: "SCOTUS clerk demographics"). Thanks.

The corrected OT 2008 and OT 2009 SCOTUS clerk lists -- with Michael Park and Andrew Oldham added, and Jaynie Randall moved to OT 2009 -- appear after the jump.

Here are a few items about U.S. Supreme Court clerk hiring:

1. The justices have completed their hiring for October Term 2008. They're all done (including retired Justice O'Connor). If you were hoping to land a SCOTUS clerkship for OT 2008 and haven't heard anything, our condolences -- that ship has sailed.

2. Here are two hires not previously reported in these pages:

(a) Clerking for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (Term not determined): Jaynie Randall (Yale 2006 / M. Patel (N.D. Cal.) / Cabranes).

(b) Clerking for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (for October Term 2009): Scott Keller (University of Texas 2007 / Kozinski).

We don't know whether Randall will be clerking for Justice Alito in OT 2008 or OT 2009. We have reason to believe that she's an OT 2009 clerk. But that would leave two unknown spots for OT 2008 in SAA's chambers, which strikes us as strange. So we are listing her as OT 2008 for the time being, until the mysteriously missing Alito clerks are identified.

(On that subject, if the outstanding Alito clerks for OT 2008 are deliberately trying to conceal their identities from the world -- perhaps thinking their fellow clerks are fit to be listed on ATL and Wikipedia, but they are somehow too "special" to be revealed -- that strikes us as rather precious and self-important. Also, their names will appear on the Court's official list of law clerks in a few weeks, making the cloak-and-dagger secrecy even more unwarranted.)

Keller, a current clerk for Judge Kozinski, will do a Bristow Fellowship in between his Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court clerkships. To the ATL readers who asked about whether Bristow Fellows had been announced, there's your answer.

3. The Clerkship Notification Blog, a tremendously helpful resource for those in the clerkship hunt, is up and running for the 2009-10 clerkship season. The main page is accessible here, and the SCOTUS clerk section is accessible here.

4. Finally, we'd like to pose the same question to you about SCOTUS clerk demographics that we posed last year:

We're interested in figuring out how many law clerks for the upcoming Supreme Court Term are women or minorities. But we don't know all these folks personally (much as we might like to). So we need your help.

If you know of either (1) a clerk who is a racial or ethnic minority or (2) a clerk whose gender is not revealed by their name (we already know that incoming AMK clerk Ashley Keller is a guy), please let us know, preferably by email (subject line: "SCOTUS clerk demographics"). Thanks.

(Some of you might find this inquiry crass. But racial and gender diversity among Supreme Court law clerks has been discussed on Capitol Hill and in the pages of the New York Times and the Legal Times. So please don't get upset at us for being curious about something that members of Congress and the mainstream media are already interested in.)

The latest lists of the OT 2008 and OT 2009 law clerks to the U.S. Supreme Court, with Randall and Keller added, appear after the jump.

Earlier this month, some controversy was generated when it was reported that Senator John McCain, the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee, said he'd be happy to nominate justices in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts -- but Justice Samuel Alito, not so much.

This resulted in speculation over exactly what Senator McCain meant by this. Several observers were confused, since JGR and SAA are jurisprudential buddies. As noted SCOTUS advocate Tom Goldstein pointed out, in the Court's last full Term, Roberts and Alito "had the highest proportion of agreement of any members of the Court, 89 percent in pure agreement, that is to say, not just in the result but in absolute, complete agreement, every word."

So here's one theory. Maybe McCain doesn't like Alito because of the justice's taste in television? From the AP:

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. has convicted "The Sopranos" of spreading what he says are stereotypes about Italian-Americans. During a visit to Rutgers University on Wednesday, Alito complained that the hit HBO television drama not only associated Italian-Americans with the Mafia, but New Jerseyans, as well.

"You have a trifecta — gangsters, Italian-Americans, New Jersey — wedded in the popular American imagination," Alito said at an event sponsored by the Italian studies program at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

But it was such a great show, Your Honor!

A bit more, after the jump.

Things have been quiet on the Supreme Court clerk hiring front. There are rumors that Justice Alito has finally finished hiring for October Term 2008, but nobody seems to know who the lucky winners are. If you know, please drop us a line.

We do, however, have some news. A tipster reports:

Justice Ginsburg just hired a 2006 UVA Grad to begin clerking summer 2009. I knew Pamela Bookman (pictured) in law school, and not only is she incredibly smart, she is remarkably fun and down to earth. Kudos to Pam!

For confirmation, see this article, which has the story of how Pam Bookman got an offer from RBG on the spot:

Even though Bookman [who is clerking for the International Court of Justice in The Hague] currently lives thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., she was still able to arrange an in-person meeting with Ginsburg. Two weeks after receiving an e-mail from Klarman saying that Ginsburg wanted to interview her, Bookman traveled to Washington while visiting her parents during winter break. Bookman chuckled that her interview was her first time ever visiting the Supreme Court. After chatting with Ginsburg about international law, the justice offered her the job on the spot.

“It was thrilling, it was surreal,” she said. “I’m still not sure this is real.”

The current tally of OT 2008 and OT 2009 SCOTUS clerks, with Pamela Bookman added, appears after the jump.

We now yield the floor to Laurie Lin. Who better to report on one of the year's biggest social events than the writer of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch? Over to you, Laurie.

****************
Ambition and Old Spice wafted sweetly through the air last night at the Federalist Society's 25th Anniversary Gala at Union Station -- a kind of right-wing Golden Globes. Nearly two thousand G-ed up conservative lawyers packed the main hall to hear President George W. Bush blast the Senate on judicial confirmations:

"Today, good men and women nominated to the federal bench are finding that inside the Beltway, too many interpret 'advise and consent' to mean 'search and destroy,'" Bush said.

Tickets to the black-tie affair were $250 -- actually $249, because there was a new $1 Madison coin at every place setting -- but that was a small price to pay to breathe the same oxygen as Ted Olson, Antonin Scalia, and Laura Ingraham.

More on the conservative legal fabulosity -- including pictures of the people who didn't hide when they saw us coming -- after the jump.

In October 2006, when LEWW reviewed her wedding, we wrote of Aileen McGrath (at right, with handsome hubby Jason Gillenwater):

Aileen is the President of the Harvard Law Review. HELLO!!! And this isn't mentioned in the announcement, but we've learned that she'll be clerking next year for Chief Judge Michael Boudin, of the First Circuit -- feeder judge extraordinaire.

So, Aileen, have you picked which Supreme Court justice you'd like to clerk for?

She has. We've learned that Aileen McGrath (Harvard 2007 / Boudin) has accepted an offer to clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer in October Term 2008. One source tells us: "[S]he’s universally recognized as brilliant. She was president of the law review and a Sears Prize winner."

We also hear that the fourth clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas for OT 2008 is a D.C. Circuit clerk (believed to be clerking for Judge David Sentelle). Will someone please give up the name?

Update: Her name is Claire Evans. She's a 2002 graduate of Rutgers School of Law - Camden, and she's the first alum of the school to score a SCOTUS clerkship. She clerked for Judge Jerome Simandle (D.N.J.) in 2003, and then for Michael Chertoff, back when he was still on the Third Circuit. Reports our source:

"Chertoff liked Claire so much that he took her to the Department of Homeland Security when he left the bench for Washington. Apparently, Claire continues to amaze and has now secured the most coveted of credentials -- a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship."

"[S]he holds the highest cumulative grade point average in the history of Rutgers School of Law - Camden. And, because of a grading change implemented the year after Claire graduated, it is now mathematically impossible for Claire's epic GPA to ever be topped."

Finally, expect more SCOTUS clerk hires in the near future. From an in-the-know tipster:

There's movement among the justices now. At least Alito, Roberts, Kennedy & Breyer have scheduled interviews in the last few days. Kennedy has scheduled pre-screen interviews, at least some of which are with Judge Kozinski.

The current tally of OT 2008 Supreme Court clerks, with Aileen McGrath and Claire Evans added, appears after the jump.

People, you've been holding out on us. We've been hearing rumors about more Supreme Court law clerk hiring taking place for the next Term (October Term 2008).

For example, there's gossip going around that Justice Samuel Alito has hired a clerk from Judge Harris Hartz (10th Cir.). We've also heard a rumor to the effect that Justice Thomas's mysterious fourth spot for OT 2008 has been filled -- mysterious, because he's already hired at least one clerk for OT 2009 (Marah Stith; see here).

But nobody has let us in on what's been going on. That's just plain wrong.

A list of the OT 2008 clerks that we know of appears after the jump. Are you aware of an OT 2008 clerk who isn't on the list? If so, please contact us, by email (subject line: "Supreme Court clerk hiring").

(You can also post a comment, but we prefer email for this subject, for verification and possible follow-up. Thanks!)

Update: We've been told, from a reliable source, that the rumor that Justice Alito has hired a clerk from Judge Hartz is not correct. As far as we know, Justice Alito has hired only two clerks for OT 2008: Dana Irwin (Yale 2002 / Scirica) and Jack White (Pepperdine 2003 / Alito).

In case you haven't noticed, we have thing for law librarians around here. We've given them their own category tag, and we previously held a law librarian hotties contest (male nominees here, female nominees here, and winners here).

In our recent New York Observer column about Cadwalader, we also tried to include a shout-out to their super-cool library staff, based on this New York Times article. It ended up getting cut in the editing process, but we thought we'd mention it here. From a tipster:

The "librarian at a law firm" who was profiled [in the Times] works at Cadwalader. I'd be curious to hear from the ATL posters which other Vault firms feature these alleged "hipster librarians."

So, any takers? Having a team of crack librarians, ready to go to the ends of the earth to find some obscure treatise or track down elusive legislative history, is one of the nice perks of Biglaw life -- as well as life as a law professor or government lawyer, too.

And you might end up getting more than just USCCAN volumes -- you could end up finding love. Justice Samuel A. Alito, you may recall, ended up marrying his office's law librarian. How neat is that?

If you'd like to praise (or complain about) the library staff where you work, please feel free to do so in the comments. Thanks.

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers [New York Times]
Jeffrey Howard Buckley [jehobu.com]

Welcome. If you're at home, tune in to C-SPAN, which is rebroadcasting the recent book party for Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas's eagerly anticipated memoir, My Grandfather's Son, is now in bookstores -- and topping the bestseller charts (to the relief of his publisher, HarperCollins, which reportedly paid him a $1.5 million advance).

7:05: The party is being held at the elegant, red-brick Capitol Hill home of radio host and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams. Expected to attend: 250 guests, including six Supreme Court justices, Vice President Dick Cheney, and several U.S. senators.

Armstrong Williams is interviewed. He explains that the party has been in the works since June. An overwhelming turnout is expected; more people were turned away than allowed to attend.

7:08: Justice Thomas climbs the stairs. When he enters the kitchen -- which is right at the top of the stairs, and thus (oddly) where everyone enters and exits -- he’s greeted by hearty applause.

Various guests hug him. One guest gushes over his 60 Minutes appearance. CT explains that CBS News made no promises about the nature of its coverage. Interesting. Considering how flattering that segment was, and how uncritical Steve Kroft was in his questioning of Justice Thomas, one might have suspected that Brangelina-type stipulations were in place.

More after the jump.

Warmest congratulations to our friends Junko Ozao and Jason Choy, whose lovely wedding was written up in this week's Vows column. Jason is an associate at Kirkland & Ellis, but Junko is a normal person, and that shortcoming cost them a spot in this week's Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. The news will likely ruin their three-week honeymoon, but such are the ruthless decisions our readers expect LEWW to make.

Here are the six finalists (all lawyers):

1.) Amanda Trivax and Brian Burnovski

2.) Anna Skotko and Ben Vonwiller

3.) Amy Tovar and Benjamin Horwich

More about these legal eagles, after the jump.

* This may come as a surprise to some of you, but Chambermaid isn't the only law-related book that has been published in the past six months. Check out Nicole Black's enthusiastic review of Ivy Briefs, by Columbia Law School grad Martha Kimes. [Legal Antics]

* Harvard Law School snags Bill Rubenstein, a prominent gay law prof. So why are they keeping it on the down low? [Leonard Link]

* Justice Alito thinks some of his colleagues need to shut their pieholes. We think their first names rhyme with "Beano" and "Even." [Legal Times via NYM Daily Intelligencer]

* Sarbanes-Oxley: Hot or Not? [DealBreaker]

* More advice for Loyola 2L: If your non-Biglaw job doesn't pay you enough, try dumpster diving! [ABA Journal]

* Willkie gets sued -- and we're reminded of this lawsuit. State and local governments don't seem to like Biglaw much these days. [San Diego Union-Tribune]

* Hold the cheese. Or get sued for lots of cheddar. [Charleston Daily Mail]

In a recent post about Peter Barta, the Legal Aid lawyer who allegedly videotaped his female colleagues as they were getting undressed, we ranked on policy debaters.

Maybe we should take it back. From a highly informative reader email:

Not all former policy debaters are creeps. Here's a list of former policy debaters who are current or future legal rock stars:

Justice Samuel Alito, Judge Merrick Garland, Larry Tribe, Louis Kaplow, Erwin Chemerinsky, NYU President John Sexton, Jonathan Massey, David Boies, Tom Goldstein, Rebecca Tushnet, Annie Kastanek (OT 2007/Kennedy), and John Hughes (OT 2005/Thomas; pictured at right, captured in mid-debate).

Former policy debaters, please accept our apologies. We did extemp and L-D debate in high school, and we generally viewed C-X debaters with suspicion. They struck us as kids who talked reallyreallyfast, warning constantly of nuclear war. But maybe we were wrong.

To paraphrase the "ignorant tipster" from the Oona O'Connell story: "We feel kind of bad that we prejudged them. Sorry to sound like an afterschool special. But you know what? Perhaps we learned a lesson today. Good on you. 'The more you know.'"

Earlier: Reading the Bartameter (Part 3): What Is Up With Those Policy Debaters?

They prefer crack, thank you very much.

Because why else would the justices rule against noble, crusading students, and in favor of the mean old school officials, in Morse v. Frederick -- aka the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case?*

But free speech proponents shouldn't despair. Over at SCOTUSblog, Marty Lederman notes:

Morse is a very limited holding -- essentially limited to the drug context. The Alito concurrence, joined by Kennedy, is controlling. He writes:

I join the opinion of the Court on the understanding that (a) it goes no further than hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use and (b) it provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue, including speech on issues such as 'the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.'”

In other words: Hey liberals, this Alito guy might not be as bad as you thought.

* As we previously observed, petitioner Deborah Morse, one of the prevailing school officials, is "a curvaceous, dark-haired beauty." But we would hope that Supreme Court justices would decide cases based on the merits, not on the attractiveness of the parties.

Of course, sometimes both factors point in the same direction. See, e.g., Marshall v. Marshall -- the Anna Nicole Smith case.

Quick Preliminary Notes on Hein and Morse [SCOTUSblog]

Judicial junkies, here are two quick items about the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit:

1. New Novel. The eagerly anticipated Chambermaid -- a roman a clef novel set in the Third Circuit by Saira Rao, a former law clerk to the totally terrifying Judge Dolores Sloviter (3d Cir.) -- is now in bookstores. It has arrived a few weeks ahead of its original publication date of July 10. Our earlier discussion appears here.

A very interesting interview with Saira Rao, followed by a comments clusterf**k lively reader discussion, appears at the WSJ Law Blog.

We recently read Chambermaid, which we thoroughly enjoyed. We'll probably review it in the near future, either here at ATL or for a print publication.

(Shameless plug: If you're an editor in need of a book review, please email us.)

Law Blog Q&A: Saira Rao [WSJ Law Blog]
Chambermaid by Saira Rao [official website]

Earlier: A 'Devil Wears Prada' for the Law Clerk Set

2. New Nominee. After Judge Noel Hillman (D.N.J.) was mysteriously pulled as the presumptive nominee for Justice Samuel Alito's former Third Circuit seat, we wondered: What's up with that Third Circuit seat?

Now we know (or think we do). According to media reports, the likely new nominee is Shalom Stone (at right). Here's a brief bio:

Stone, a former chairman of a state bar committee on federal practice and procedure who handles a wide swath of issues, including insurance, RICO, real estate and ethics, has been practicing for 20 years. He's now a partner at the Roseland firm of Walder Hayden and Brogan.

More discussion, after the jump.

We've received some news about Supreme Court law clerk hiring for October Term 2008 (not the upcoming Term, but the one after that):

1. We had heard, through the grapevine, that Justice Antonin Scalia had started his OT 2008 interviewing earlier than usual. And it appears to have yielded at least one hire: Yaakov Roth (Harvard 2007 / Boudin).

Rumor has it that Roth has one of the highest GPAs in the history of Harvard Law School. So presumably he's graduating summa cum laude -- which happens once in a blue moon at HLS.

2. Justice Samuel Alito continues his trend of hiring from the ranks of his former Third Circuit clerks. Jack L. White (Pepperdine 2003 / Alito) will be reunited with his former boss for 2008-2009.

If you have more SCOTUS clerk hiring news to add, please email us (subject line: "Supreme Court clerk hiring").

A list of OT 2008 law clerks thus far, combining what we've just learned with information currently reflected on Wikipedia, appears after the jump.

We're a little late on this (and blame our tardiness on associate pay fixation). But here are two interesting tidbits of Supreme Court gossip, from Tony Mauro of the Legal Times:

1. Carter Phillips' Kin Is Alito Clerk [Legal Times]

One of Justice Samuel Alito's incoming clerks, Jessica Phillips -- who has been described as "beautiful and brainy" -- is the daughter of renowned Supreme Court litigator Carter Phillips. This means that Jessica "will have no involvement in cases in which her father’s firm, Sidley Austin, participates" -- which has ranged as high as 20 percent of the Court's docket.

(Btw, Jessica Phillips is not the first female clerk whose father also clerked for the Court. Mauro ticks off a list of five daughters of male clerks who went on to become clerks themselves. Check it out here.)

2. New Job for Mrs. Roberts [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]
More on Jane Roberts' New Job [The BLT]

Lawyer Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. has a new job -- and it's not at a law firm. The leading legal search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa announced this morning that Mrs. Roberts is leaving Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman's D.C. office to become leader of the In-House Practice Group in Major, Lindsey & Africa's D.C. office.

Inquiring minds want to know: Will Jane Roberts continue to earn more than her husband in her new position?

(That was surely the case in her old job, when Jane Sullivan Roberts was a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop. Even though her most recent post at the firm was Executive Partner for Talent Development, which probably didn't involve a lot of client-billable work, it would be shocking for a Biglaw partner to earn less than her hubby's $212,100 salary as Chief Justice.)

This just in from One First Street. The Associated Press reports:

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long- awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

This ruling lends support to those who predict -- like Jan Crawford Greenburg, in Supreme Conflict -- that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will move the Court significantly to the right in the years ahead. Before Justice Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a decision like this one would have required the conservatives to secure TWO swing votes, AMK and SOC, instead of just one. That frequently doomed the conservatives to defeat in the big-ticket cases.

So Justice Alito, appointed to the Court by President Bush, probably made all the difference here. As Senatrix Barbara Boxer recently observed: "Elections have consequences."

Update: For more detailed commentary, check out Lyle Denniston's SCOTUSblog post, which quotes extensively from Justice Kennedy's majority opinion and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. To read the opinion itself, click here (PDF).

Court Backs Ban on Abortion Procedure [Associated Press]
Court upholds federal abortion ban [SCOTUSblog]
Gonzales v. Carhart (PDF) [SCOTUSblog]
Senator Boxer: Elections Have Consequences [YouTube]

Next time you hear a cell phone go off in a movie or at the theater, and think to yourself, "What an a**hole!", remind yourself: Someday YOU might be that a**hole.

Watch this video, from the start of the Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court finals, which we attended at Columbia Law School earlier this week. Pay special attention to what happens around the 18-second mark:

Yes, that's right. The judges entered the room, their robes billowing out behind them. The court crier made the very formal and grandiose announcement: "Oyez, oyez..." The room fell into a solemn silence. And then, at that precise moment, our computer -- which was in the process of turning on -- made that annoying Windows start-up noise. Loudly.

One could feel a wave of horrified embarrassment sweep through the audience. Justice Alito chuckled, so hopefully he wasn't too offended. But we were mortified (and rightfully so).

In our defense, this was a complete accident. We were in the process of setting up and turning on our computer, and we didn't know when exactly the judges would be arriving. We turned our computer on, and it began the start-up process (which can take a little while). Unfortunately, just seconds after we turned it on, the judges made their entrance. And even more unfortunately, as the silence settled over the room, our computer made that colossally loud cyber-fart.

In any event, our apologies, Your Honors! Please do not blame the CLS audience for this rudeness. It was completely our fault.

We took some rough notes on the proceedings. They will probably interest you only if you attended the Moot Court finals yourselves. Or if you care about the hairstyles of Article III judges.

If you want to see our commentary, it's available after the jump.

Yesterday afternoon, we attended the Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court finals, at Columbia Law School. We interviewed the four finalists prior to the arguments.

Here's our interview with Eric Chesin and Geoffrey Reed:

And here's our interview with David Gringer and Patrick Somers:

After impressive arguments, and deliberation by the distinguished panel -- Justice Samuel A. Alito, Judge Susan P. Graber, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor -- the best oralist prize went to Eric Chesin. Congratulations, Eric!