• U.S.

The Law: An Alleged Vacation

4 minute read
TIME

Freshman Justice William Rehnquist thought it would be safe to rent a beach-front condominium in Delaware for two weeks early this summer. Then he found himself spending most of his time driving to and fro between the seashore and Washington, D.C. “Out of the two weeks,” he says, “I think I got to spend five days at the beach.” Justice Potter Stewart escaped to a fishing lodge in New Hampshire, but he has to telephone his office every day—and keep reading. “We’ll get about 800 cert petitions* through the summer,” he says.

Officially, the Supreme Court is now closed for three months (until Oct. 2), a period in which the overworked Justices should be free to take a broad look at how their decisions affect the law and the nation. But court problems simply will not go away during what one Justice described to TIME’S David Beckwith as “the alleged summer vacation.”

Last year the Pentagon papers cut into the summer recess. This year the dispute over the California delegation to the Democratic Convention brought the Justices back to work in only the fourth special summer session in history. After that, the court firmly turned down two more bids for special hearings, on the Ellsberg case and on the Ripon Society challenge to the Republican delegate selection process. Even when the Justices have scattered around the country, however, the Supreme Court machinery continues to operate through an informal system of phone calls and couriers.

Recess or no recess, each of the Justices must oversee the federal courts in a given area of the country. “Applications—for a stay of an order, for granting of bail and so forth—average about one per day,” says Lewis Powell, “and they usually require immediate attention.” When he arrived last week for a three-day visit with his daughter near Hunt, Texas, he hoped to enjoy his first nonweekend leisure time of the summer, but two large packages of court business were waiting for him.

Several Justices feel that they must stay in or near Washington during most of the recess. And any Justice who departs maintains regular contact. Potter Stewart drives daily to the post office in Franconia, N.H., where at first “a few of the Yankees looked pretty skeptically” at the franked manila envelopes that poured in. “I think they wanted to know where the stamps were,” says Stewart, who puts in three or four hours of court work seven days a week.

Robe Showing. William Douglas has no phone at his retreat in Goose-prairie, Wash.; so in a pinch, his secretary calls a neighbor who lives six miles away. When Douglas wants to call, he drives 40 miles to a roadside phone booth outside Yakima, Wash., drops in a dime and gets his office collect. Keeping contact with Thurgood Marshall also has its difficulties. In the Virgin Islands in July, he broke an ankle in a Jeep accident. Last summer he had appendicitis, and two summers ago he got pneumonia. “We have a regular routine here,” says his secretary. “I go on vacation and the Justice goes to the hospital.”

Beyond formal judicial duties, the Justices also fill what might be called showing-the-robe obligations at events like the recent American Bar Association meeting. By the end of the summer most will have attended meetings of various legal advisory committees on which they serve, as well as a conference of the judges in their area. Chief Justice Warren Burger has extra administrative work so that when he leaves for a 21-week mountain vacation near Washington, D.C., it will be his only full time off, and even then he anticipates devoting three to four hours a day to accumulated cases.

Recharging. There is, of course, some time to relax. Says Stewart: “It’s extremely important for me to do some fishing, climb a hill, look at the trees and mountains and lakes.” Rehnquist, one of the court’s most gregarious members, last week returned from two days in Gooseprairie with Justice and Mrs. Douglas. How had the court’s most conservative and liberal members fared? “We had a great time,” Rehnquist reported. “We have a lot in common. We all love the out-of-doors.”

Even outdoors, though, the press of work is hard to escape. “The load is reaching near-crisis proportions,” says Powell. “It doesn’t matter to me personally, but I am quite worried about the court as an institution.”

*Most cases can come before the court only by way of a petition for certiorari, which the court may grant or not.

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