Justice Ginsburg is funny!

Here's a recent speech she gave to the Otsego County Bar Association, which I found to be a great read (One example: “I am now delighted to report that not once this term has an advocate called me Justice Sotomayor or Justice Kagan, and the same holds true for my junior colleagues.")

JoshBlackman.com summarized some of the questions Justice Ginsburg reviewed from this Term (Ginsburg: “From the foregoing samples, you may better understand why the court does not plan to permit televising oral arguments any time soon.”):

• “What [did] James Madison th[ink] about video games?” --Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

• “What do you think about Satan?” -- Justice Antonin Scalia in Matrixx Initiatives v. Siracusano.

• “Does al-Qaida know all this stuff?” --Justice Antonin Scalia in NASA v. Nelson. (after a lawyer for the employees said they worked in a “campus atmosphere” and they posed little or no security risk).

• “Where is the 9,000-foot cow?” --Justice Stephen G. Breyer in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, involving Breyer’s hypothetical involving a Swiss law only allowing the purchase of milk from cattle grazing in pastures higher than 9,000 feet.