5 interesting facts about the US Supreme Court

In celebration of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, all this week, I’m going to write a post about the Supreme Court and the US constitution. Hopefully at the end of this week we’ll all be a little bit more knowledgeable about the highest court in the land and the American constitution. 

1.The president of the United States has the right to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court!  Yup!   And the last president to argue a case before the court was Richard Nixon..he lost! 

2. The US justices used to wear white wigs, similar to the ones worn by British justices, but during the first session of the court in 1790 William Cushing was the only justice to show up wearing the wig (I guess he thought it was cool..)  But his fashion faux pas didn’t go unnoticed.  And Thomas Jefferson eventually convinced Cushing to get rid of it declaring that the wigs made the judges ” look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum.”  

3. The US Supreme Court has no specific size and the number of Justices on the Supreme Court has increased as the US has grown geographically and as  judicial circuits have increased.  

4. If  the 10 000 bill was still in circulation it would be called a Chasey (at least that’s what I would call it..lol) because Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase appeared on it.

5. The 27th President of the United States William Howard Taft also served as the 10th Chief Justice of the United States. He was nominated by President Warren Harding after the death of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White.  Wouldn’t you just love to have those two jobs on your resume?