Birthright on Trial: The View from Section F2

Our dispatch from inside the Supreme Court for this morning's oral arguments.

PRESS BOX, SUPREME COURT —The place looked like the waiting room of Olympus. Marble, silence, power. Everyone wore the uniform—dark suits, grave ties, faces frozen into masks of reverence. It was cold, like the morgue. You could feel your pulse in your teeth.

From my seat in Section F2, the view was lousy—a red curtain pinned with the Court’s golden scales blocked half the room. Even here, amid the gospel of American law, your view depended on luck.

The chairs were hard, the kind that punish posture and remind you you're not supposed to get comfortable. An intern next to me scribbled like her life depended on it, which, given the law school admissions game, it probably did. A security officer nearby kept looking at her like she was hiding something. Maybe a bomb. Maybe a future.

The Justices marched in, and everyone stood. It felt like a church without a god. Then came the government’s lawyer, John Sauer—crooked back, raspy voice, and the look of a man already halfway down the gallows.