Temple to Justice

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Seventy-five years ago, the Supreme Court heard the inaugural arguments in its new building across from the United States Capitol. The architect, Cass Gilbert, designed a Greco-Roman temple, with imposing white marble columns and immense bronze doors. He intended it to be a monument to justice, and he succeeded.

The building was the project and passion of Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The former president, who had also argued before the court as solicitor general, was just as eager to transform the court’s work. For 134 years, the court had met in borrowed space in the Capitol. The justices then functioned as a court of errors, correcting those of lower courts while only secondarily shaping American law.

Chief Justice Taft convinced Congress to pass the Judiciary Act of 1925, which gave the court wide discretion over its docket. The justices soon began to take cases of major social portent. In the Scottsboro case in 1932, the court overturned rape convictions on bogus charges of nine black youths because the State of Alabama had failed to provide them counsel. Throughout the 1920s, the chief justice also pushed for the new court building, and, in 1929, Congress appropriated $10 million.

In “Representing Justice,” Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis describe the Gilbert building as the major symbol of American courts’ essential role in our democracy and of the Supreme Court’s particular responsibility for making hard choices fairly and openly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/opinion/28tue3.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a211