Roger Smith rounds up the latest human rights developments
The US media has been full of coverage of the Supreme Court challenge to the president’s health legislation, generally known as ObamaCare. The New York Times revealed that advocates for both sides had been using Georgetown University Law Centre’s ceremonial courtroom as a mock up of the Supreme Court. According to The Times, there has been a threatened shortage of “something that had never been thought in short supply: Washington lawyers willing to pretend to be Supreme Court justices”.
Realistic representation
It turns out that US lawyers make a practice in big cases of running through their arguments in as realistic a representation of the Supreme Court as possible. Such advocates have, on the one hand, to compress their argument into very tight time limits but, on the other, the cases are, by our standards, pretty short. For example, the court mandated 90 minutes of argument in total on the consequences of any decision that they made to strike down the legislation.
English counsel might reckon to have barely got into their stride
