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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Rehnquist Slams Lawyers Who Show Up Unprepared Those Who Enter Case In Time To Appear Before High Court Not Always Ready, Chief Justice Says

Richard Carelli Associated Press

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist criticized big-footing lawyers who enter a case just in time to appear before the Supreme Court and don’t bother to master the legal points at issue.

“It may be the attorney general of a state, the senior partner of a law firm, the head of some department who has done none of the work on the case in the lower courts but who is either too busy or too slipshod to truly digest the brief from which he is arguing,” Rehnquist said Friday.

“This sort of insouciance offends the court and can do nothing but harm the client’s case,” he told an American Bar Association group of lawyers who specialize in appellate court work. “This seems to me inexcusable but it does happen on rare occasions.”

The chief justice did not identify any lawyer by name, but many prominent attorneys - even some U.S. attorneys general - have been caught by surprise by unanticipated interrogation from the bench.

During a 1988 argument in an important drug-testing dispute, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh appeared to stumble when asked for some specific details.

“I’m not going to palm myself off on this court as an expert,” he told the justices. But Thornburgh and the federal government ended up winning the case.

Just this week, Attorney General Janet Reno reflected upon the pit-falls of being a high-profile official arguing a case before the high court. She said she would like to argue before the justices, but added: “I’ve got to be prepared … I don’t want to be before Justice Scalia and others and not be prepared.”

Because most members of the current Supreme Court are prone to ask many questions, Rehnquist said lawyers “have to be prepared … you must expect hypothetical questions posing slightly different factual situations from yours, and be prepared to answer them.”

He added: “The only way to successfully deal with these questions is to have thought through the case in advance of argument, and try to anticipate what such questions might be.”

And he had this advice for those lawyers appearing before the nation’s highest court: “Realize that questions may be asked … for more than one reason.

“The questioner may simply desire information which he doesn’t have … But other questions may flow from less benign motives,” Rehnquist said.

“An advocate before our court should be extremely cautious about what he concedes and about the way he answers questions,” Rehnquist said. “You must not shy away from giving answers which the questioner will not like, and you should never give an answer just to please the questioner.”