2nd Blog Post: Katie Gibbons
On Tuesday October 7th I went to the Supreme
Court. When visiting the Supreme
Court, there are two lines: one line for people who want to sit for the entire
hearing and a second line for people who just want to see court in session, in
which you get to enter for three minutes and leave. Seating for the entire first hearing started at 9:30AM for
the general public. Lawyers and
courtroom staff were allowed to enter before the general public and influenced
the amount of people that would be allowed in. Unfortunately, for the first hearing, only about 25 general
public people got to enter to sit in on the entire hearing and I did not make it
in.
The second case of the day, the one
that I got to witness, was Dart Cherokee Basin v. Owens. The question presented to the Supreme
Court was “is a defendant seeking removal of a case to federal court required to
provide evidence supporting federal jurisdiction in the notice of
removal?” By the time that the
general public was able to enter the hearing, after being processed through
security and briefed, the hearing was already over half way completed. However, we got to witness about 25
minutes of the hearing. We got to
go into the courtroom, which was absolutely beautiful. I got to see all nine Justices and hear
their comments and questions for the attorney. Throughout the hearing, I kept
thinking about how intimidating it would be to be the attorney arguing before
the Justices. Several of the
Justices, as well as the arguing attorney, made sarcastic comments that made
the entire courtroom laugh, which was something that I was not expecting, but
it made the hearing fun. After the
hearing, there was a large media presence out front of the Supreme Court. Even though my visit to the Supreme
Court did not go as smoothly as it was planned, I still really enjoyed the
experience of getting to witness the Court in session.
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