No email? You must be an eccentric New Hampshire Justice!


Indeed, several of the other former law clerks appeared weary, almost panicked, as they struggled up the forty-four marble steps to the Great Hall. (Kerri Martin Bartlett, a 1983 clerk and a former federal prosecutor in New York, held her corner of the pine casket with both hands and looked as though she might topple under the strain.) Roberts’s unlined countenance didn’t crack, though if he had glanced toward his future colleagues he might have sensed the possibility of difficulties ahead. Two Justices were missing. One of them, Anthony M. Kennedy, had an understandable excuse, for he was at that moment flying back from China. But the question that preoccupied court-watchers involved the other absence: Where was David Souter? And why hadn’t he issued a statement about the Chief, like all of his colleagues? The answers weren’t entirely clear. Souter’s home in Weare, New Hampshire, doesn’t have e-mail, fax, or an answering machine, and he didn’t make it back to Washington until the following day. But his absence served as a reminder that Roberts’s talents had better include the skillful handling of eccentrics. Jeffrey Toobin, Rites, The New Yorker.