I prefer my Cooley with some
fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Courtrooms are places for serious business. After all, people’s lives, businesses, property, and past and futures are at stake. It’s right that the court, the lawyers, and the public take what goes on there seriously.

But judges and lawyers are also human (really), so it should surprise no one that moments of levity and humor can creep in. (Remember lawyers: you are the straight man, the Martin to the judge’s Lewis; they make the jokes, not you.) And as noted by lawprofs Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sagin in Taking Laughter Seriously at the Supreme Court, 72 Vand. L. Rev. 1423 (2019), these are not necessarily distractions, but can be subtle indicators of what the Justices think about your case.

In that vein, here are some of the lighter (Laughter.) moments from yesterday’s arguments in Pung v. Isabella County. [Just a reminder: our shop represents the Pung Family.]

First up, Justice Gorsuch with a reference to one of Judge Cooley’s treatises, pushing back on the Solicitor General’s suggestion that the County’s take-and-auction process aligns with history and tradition. Justice Gorsuch noted that, but reminded the SG that Judge Cooley also said that governments shouldn’t “take more property than you need to, right?” See Trans. at 67.

That brought out this striking metaphor, followed by a laugh line:

Earlier, there was a colloquy where the Justices were grappling with the question of whether the County could have satisfied the alleged tax debt by lesser means than seizing the Pung home and instead go after personal property:

Going once…going twice…

Peloton bikes are so 2021, we guess? Oof.

Speaking of evocative metaphors, this next one from Justice Barrett was pretty good. Invoking Hugo’s Les Misérables, she compared Isabella County’s tax collector to the novel’s Inspector Javert, notorious for his single-minded pursuit of Jean Valjean. The biggest difference here is that unlike Valjean (who did steal the loaf of bread, after all), the Pungs never owed the taxes.

Highlighting the equities in the case (wiping out six-figures of equity over a wrongfully-imposed $2k tax), Justice Barrett laid it out:

Mon Dieu!

“In the moment when the eyes of the two men met, Javert,
without having moved or made the least gesture, became hideous.
No human emotion can wear an aspect so terrible as that of jubilation.
He had the face of a fiend who has found the victim he thought he had lost.”

The Justices didn’t get the only laugh lines. Our colleague Phil Ellison, arguing on behalf of the Pung Family, sneaked this one in when Justice Gorsuch asked him to elaborate on what happened below:

Long story short: the longer story Phil refers to is here.

Check it out. Our tally is that Justice Gorsuch won the humor title yesterday, if “(Laughter.)” counts from the transcript are accurate. Keep on ruling Your Honor, and we’ll keep up the good humor.