I have a new, furtive pleasure: eavesdropping on the Supreme Court. If you watch television news, you may have heard sound bites from the Robed Ones mixed in with recent Supreme Court coverage. Starting with the controversial arguments over the 2000 presidential election results, the justices have selectively released recordings of oral arguments on the same day they are heard.
So instead of waiting several months and trudging down to the National Archives to get your Supreme Court audio fix, you can hear many of the most interesting cases, including the Guantanamo detainees' lawsuit or the Dick Cheney energy task-force beef, at such websites as pbs.org and c-span.org. But not, curiously, on the official Supreme Court website.
What have I learned? That chief justice William Rehnquist waxes orotund, Antonin Scalia is argumentative and showoffy, and Stephen Breyer sounds a lot like the Cambridge snob I imagine him to be. You can see pictures of Breyer's pretentious library, which practically screams "Look, I own a first edition of Dr. Johnson's dictionary!" by clicking "Tour" on the unofficial Supreme Court website www.oyez.org.
My hero, David Souter -- yes, I still carry a letter he once wrote me around in my briefcase -- sounds as clear as the waters of Lake Horace, just west of his beloved Weare, N.H.
What else? Lawyers talk for about 60 seconds until the first justice, usually Rehnquist, starts poking at their arguments. I learned there is one proper way to answer a justice's query: "That is correct, your honor, but . . ." Furthermore, it's obvious I don't have the intellectual candlepower to be a mediocre lawyer, much less argue before the Supremes.
But wait, there's more. Oyez.org lets you listen in on dozens of important cases dating back to 1955. I spent some of Wednesday eavesdropping on "Memoirs v. Massachusetts." That was the 1965 case in which the state's then-assistant attorney general (now judge), William Cowin, hoped that the Earl Warren court would uphold the Bay State's ban on John Cleland's gamey literary classic, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," better known as "Fanny Hill."
You can hear Cowin making the case that the 18th-century prostitute's memoir was "utterly without redeeming social value." The novel's publisher -- which ultimately prevailed -- lined up professors from Williams College, Harvard, and Boston University to state the opposite. All but about 30 of the book's 200 pages contained smut, Cowin says on the tape. "Unlike `The Tropic of Cancer,' where the reader is forced to do quite a bit of searching for what he might feel are the interesting scenes," Cowin notes, "this is a book that is ideal for the skimmer. Absolutely no searching is necessary at all."
Thank heavens attorney general Tom Reilly has important business to attend to, like shutting down gay marriage for out-of-staters. We wouldn't want him wasting his time inveighing against high literature!
Oyez.org has other treats for the eustachian tube: Miranda v. Arizona, Roe v. Wade, the First Amendment benchmark Times v. Sullivan, even the 1958 case in which lefty New Hampshire artist Rockwell Kent successfully sued Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to get his passport un-revoked. I listened to a few minutes of the 1971 Pentagon Papers case and heard Richard Nixon's solicitor general Erwin Griswold intone: "The New York Times and the Washington Post are here consciously and intentionally participating in a breach of trust."
The Oyez project, which emanates from Northwestern University and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, posts about 2,200 hours of Supreme Court arguments on its site. In the future, "we intend to take everything from 1955 on and make it fully accessible and searchable for anyone who wants it," says Northwestern political science professor Jerry Goldman.
So much for great audio. When will we be able to download video clips of the Supremes in action? The answer: when a certain New Hampshire justice decides to hang up his robe. "The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body," Souter told a Congressional committee in 1996.
My admiration for the man grows every day.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.