The Supreme Court is usually a stickler for time. The Justices take the bench promptly at 10 a.m. on Court days. White and red lights on the lectern alert arguing counsel when they have five minutes left and when their time is up, respectively. And clocks around the building buzz from time to time, such as the five-minute warning before a Court session starts and after the Justices have left the bench.
On Monday, the clocks around the building, including the two ornate clocks in the Courtroom, were way out of whack. When the Justices took the bench for arguments in two cases, the clock that hangs above their heads and just behind them registered 6:05. The clock at the back of the Courtroom, the one the Justices face, showed 6:15. (Or really, about five past six and a quarter past six, since the clocks are the old-fashioned, analog kind with Roman numerals.)
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., acknowledged the issue as soon as the session began.
“Chief Justice Rehnquist would admonish counsel from time to time not to look up at the clock,” Roberts said. “The advice is well taken today.”
As the morning’s arguments continued, the clocks sometimes sped up rapidly, only to slow down to a normal rate, but never at the correct time. One lawyer wrapping up his rebuttal in Foster v. Chatman, a case about race and jury selection, saw his red light come on and asked, “Can I have just a second?” The Chief Justice obliged him, briefly.
By the time arguments ended in Spokeo Inc. v. Robins, about standing under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the clock behind the Justices said it was just after 11:00, while the one in the back said 1:00. The correct time was 12:07.
Kathleen Arberg, the Court’s spokeswoman, said the building’s clocks were reset to standard time from daylight savings time over the weekend by the GPS-based system used to synchronize all the clocks. But by Monday morning, the clocks were awry. Court employees were working to manually set them to the correct time.
Some reporters who cover the Court regularly had a collective sense of déjà vu that the clocks had similarly malfunctioned as recently as a year ago. A Web search turned up a news story describing an almost identical problem with clocks in 2009, wih Chief Justice Roberts making a similar quip about Rehnquist’s admonition not to look at the clocks. Could time really be moving that quickly?
The Justices are due back on the bench Tuesday at 10 a.m., give or take a second.
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