Today was our last day in the library, and as I write this on our plane flight back to Dallas, it’s hard to imagine that the week has already gone by in such a blur. Initially, I was worried about the 8 ½ hour days in the library–I didn’t think it was possible that I could do research for that long every day. However, the time passed faster than I could have expected or wished. Every day I felt like I would read through the papers for just ten minutes, look up, and realize it had been an hour. Luckily, I was able to get through all the cases I’d planned to with help from Professor Kobylka and emotional support from my classmates. When we first got here, my process was incredibly slow, but in just a few days I’d begun to develop a sort of expertise on what sorts of resources I was looking for in each folder I went through. One of the most unexpected outcomes from our research time was learning the personalities of the justices through their papers. For instance, Justice John Paul Stevens was so much more of a coalition builder than I would have imagined. In several of the memos on Hodgson v Minnesota, Justice Marshall and Justice Brennan’s covert conversations talked about how he was “walking a fine line” to keep Justice O’Connor’s vote on their side. Additionally, Justice Blackmun had quite the sense of humor. Quite often he would write humorous little notes to himself (one shown left). It was always a nice break in the routine of flipping through papers to come across these little gems. During dinner, my classmates and I would debrief the funniest comment we saw on a draft, or a particularly humorous piece of hate mail that one of us found in our papers.

A particularly humorous piece of hate mail that Justice Blackmun saved

On the right is one that Justice Blackmun had saved and on which he had written some entertaining commentary. One of our favorite collective discoveries from the papers was Justice Antonin Scalia’s designated nickname, “Nino.” One of the best finds of the trip was a memo from a clerk to Justice Blackmun in which she announces that they must await the expected “Ninogram” before putting out their own draft. The Ninogram will certainly go down in infamy in the memory bank of this trip. Besides the funny tidbits we discovered, it was also just incredibly rewarding to see the oft-concealed process behind these famous Supreme Court decisions we’d been reading about the entire semester leading up to the trip. It was a rare opportunity to see what went on behind the scenes, since the Court is such an opaque institution.

Many of the files were photocopies, possibly because the original note was on delicate paper or too fragile to be handled by the library goers. Frequently, though, I found myself holding a note handwritten by Justice Kennedy or original notes scrawled on a draft in pencil by
Justice Blackmun’s hand. I was in awe holding these documents that had once gone into creating some of the Supreme Court cases that had so shaped how I have experienced our country in my lifetime. The camaraderie developed among our class during the trip was also very special. In the library, we often popped over to each other’s tables to ask what files others were looking at, or chatted about our research on breaks. It was nice to be able to talk about a funny note with others that would understand why it was humorous ini that context, or vent frustrations that only the other class members would understand. We also spent many a night all playing games that Professor Kobylka brought in the lobby that really showed our true colors. For some
inconceivable reason, nobody believed that mine and Anna’s self-dubbed “Fascist Island” (a table slightly lower than the one all the others in the game were sitting at) was actually part of the liberal party.

My research was focusing on the development of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on abortion and specifically why the Court failed to overturn Roe in 1992, when they had a majority of conservative-appointed justices and the opportunity in Casey. To explore this topic, I am focusing on Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter and attempting to uncover their motives for preserving Roe in the joint opinion they wrote for Casey. This course does not mark the first time
I’ve explored this area; the last two papers I have written for Professor Kobylka were about O’Connor’s conservatism and stance toward abortion while she was on the Court. Since I have been researching this topic since my freshman year, this trip was a rewarding culmination of the work I have done in my political science major. Though I’ve run the gamut of secondary sources on my topic over the past four years, for the first time on this trip I was able to do my own
primary research and understand the topic on a deeper level. It has been a tiring week, but a thoroughly rewarding one and I cannot wait to return to D.C. and read more papers when they are released!