Justice Antonin Scalia asks whether a law firm could reasonably do the same thing in billing its clients. Could the firm just say, "We're going to kick it up another $10,000 because this—this second-year associate, boy, he's a whiz, and he performed like a senior partner. So we are billing him at the $500 rate, instead of the $200!"

—Dahlia Lithwick

No! From each according to his ability to pay his lawyer at least $200 per hour, to each non-contingent-fee lawyer according to his need, win or lose.

When the justices next make one of their periodic over-the-top pleas for a judicial pay raise, Congress should remind the justices that their economic philosophy precludes such mercenary concerns for key players in the justice system.

As for Roberts, he’s now admitted that the justices’ reason for limiting its 75-case-per-year docket to cases in which it is either a government lawyer or a lawyer who is among the handful of extremely-high-priced Washington-based Supreme Court lawyers (like Roberts himself until he became a judge) who, courtesy of the justices, appear regularly in that Court—and that no one else need apply—is not that these are better lawyers. It’s either just a coincidence or it’s that the justices and their law clerks don’t even read any of the other certiorari petitions (petitions asking the Court to hear a case).

Court watchers have suspected the latter for a long time.