3 Quotes Tagged: oral

The written record is by far the more important component in an appellate court’s decisionmaking, but the oral argument often elicits helpful clarifications and concentrates the judges’ minds on the character of the decision they are called upon to make.

Twenty-one months after her admission, Lockwood became the first woman to participate in oral argument at the Court. She next and last argued before the Court in 1906. She was then seventy-five. Using the skill she had gained over a thirty-year span in her specialty — pressing money claims against the United States — she helped to secure a five-million-dollar award for Eastern Cherokee Indians whose ancestral lands had been taken from them without just compensation.

On six occasions, she appeared before the Court to present oral argument. She lost just one case. Through her briefs, starting with Reed, she, more than any other lawyer, shaped the legal arguments reflected in the Court’s opinions, earning her the honorific “the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s movement.