Haynes and Boone, LLP Partner Dan Geyser was featured in a Bloomberg Law article giving a behind-the-scenes look inside a day for lawyers arguing at the United States Supreme Court.
Read an excerpt below.
By the time Daniel Geyser got to the Supreme Court lectern, he was getting hungry.
The banana and oatmeal the Colorado-based lawyer had eaten for breakfast around 8:30 that morning were long gone. The caffeine from his coffee had worn off.
Geyser hadn’t anticipated arguments in the case ahead of his on April 22 would go for almost 2 1/2 hours. He would have timed his breakfast better if he had.
“You ideally want to be awake,” he said.
The format the justices adopted after the pandemic stretched arguments to new lengths, but this term’s proceedings in the first case on a two-case day were routinely longer than those in the second.
When the first case of the day ran over the allotted time for arguments, it did so by nearly 34 minutes on average, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. That’s compared to roughly 11 minutes, which is how much extra time the second case stretched for over the allotted time on average.
The disparity was much starker on days when a high-profile case was paired with one that was lesser-known. The difference was most severe on Geyser’s argument day when the questioning of an Oregon city’s attempt to punish homeless people for camping on public property went on for 2 hours and 26 minutes before his arbitration case, which lasted only 44 minutes.
To read the full article in Bloomberg Law, click here.
