From Law.com authored by Marcia Coyle:
“For women who argue in the U.S. Supreme Court today, the clothes they wear are not much of a big deal. But when Deanne Maynard, co-chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Supreme Court and appellate practice, was a new lawyer in the U.S. solicitor general’s office, her appearance was an issue of the “highest” order.
Maynard, speaking at a panel discussion Thursday on women in the Supreme Court, said she wanted to wear a morning suit—the traditional argument garb of lawyers in the solicitor’s office—for her first Supreme Court argument. Maynard didn’t want the suit modified to a skirt. She wanted the pants. Her request went to then-Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who took it to Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Rehnquist, according to SG office lore, said he would prefer if everyone in the office wore the same thing, and that Olson should ask then-justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both female justices told him the women should wear whatever they want. And so Maynard called the high court’s marshall, Pamela Talkin, who always wore a morning suit in court, and got exactly what Talkin wore.
But by the time of her first argument, Maynard recalled, “’I was eight months pregnant and the pants no longer fit. So I had to go rent tuxedo pants for my first argument. I remember they were 40 by 40—square pants.’”
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