In his recent (and controversial) TED Talk on preparing for Supreme Court argument and the value of AI in this process, SCOTUS advocate and Milbank partner Neal Katyal opened with: “There is a mahogany podium at the Supreme Court of the United States. One person died there, mid-argument, a stroke. Another collapsed there, dying soon thereafter.”
“I haven’t heard about [the mid-argument death],” wrote Stanford Law School professor Orin Kerr on X a few days later. “Does anyone know the details?” Kerr then answered his own question in the thread: “Katyal adds that another lawyer collapsed during an argument and died soon after, which I believe refers to William Pinkney in 1822. … The [death] reference appears to be to U.S. Attorney General Augustus Hill Garland, who had a stroke during argument in 1899, was carried to the clerk’s office, and died there, at least according to this 1908 biography [called A Life of Mr. Garland].”
Naturally, we wanted to investigate this further.
Let’s start with Pinkney. A renowned advocate known for “dressing in the latest fashions” (and for denigrating his opponents; so much so that Daniel Webster once locked him in a room in the U.S. Capitol) Pinkney also “often appeared in Court evidently intoxicated.” Despite this, he argued “over half” the cases in the 1814-15 term. In 1822, while arguing against his frenemy Webster in Ricard v. Williams – a case about land ownership – Pinkney indeed collapsed on the court floor and died two days later. In his obituary, he was remembered as “str[iving] to preserve [fame] with increasing anxiety, until, exhausted by overwork, he died at Washington and was buried there.” Another wrote that “Pinkney did die, in one sense, opportunely for his fame.”
As for former U.S. Attorney General Garland, his health had apparently been in decline in the months and years before his 1899 death, but he reportedly thought his condition wasn’t serious. On Jan. 26, 1899, Garland took to the lectern to resume argument in Towson v. Moore, a property dispute, which had begun the day before. While in the clerk’s office before argument, Garland remarked that he was not feeling well and would take time off the following Monday to rest. Fifteen minutes into the court session, Garland abruptly stopped his reading from a law book, gasped, and fell sideways to the floor. He had suffered a stroke and despite efforts to revive him (he was carried from the chamber to the chief clerk’s room), Garland died within 10 minutes. His last sentence would be “This, your honors, is our contention.” Ironically, Garland (supposedly) had said in conversation just two months before that “It has been over forty years since I argued my first case. Nothing would please me better, when my time comes to die, than to be stricken right here in this court room in the midst of an argument. That would be a fitting climax to my career.”
Advocate Thomas Emmet, too, collapsed from a stroke mid-argument in 1827 and died; one newspaper said there was “‘something glorious and consolatory’ in the manner of his death.” Advocate Prew Savoy died within 36 hours of his arguing in front of the justices in 1957, doing so while suffering from an advanced stage of lung cancer.
There are tales of less serious (although somewhat embarrassing) incidents. Ohio Sen. Thomas Ewing fainted and collapsed while speaking at oral argument in 1869. His son, General Thomas Ewing, did the same 26 years later in an 1895 argument, apparently followed the next day by the elder Ewing fainting yet again (as one paper put it, “While making an argument before the Supreme Court he fell in a faint to the floor, in about three feet of the spot where his son sunk on the carpet yesterday.”)
One advocate in 1945 fainted after Justice William Douglas asked a pointed question (“Who drafted this affidavit?”). When the lawyer recovered, he told Douglas “[t]hat he had.” Douglas also recounted one advocate collapsing in 1973 while arguing in a Fourth Amendment case (the case was reargued the next week by a new lawyer).
As Chief Justice John Roberts once noted in a lecture about oral advocacy: “Supreme Court oral argument has always been vigorous and rigorous. Some advocates have collapsed in the face of it.”
