On BlueSky, University of Texas at Austin Law Professor Liz Sepper set off a firestorm by noting “UT Law is hanging new art. And, yes, that is Justice Alito in a swimsuit right outside my office.” She was referring to the print (shown right) known as Supreme Court Beach. The hive mind being the hive mind, it didn’t take long before Jay Willis posted the full story at Balls and Strikes:
Now adorning the hallways at UT Law is a caricature of partially clothed Supreme Court justices and other Supreme Court-adjacent figures, all sporting various forms of swimwear, happily imbibing their preferred substances together on sunny Rehoboth Beach. . . .
Because there is basically no bit of Supreme Court arcana too frivolous for me to drop my actual work and spend several hours researching, I reached out to the artist, Todd Crespi. …
A longtime courtroom artist for CNN, Todd told me that he painted Supreme Court Beach in the early 2010s. It was originally displayed as part of an exhibition for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s annual mock trial, a Washington ritual that I would describe as the nerdiest comedy show you could possibly imagine: As the name suggests, it is a mock trial loosely based on the plot of a Shakespeare play in which a pair of high-profile D.C. lawyers “argue” before a panel of Supreme Court justices and federal judges, all of whom just spent the entire time cracking topical jokes.
Read the whole story here.