Brushstrokes Around the Bench

The art world isn’t limited to museums and galleries anymore, with pieces now embedded in courthouses across the country — from the majestic marble palace of the U.S. Supreme Court to landscapes urging conversations about climate change at the Byron White U.S. Courthouse in Denver.  

How did we move away from serious images of Lady Justice and authoritative judges clad in black robes to swaths of color and happy trees? How did art get into the judicial system to begin with?

In our penultimate episode this season, we bring you the artists who capture vivid portraits that honor state justices and attorneys not often memorialized in art and how courtroom sketches transcend photography to paint a picture of a defendant up close and personal or document moments of social change.

Special guests:

• Roger Laux Nelson, a landscape artist with works in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
• Ximena Velázquez-Arenas, an artist and attorney
• Ted Ellis, an artist and director of Florida State University’s Civil Rights Institute 
• Jennifer Gibson, director of the Center for Fine Arts at the General Services Administration
• Drew Alderson, manager of the Colorado Judicial Learning Center
• Joan Kee, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University
• Vicki Behringer, a courtroom sketch artist

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Transcript

(Intro music)

Kelsey Reichmann: Welcome to Sidebar, a podcast from Courthouse News. I'm Kelsey Reichmann and I'll be your host. As you may or may not have heard, I'm also our Supreme Court reporter. I only talk about it just about every second I can, but can you really blame me, though? The marble palace, as some call it, is enthralling, and as Amanda Pampuro in Denver will explain, that's intentional. 

Amanda Pampuro: Hey, Kelsey. It's not a stretch to say courts double as art galleries. The design of modern courts helps the justice system run safely and efficiently, but the art on the walls is a rare expression of what the judges inside find important. 

KR: Well, considering the Supreme Court used to meet in the basement of the Capitol, the grand marble palace does send a message. 

AP: Does it feel like walking through a history book? 

KR: Very much so. Interspersed between decorative molding depicting great thinkers are tributes to the justices. Whether it's admiration or adoration, the art isn't trivial. Take the column-lined Great Hall where anyone entering the courtroom queues before argument sessions. Even amidst a makeshift security checkpoint equipped with magnetometers, there's no taking away from the grand 40-foot pillars or busts of former chief justices that appear to watch you as you enter the courtroom. 

AP: Not to diminish the Supreme Court, but it's not that special in its use of art to send a message. It wasn't the first, and since art is subjective, many would argue it's not even the best. Lady Justice is one of the most prominent court icons, dating back to the Renaissance, and today we see much more expressive and reflective artwork. 

KR: Where do we even start? 

AP: With trees. 

KR: Happy trees? 

AP: Thoughtful trees. There are two of them, one on each side of courtroom four at the Byron White U.S. Courthouse in Denver. On the left, the piece called “High Plains” shows a gnarled pinyon pine growing among desert succulents, with a mountain in the background, trimmed in the gold of aspen fall leaves. On the right, Prairie has this great cottonwood, surrounded by tamed, ordered farmland. This one is filled with calming purple shadows. 

Roger Laux Nelson: All my shadows are different grades of purples and reds all mixed in and out. That's the power in them. 

AP: This is Roger Laux Nelson. 

RN: That's the name I use for the art. Now I've been out in my studio figuring you're going to call. 

AP: Cool, what does your studio look like? 

RN: It's in Atwater, Minnesota, which is east of Wilmer, Minnesota, where I was born, raised and I moved back to because I had a brother in a nursing home here. But it's an old library, ground floor, I don't know, it's over 2,000 square feet, something like that. 

AP: Nelson moved from Minnesota to New York in the 1970s to pursue a career in art. He originally painted abstracts, then moved into landscapes and cityscapes, developing an increasingly realistic style. The General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, commissioned Nelson's artwork in the early 1990s for an old post office it was renovating into the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. First, he bought a plane ticket, then he studied the land. 

RN: Traveled around, went out east of Denver with my camera shooting all kinds of images. Then I went around, you know, before the mountains, then in the mountains, went to Mesa Verde and everything. You know, I was never really interested in mountains but after that I said, “There's something here.” But I'm more plains, flat, distant space. So, most of my paintings deal with foreground and middle ground. That one painting of High Plains on the left side of the door, you can see mountains in the back. That's one of the first paintings I did where you, you know, have distance in a painting, because I like to feel that as you're standing in front of the painting, you're standing in the field, wherever it is. 

AP: What kind of impression do you hope people visiting the court get from it? 

RN: You know, if that's what, I don't know what took place in that courtroom, but I just think we're just destroying a lot of the land. You know, especially with climate change and all that and all going on. I like people to look at my paintings. Not think of man or the farmer, but that's there, with the patterns of the fields and stuff, but just think of all the trees, because so many people drive around, just pass through the country. They're going from point A to point B and if the landscape's in the middle they really don't look at them. So, I hope people see my paintings and they get the idea maybe we should slow down and take a look once in a while before it's all gone. 

AP: Art is, of course, in the eye of the creator. How did you first get into art? 

Ximena Velázquez-Arenas: Oh man, I feel like I've been dabbling in art my whole life. I grew up moving around a lot and I think I was slow to pick up language. I was a really quiet and introverted kid and there were also a lot of languages spoken in my household generally and I couldn't tell them apart. I would just kind of speak a mixture of them and as a kid I couldn't separate like which language was which. So, it made for some difficulty in communicating what I wanted to say, and I think as a kind of remedy for that, I picked up drawing and painting. My name is Ximena Velázquez-Arenas, and I live in Seattle, Washington, although I'm from Mexico, Mexico City. I work as a lawyer and my passion project is art, so I'm an oil painter. I went through my period of kind of losing faith in art, I'd say early 20s, like right around the time you're declaring your majors. I went to art school for two years and I transferred out of art school and pursued a liberal arts degree, international relations and then politics. I both got jaded by just learning more about the direct needs and maybe just where I was in that period of my life, but then also I think I was scared. I was really scared to fully commit to art because I didn't see an obvious pathway. And it was a little bit of both, like the fear and not trusting that art was that, that it had such transformational power in that era. 

AP: Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. 

XV: It was my first year of law school. I had moved back to Mexico City. When I was home, I had left a bunch of oil, like I had a bunch of art materials that I hadn't, I like I didn't even realize I had. But Covid was a big reason why I started painting again. I was trying to do something in between my first year of law school classes that brought some hopefulness back in me, particularly during that era of the pandemic. There was just so much suffering all around, a lot of the responses in Black Lives Matter, some of the, like, environmental disasters that were happening and targeting of activists in Latin America, in Mexico and in Guatemala, were just like top of my mind and I started a series just like making portraits of people that were inspirational to me, and so I painted Little Miss Flint. I painted like a bunch of mostly women of color activists, and I posted about it on my social media just like, not like, I wasn't looking for anything out of it, I was just sharing my work. I got a message from Chief Justice Gonzalez, who came across my work on social media. 

AP: In it, then-Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Stephen Gonzalez said he wanted to commission their work. 

XV: I mean, like, nothing could have prepared me for that interaction. I thought I was dreaming. 

AP: So, they painted two portraits for the Washington state Temple of Justice of Justices G. Helen Whitener and Raquel Montoya-Lewis. How do you know what aspects of someone like a judge to put in there? 

XV: I researched them, trying to find elements that were representative of particularly where they were coming from, because being of the diverse backgrounds that they are, both the first Native American woman elected to a Supreme Court and with Justice Whitener, she has so many, so many unrepresented identities, both from like an immigrant perspective, LGBTQ community, being African American, being disabled, like many, many aspects that she was bringing into the court for the first time. There was just a lot that I wanted to convey, without making it kind of like a laundry list, but more a mixture of like the different, the different strengths that made them just so wonderful. 

AP: The resulting portraits are vibrant and filled with character. Justice Whitener pops out of a jungle scene surrounded by birds of paradise and banana leaves. Justice Montoya-Lewis cups a small drum and is surrounded by geometric patterns. It's a refreshing break from the tradition of solemn poses in black robes. 

XV: I appreciate the old tradition, which tends to be like more muted and darker and somber, but I feel like that's just, that's not necessarily what the personalities that we have in the court are now, and I think that it's wonderful to be able to celebrate them in a way that is more vivid and rich and just like saturated with what I think is experience. 

AP: What kind of artwork do you want to see hanging on the walls of the courthouse when you're going in to argue a case? 

XV: So, the first thing that came to mind is not actually in a courthouse, it's from Berkeley. They were a series on Guantanamo and on the incursion into Iraq and Afghanistan and just the complete abuse of prisoners by the United States military, and I mean they are like, they're horrendous images of the real stories and real abuses that happened against those prisoners. 

AP: The law school has four paintings by Fernando Botero based on photos leaked in 2004 showing prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib and later held at Guantanamo Bay. 

XV: They really brought, like physically, almost like tactile, like right in front of you, the repercussions of injustice and of letting things reach those levels of normalized violence and militarism. I think art that can be stirring in that way, that reminds you of the real stakes, is important. There will be consequences if you're not mindful that these laws are going to reach people in ways that can be ultimately beneficial and reduce harm, or in ways that can perpetuate violence against them. 

KR: I can't imagine seeing those in the U.S. Supreme Court. 

AP: Which is strange because shortly after the publication of those photos and the donation of the paintings to Berkeley, SCOTUS took up the case that decided Guantanamo Bay prisoners should have access to an attorney and can challenge their detainment. 

KR: So, the pictures weren't there, but their case was. 

AP: Yeah, and maybe that's part of why attorneys want to argue the letter of the law and block out the emotion. 

KR: I've heard that before. 

AP: It isn't surprising that more court art is being produced from the outside looking in. Our next artist, Ted Ellis, hasn't been displayed in a courthouse yet, but can be found in many attorneys' offices. 

Ted Ellis: What I realized is that on constructive, positive images, there were rarely any of African Americans, particularly in a professional space, and I think that's why it resonated so well with the images that I did. I am the inaugural director for the Civil Rights Institute at Florida State. I'm also a museologist, but I've been an artist for 30 plus years pictorially documenting African American history and culture. 

AP: Ellis learned to paint growing up in New Orleans, where he would ride the bus to the French Quarter to talk to the street artists, then go to the library and study Renaissance painters in the World Encyclopedia. 

TE: You know, to this day I still paint, not as aggressively as I used to. It has been sort of my magic carpet of learning different people, different places, different cultures, different ideologies and spend a lot of time visiting museums and doing the good work of advocacy through art. What was happening and transpiring in America at the time, 1993, I was working with Rollins Environmental Agency. I was middle management but all what I saw on television was the Bloods and the Crips being televised and, you know, Black men killing up each other. And I thought about my personal story. I came from New Orleans, from the Lower Ninth Ward. I didn't do any drugs, I got a quality education, environmental chemist. I said, you know, I need to see more of those kinds of stories in the media. And so, I was reaching out to all the news agencies, ABC, NBC, the Houston Chronicle, NPR Radio and nobody really responded. And so, I said I got to do a powerful image that would speak to my importance in the space of being very constructive. And so, I thought about, in the capacity of the letter to law, and in 1993, “Justice” was born. 

AP: That is the first in Ellis' series titled “Black Lawyers.” The idea is simple: Black lawyers and judges in positions of quiet courtroom power. 

TE: An African American attorney who was in the middle of the courtroom persuasively arguing his case with a level of legal acuity, comfortable, multicultural jewelry. You had a photo of Thurgood Marshall on the wall and the light coming out from the Holy Bible that he was a moral, ethical man in this space, and he was fighting for justice. I love the space that I'm in because it typically can handle any kind of conversation when you impose the art inside of that space. That's part of the reason I took this position at Florida State University to use art and culture as a form of advocacy and activism. Get us all comfortable in the same space. You know, if we have an appreciation for who we are, where we came from, our ideology, our faith, our education, even if it's unfamiliar, if we pause just to learn and to listen, you know, then we've done a wonderful thing. 

KP: Because art can change the world. 

AP: Yes, it can. 

KR: Who decides what gets shown anyway? 

AP: I will tell you after the break. 

Michael Gennaro: Hi, this is Michael Gennaro, a reporter for Courthouse News based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I cover civil and criminal cases in San Francisco. I'm especially interested in covering tech companies and artificial intelligence. A recent case I've been covering is a federal judge's order forcing Google to allow third-party app stores on Android phones. A jury found that Google's Google Play Store constituted an illegal monopoly last year. The judge's order is currently stayed pending appeal. If Google loses that appeal, this case will fundamentally change how app stores work on Android phones. You can find more of my work on Courthouse News. Now, back to Sidebar. 

AP: So, let's get back to who decides what gets shown and why. To answer that, I spoke to the federal government's director of the Center for Fine Arts, Jennifer Gibson. 

Jennifer Gibson: We bring an artist into a project early. 

AP: The artist meets the commissioning panel, which usually has a judge and an architect and other people who will be using the court. Gibson works under the General Services Administration, which doesn't just commission paintings, they do mosaics and great towering sculptures down to peaceful crabapple gardens. 

JG: Our earliest works are in the Customs House in New Orleans. This was just part of the program, and it was often done via the architect, so that the person who designed the building would also be working, bringing in the artists. The content was very much guided by the federal government. Examples we have would be the Metzenbaum Courthouse in Cleveland or the Birch Bayh Courthouse in Indianapolis. The vocabulary was allegorical. There were the symbols of justice, the symbols of the rule of law, the aspirations of what the country was to be. At the Metzenbaum Courthouse, there's a mural of Cleveland and the arts, the notion of Cleveland as a goddess kind of figure. That was just all part and parcel of what a public building should be. 

AP: When do you start to see a shift away from the allegorical, aspirational paintings and when do we get more abstracts and landscapes? 

JG: It's very much tied to the society. The form of visual arts at the turn of the 20th century was one that did speak to the public in allegorical forms and that's, and people understood it that way. In the ‘30s you start to have a broader interpretation that visual vocabulary shifts and then how art works in conjunction with the building and how artists interpret their world shifts, as does the public and how they see works. If you were to do a totally allegorical figure now, the question would be would people understand, would they know these references, or what are the references that are relevant today? 

AP: And it makes me wonder what kinds of trends or pieces you're seeing commissioned now. 

JG: Some feel, like these images of justice, the seriousness of the undertaking of the law is what's really important. Others are very interested in the history of the area, the district that the court is part of, how they want that to be, that that needs to be represented and carry a message to the people who come into the building. Others talk about the rule of law, history of the law, and others say it's all about the jury. Without the jury, there is no carrying out of the law, and so they want the emphasis on those people who serve as the jurors. I was just thinking of Michael Fagan's piece “Three Sets of Twelve.” It's in the courthouse in Seattle. It's acrylic paint on the wood walls and it's in the elevator lobbies and it's about the people who serve as jurors and they're shown in their professions to show these are us, we're all part of this. It's not something just removed from us. So, it's a quite distinct difference from the notion of justice being sort of bestowed or carried out on us, to our, as individuals, being part of this whole legal system and the operation of justice. 

AP: Yeah, that's quite a, like, ideological transition from Renaissance paintings depicting judges with angels as being godly figures down to here are the people who decide the case, you and me. 

JG: But it takes many forms and so when we look at how art might be incorporated, the artists, a number of artists are reviewed. Eventually, it's a procurement process. The panel talks about what's important, how art might be incorporated. The architects are involved. Once the artist is under contract, they come, they meet with everybody. All of this information is shared. They go to the site, they go to the architect's office. There's a lot of exchange and the artist comes back to us and says here's my idea. We're not saying it has to be in such and such a material, it has to have certain content. The artist is there because of what they know, kinds of questions they ask and how they might contribute to the success of the overall project. 

AP: When the Ralph Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver was being designed, some judges wanted a better way to reach the public. 

Drew Alderson: If you think about it, most people don't interact with the courts. I mean speeding tickets is probably the most common thing. After that, divorces, so we're the third of the government that nobody knows anything about. A learning center is an opportunity for a judicial branch to talk to the public directly to explain, OK, this is who we are, this is what we do. My name is Drew Alderson, and I have the distinct privilege of being the manager of Colorado's Judicial Learning Center. 

AP: Why is this more effective than paintings on the walls in telling the story of Colorado's law? 

DA: When you build a place like this, there's basically two schools of thought, and one of them is museum, and that's the very traditional here are artifacts, that sort of thing. And then there's learning center and the idea there is that it's more heavily into education than commemoration. If it's a game, if you gamify something, kids will learn it without knowing that they're learning it. So, it works pretty well. I think one of the things that this room does exceedingly well is that it does demystify things. People don't know how a judge makes a decision. Everybody sees it on television and, honestly, sometimes I wish things were kind of a little more like television, because 20 minutes to solve the whole problems of the world, that'd be a neat trick, honestly, but it just really didn't work that way. 

AP: In 1488, Gerard David painted “The Judgement of Cambyses,” depicting a corrupt judge being flayed by the public to show what happens should judges make the wrong decisions. In a similar way, the learning center has an exhibit that invites listeners to step into the judge's shoes and feel the weight of the job. 

DA: There's an exhibit here where you can play the part of a judge. There's one of those cases about who's going to get custody of the children in a divorce case. There's no villain, there's nobody that isn't trying, there's nobody who's not doing a good job. There's no obvious choice and they stand back and go well, this is hard and I'm like, but that's the job that judges do every day. There's not always, you know, black and white and cut and dry. It's just you have to do the best that you can. You have to make the best decision that you can. It's based on the law. I think that's probably the most important part of what I do is answer questions. 

AP: What's the weirdest question you get? 

DA: For some reason, fifth graders have a conspiratorial mind. They see the seal behind the bench and at the top it has the eye and the triangle. And then they say isn't that the Illuminati symbol? And then I have to go "OK, look, we're not part of the Illuminati.” And every now and then, one of them will push back and go, “Yeah, but that's what you'd say if you were part of the Illuminati,” and I promise we're not. 

AP: But artists who aren't commissioned by a court really get to say whatever they want. 

Joan Kee: I think that in many ways, that artworks provide an excellent training ground for facing the full magnitude of irrationality of human behavior, that if you're a lawyer or judge, you're seeing this on a daily basis. My name is Joan Kee, I'm the Judy and Michael Steinhardt director of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and I was a practicing attorney. 

AP: And she wrote “Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America.” I want to ask quickly about your research procedures. Do you just go to as many courts as you can, and do you struggle with the inability to take photographs of pieces? 

JK: Getting visual evidence of that visit is very, very difficult sometimes for me. I always try to go to if I'm writing about a work, I will always do my best to see it. If it's small enough, I will recreate it like, make a miniature one. You know, just because I want to get a sense of the labor and the effort that's involved and also just how difficult it is to work with materials. Because you know, just as lawyers, you know, wrestle with words and the nuances of certain words and even punctuation, you know artists also wrestle with, you know, materials. They don't listen to you sometime. 

AP: That's amazing. Do you bring materials with you? 

JK: No, no, no no, no, I have to go home and do it. Yeah, also because so that no one can see my shame in public of how bad my own crafting skills are. 

AP: It's not about replicating it perfectly right, and that the limitations of photography in courts create that workaround that I can take it home with me. You can't stop me from putting it in my mind and then replicating it. 

JK: I'm also thinking about the ways in which, again, where artworks can provide a space in which to say things that you can't because of legal restrictions that are politically motivated. So, a good example would be there's an artist from Colombia named Doris Salcedo, and in 2002, she made a work called “November 6th and 7th,” and what that work was, it was basically 280 wooden chairs that were lowered from the roof of the main courthouse in Bogota over the course of, I think, what, 52 hours?

AP: The siege was in 1985. A leftist guerrilla group seized the Palace of Justice, planning to put the president on trial, but the Colombian Army took the court back. Forty-three civilians were slain, including half the Supreme Court. 

JK: So, she was basically reenacting not only their deaths by lowering each chair, but also commemorating those who had died in this courthouse, in the Palace of Justice. So, one sort of question I think that art also allows us to do is to not just commemorate, you know, legal cases or legal victories or grievances, but also enable a space in which to reflect on how, say, the implications of a particular incident or decision still continue to reverberate to the present day. 

JK: Kee has also been following the work of Pak Sheung Chuen, a Hong Kong artist documenting his experiences in the Umbrella Movement, a democratic holdout from China, which lacks a free press and requires journalists to be licensed by the state. So, when Sheung sat in court and took his own notes with his own courtroom sketches that differed from the official narrative, he created art, blending gonzo journalism with politics and activism. 

JK: I mean, I'm thinking a lot about, you know, Hong Kong right now, which, again, its judicial system is under threat and that the courtroom sketch artists, or even those who make sketches that are not in an official capacity as courtroom artists, you know, they are actually performing politics in the name of democracy. You know, again, these are some of the only evidence records we have about what actually is taking place in, you know, in courts that are under real threat right now. 

AP: In the U.S., anyone can sit in court and listen or draw, but really capturing what is happening requires a specialized skill set. 

Vicki Behringer: I came across this job, like, with synchronicity. It was really quite magical. I was a sales rep for a title company. I quit because everybody said I needed to get back to doing my artwork. And one day, my neighbor came to me, and she says, “Vicki, you could be a courtroom artist.” And I thought what? I didn't even know for sure what it was. And then within a week or two, my art teacher said, “Vicki, have you ever thought about being a courtroom artist?” Hi, I'm Vicki Behringer and I am a sketch artist in Northern California. 

AP: When Behringer found her first gig in 1990, the TV station told her they needed someone who could do pen and ink with watercolor. 

VB: I was taking a pen and ink class at City College and a watercolor class. At six months earlier, I couldn't have done it and I went into court the next day, and I just knew I was in the right place. 

AP: Behringer has been in the business so long, she owns the URL for courtroomartist.com and has drawn many, many notable cases over the years. 

VB: Sketching Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and a producer from CBS, said, ‘Hey, can you get him walking into the courtroom?’ Because it was just jury selection, and they were just looking for something that had a little more interest to it. So, I had just been talking to some friends and I was smiling, and it was like, oh, he was coming in. And so, I caught him, you know, facing us as he walked in and I'm smiling. Well, he smiled back at me, and it was so funny because I didn't think anything of it, and I did my sketch, and I leave during the next break and all my reporter friends are like, “Vicki, Vicki, do you know Ted Kaczynski? Have you been talking to him and visiting him? Why was he smiling at you, talking to him and visiting him? Or why was he smiling at you?” and I just was like, “What?” It was because I had just been talking to my friends and I smiled, I was smiling already and one of his fans came up to me and said, “Oh, do you like Ted, too?” Anyway, it was it was pretty funny. 

AP: That does make me curious. When you're drawing someone like Ted Kaczynski or any defendant in a hearing, do you think that you let what you know about them influence your drawing, or do you try to just focus on how they appear in court and that person? 

VB: Contrary to what other people would like me to do, such as put horns on them or whatever, I get as neutral as I can. I just draw what I see in front of me, because I'm not supposed to make the story. I'm supposed to just draw what I see, because a lot of this is about capturing reactions and emotions. I just sense what's happening. I sense the energy in the room, and one time during the Scott Peterson trial I saw, when his lover took the stand, Amber Frey. The back of his neck got red, turned red, and he was nervously chewing on a pencil. And as to whether the reporters caught that or not, I don't know, but I have a sketch of it and I told them about it. 

AP: You also have a sketch from that trial where you have another sketch artist and you have a photographer in there. 

VB: That was one time where I showed up for court and they allowed the cameras in, and so I thought well, if I'm going to sketch in here, I might as well have some fun, because I don't think anybody bought my sketches that day. If the cameras are allowed, they don't want to use sketches. 

AP: Well, let me ask, what does the courtroom sketch do that the photograph can't? 

VB: The courtroom sketch can capture moments of emotion, where sometimes the photographer or videographer can do a very good job of that also, but sometimes they miss it also. I can incorporate most all of the courtroom at one time where they physically just can't do it. I've kind of squeezed things together, versus the camera is just, like, you know, what you see is what you get. It's not quite as colorful, that's for sure. 

KR: In the infamously technology-adverse Supreme Court, courtroom artists are the only way for most of the country to see how the justices arrive at decisions that end up shaping American history. 

AP: Yeah, unless you're a politics nerd and watch the confirmation hearings, you probably don't even know what they look like. 

KR: Longtime court artist Art Lien, who recently retired, didn't just draw the justices, he humanized them and gave them personality, and when he wanted to mess around, he drew them as a baseball team or a rock band. 

AP: That's hilarious. 

KR: Yeah, it takes away some of the stress and seriousness of the Supreme Court. 

AP: Sometimes we need that. It's so easy to get lost in a justice system asked to solve all of society's problems, and one remedy is to stop and appreciate the brushstrokes. Or, better yet, pull out your notebook and sketch it out as you see it.

KR: I have a busy schedule this season, but I'll try. 

AP: I would love to hear from listeners – that's you – on X @SidebarCNS. Let me know what artistic gems you found in your local courthouse or that you wish they would cover up.

KR: Next time on Sidebar: Our year-end episode features three of 2024's biggest trials. How did the high-drama prosecution of rapper Young Thug and Georgia's longest-running criminal trial come to an anticlimactic end? Why does the former leader of the nation's most powerful gun group owe the NRA millions? And what happened to the $4.7 billion verdict against the NFL? We'll be joined by Courthouse News reporters across the country to break it all down. Subscribe to Sidebar on all your favorite streaming platforms so you don't miss out. If you liked this episode and want to share your thoughts, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. For more stories like this, check out courthousenews.com or our social media pages for more. 

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