10. Fifteen-year old William Howard Taft chased a female classmate up a hill for potentially prurient purposes….. but ran out of breath.
9. No, Byron “Whizzer” White didn’t earn that nickname from athletics.
8. As a boy in Austria-Hungary, Felix Frankfurter offered a most audible Bronx cheer as Emperor Franz Joseph passed in his carriage.
7. At a raucous keg party at Stanford Law School, an uninhibited Sandra Day O’Connor won the “wet black robes” contest.
6. Just how did Potter Stewart arrive at “I know pornography when I see it?”
5. Teenage John Marshall pranked Thomas Jefferson by paying a town crier to spread rumors about TJ and Sally Hemmings.
4. At Columbia Law in 1923, William O. Douglas became NYC’s first subway graffitto artist, when he scrawled “You have the right to remain silent” on the #1 train.
3. High above Cayuga’s waters in 1953, Ruth Bader Ginsburg blew kisses to the Cornell hockey team from the ice arena’s first row.
2. At one of the first moving picture theaters, 18 year old William Brennan appeared to be getting amorous with his date in the back row… but it was too dark to be certain.
…and the NUMBER ONE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN YOUTHFUL INDISCRETION THAT COULD HAVE DERAILED PREVIOUS NOMINEES for the U. S. SUPREME COURT is:
1. At his 12th birthday party, young “Ollie” Wendell Holmes Jr. actually did yell “fire“ in a crowded theater.
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