How Was Your Summer?

Clarence Thomas likes to spend his breaks road-tripping in his RV. Newly sworn-in Elena Kagan lived much of the past few months in front of C-SPAN’s cameras. Their colleagues also kept busy.

Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife traveled the east coast of Australia, making stops in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Roberts was there to give lectures, but his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, has personal ties to the country—she used to practice law in Melbourne.

For the 21st summer in a row, Anthony Kennedy went to Austria to teach students from the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law studying abroad.

Antonin Scalia spent time in Rome, where he was the guest lecturer at a Loyola University Chicago School of Law summer program. He likely had more enjoyable dining experiences there than the one he had later in the summer when he tripped and fell upon leaving an Italian cafe in Providence.

Speculation that Stephen Breyer might officiate at Chelsea Clinton’s July 31 nuptials was wrong, but Breyer—who has a new book out, Making Our Democracy Work—did turn up, along with actor John Lithgow and several Pulitzer Prize winners, at a writer’s conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Sonia Sotomayor has spent vacations in the Caribbean and at casinos, but her summer was relatively low-key. She headed west with fellow justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to a judicial conference in Colorado Springs, and in June Sotomayor gave the commencement address at Hostos Community College, a school in her hometown of the Bronx and her mother’s alma mater.

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Marisa M. Kashino

Senior Editor

Marisa M. Kashino joined Washingtonian in 2009 and was a senior editor until 2022.