These were always collegial meetings inside the Supreme Court. This time—over the course of two days, January 9 and 10—seven American justices participated, everyone but Souter and Thomas. The justices from the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation—Yuri Rudkin, Nikolai Seleznev, Oleg Tyunov, and Gennady Zhilin—were joined by judges from the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Dagestan and the Constitutional Supervision Committee of the Republic of Northern Ossetia-Alania. They all met in the Court’s private ceremonial conference rooms: for an informal reception, the blue-motif West Conference Room; for hours of discussions about law and American heritage, the rose-motif East Conference Room, with a portrait of the legendary 19th-century chief justice John Marshall above the fireplace.

But this year, the discussions weren’t about general topics such as due process or free expression or separation of powers. Some of the Russians wanted to know how Bush v. Gore had come to pass—how it was that somebody other than the electorate decided who ran the government. That was the kind of thing that gave Communism a bad name. “In our country,” a Russian justice said, bemused, “we wouldn’t let judges pick the president.” The justice added that he knew that, in various nations, judges were in the pocket of executive officials—he just didn’t know that was so in the United States. It was a supremely ironic moment.

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