The First Monday in October and the Lawyer’s Briefcase

Congress settled the date long ago, and the statute has not moved. 28 U.S. Code § 2 reads: “The Supreme Court shall hold at the seat of government a term of court commencing on the first Monday in October of each year and may hold such adjourned or special terms as may be necessary.” In 2026, that Monday is October 5. The federal judiciary’s own news service put the rule more plainly in 2012: “By law, the Supreme Court of the United States starts its new term the first Monday in October.” The justices, it added, “will hear arguments in about 75-80 cases and will typically issue decisions in these cases prior to the Court’s adjournment in late June.”

Seventy-some cases. A whole year of law for a country of this size.

The Work That Happens Before the Doors Open

The term begins in public on a Monday, but the first real decision happens earlier, behind closed doors. SCOTUSblog describes the long conference as a private meeting held in late September or early October, at which the justices consider the petitions for review that piled up over the summer. Roughly 2,000 of them. A 2010 SCOTUSblog explainer states the voting rule in one sentence: “four Justices must vote to grant cert., or the petition is denied.”

“Cert.” is shorthand for certiorari, the petition by which a losing party in a lower court asks the Supreme Court to take the case. The Court is not obliged to say yes, and in nearly every instance it says no. A petition that fails ends the matter there, with no argument, no lectern, no one-notebook allowance and no October Monday for the lawyer who wrote it.

The odds are poor. That same SCOTUSblog piece reports that over the past decade the Court has granted between 5 and 15 petitions from the long conference, roughly a 0.6 percent chance of approval, half the 1.1 percent typical of petitions considered at other conferences. It also quotes two lawyers on the experience. Edward Lazarus, a former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, called the session a “single marathon session,” and Gregory Garre, a former U.S. solicitor general, called it the place “where petitions go to die.”

The 2012 item also calls the first-Monday start “a practice that has occurred for nearly 100 years,” which is how long a date can sit in the law before anyone thinks to question it. The consequence for anyone who argues there is practical. The calendar does not bend to a lawyer’s preparation. The preparation bends to the calendar.

What Counsel Is Told to Wear and Carry

A lawyer who clears those odds then has to stand at the lectern, and the Court has views about what that looks like. Its Guide for Counsel, in the 2019 revision, says: “Appropriate attire for counsel is conservative business dress in traditional dark colors (e.g., navy blue or charcoal gray).” On materials it is shorter still: “Do not bring numerous volumes to the lectern. One notebook will suffice.” The guide adds that “a legal sized pad does not fit on the lectern properly.”

One notebook. After months of briefing, that is the allowance. The Court revises the guide from time to time, so anyone relying on it should check the current edition rather than this one.

The dress rule has company in the post on Thurgood Marshall, who argued before this Court in a suit he could not afford, according to that account. The Court’s standard of dark, conservative dress is old. The standard for what a lawyer carries into the building is, if anything, older.

What Stays Outside the Courtroom

The guide is just as direct about devices: “No personal computers, cellular phones, cameras, PDAs, or other electronic/wireless devices are allowed in the Courtroom, and they may not be used in the Lawyers’ Lounge.” Counsel, it says, “may leave such devices, coats, hats, and similar items in the Lawyers’ Lounge.” Guests are handled differently. They “should check coats, hats, briefcases, cameras, electronic equipment, and similar items in the cloakroom.”

The guide does not say where counsel’s own briefcase waits during argument. “Similar items” in the lounge language is the nearest it comes. What the text does establish is the shape of the day: a great deal of material goes to the building, and very little of it goes to the lectern.

Why the Briefcase Matters Most When Nobody Sees It

That gap, between what is carried to the building and what is carried to the lectern, is where a briefcase does its work. It holds the record, the briefs, the authorities and the annotated copies in an order the lawyer can find again under pressure, and it delivers them flat, dry and unmarked. A legal-size file that bends in a too-shallow bag is a small failure, and small failures in transit are the kind a preparation can’t afford. The practical question of dimensions is taken up in Will a Legal-Size File Fit? Briefcase Dimensions for Attorneys, and the courtroom side of the day, the waiting and the carrying between rulings, in Off the Clock in the Well of the Court.

Marcellino NY builds briefcases from English bridle leather, made to order, for exactly that kind of use: daily, loaded, and carried through the weather between the car and the courthouse steps. A bag of that kind is not on view when the Court sits. The justices will not see it. The gallery will not either.

None of this is a reason to carry less. It is a reason to carry well. A lawyer whose case reached the argument calendar got there past odds like those, and has by then spent a long time with the paper. The bag that carries it is the last piece of equipment standing between that work and the courtroom.

Past odds like those, a lawyer arrives with a notebook. Everything else that got that case to the lectern is somewhere behind it, waiting.

You Might Also Like

• Will a Legal-Size File Fit? Briefcase Dimensions for Attorneys
• Off the Clock in the Well of the Court
• Thurgood Marshall Argued Brown v. Board in a Suit He Couldn’t Afford

Sources

• 28 U.S. Code § 2, Terms of court (Cornell Legal Information Institute)
• New Term Starts at United States Supreme Court (U.S. Courts, Oct. 1, 2012)
• What is the Supreme Court’s long conference? (SCOTUSblog, 2025)
• The beginning of the term in plain English (SCOTUSblog, 2010)
• Guide for Counsel in Cases to Be Argued Before the Supreme Court of the United States, 2019 revision