Supreme Court Building

The Supreme Court did not have a permanent home of its own for the first 135 years of its existence. It convened first in a New York City tavern in 1790, moved with the government to Philadelphia, and then to Washington, where it met inside the Capitol itself — first in a cramped committee room, later in the old Senate chamber, and finally in a basement courtroom so unassuming that visitors sometimes walked past it without realizing the nation's highest court sat inside. The arrangement reflected the founders' expectation, articulated by Alexander Hamilton, that the judiciary would be the "least dangerous" branch and needed no building of its own to prove it.

Chief Justice William Howard Taft — the only person ever to serve as both president and chief justice — spent much of the 1920s arguing that the Court's borrowed quarters diminished its standing as a coequal branch of government, and he lobbied Congress until it approved funding for a dedicated building in 1929. Architect Cass Gilbert designed a Corinthian-columned marble temple modeled on classical courts of law, with the phrase "Equal Justice Under Law" carved above its entrance. Taft died in 1930, five years before construction finished, and never saw the building he had fought for.

The Supreme Court Building opened in 1935 and held its first oral arguments that October. Inside, beyond the public courtroom and the justices' private chambers, a top-floor gymnasium with a basketball court earned the nickname "the highest court in the land" among the clerks who use it. Nearly every landmark constitutional ruling since 1935 — Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, and countless others — has been argued inside a building the Court spent a century and a third doing without.