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Speaker 1: Harangue is defined as a lengthy and aggressive speech. It's

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Speaker 1: the word millennials might not favor today. But is it

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Speaker 1: a word whose meaning is clear? The d C. Circuit

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Speaker 1: Court of Appeals said yes and upheld the use of

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Speaker 1: the words harangue and oration in a criminal law used

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Speaker 1: to charge five people for staging protests in the Supreme

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Speaker 1: Court chamber on April one. The Circuit Court pointed to

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Speaker 1: the defendants coordinated standing facing the bench and messaging to

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Speaker 1: indicate the defendants were addressing the court and gallery, citing

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Speaker 1: Judge Chamberlain Haller. He's the judge played by actor Fred

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Speaker 1: Gwynn in the film My Cousin Vinny In that chair.

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Speaker 1: He told me to sit here. When you're addressing this court,

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Speaker 1: you will rise speak to me of a clear intelligible voice.

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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Legal reporter Andrew Harris wrote the story and joins us. Now,

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Speaker 1: Andrew tell us about the incident in the Supreme Court.

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Speaker 1: All right, tune, thanks for having me on well um

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Speaker 1: two years ago. Uh, they say. For first, Uh, five

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Speaker 1: protesters with a group called rise Um stood up and

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Speaker 1: sequentially UH shouted at uh the nine members of the

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Speaker 1: Supreme Court. Shortly after its galloled into session. They were

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Speaker 1: commemorating a ruling a year earlier that had taken some

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Speaker 1: of the stricchers off of campaign finance UH contribution limits,

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Speaker 1: and four of them UH sequentially got escorted out of

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Speaker 1: the court UH, prompting a warning from Chief Justice John

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Speaker 1: Roberts that anyone else doing so ran the risk of

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Speaker 1: being held in contempt of court. The fifth person, lead defendant,

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Speaker 1: David Bronstein, stood up and UH sang a brief song

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Speaker 1: about freedom, UH two stanzas of we who believe in

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Speaker 1: freedom shall not rest, at which point he was escorted out,

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Speaker 1: and all five of them were charged with two counts

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Speaker 1: basically of disturbing the tranquility of the court, one punishable

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Speaker 1: by up to a year in prison our jail, I

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Speaker 1: should say, and another punishable by up to sixty days.

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Speaker 1: That was the must talk about harangue and oration statue

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Speaker 1: that they challenged, and that pronogy. You know, protests and

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Speaker 1: really singing actually are pretty infrequent in the Supreme Court gallery,

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Speaker 1: I would think. So what was the arguments that the

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Speaker 1: that was made in court that they should not be liable? Well,

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Speaker 1: you know, as you said, this kind of behavior was

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Speaker 1: prowned upon in the decorum of the Supreme Court, and

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Speaker 1: the argument was that harangue and oration or kind of

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Speaker 1: antiquated vague words and so vague in fact, that their

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Speaker 1: meaning is unclear, uh and to too unclear to enforce compliance.

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Speaker 1: They won kind of in court. So tell us what

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Speaker 1: the circuit court rule. Well, the lower court said, you're right,

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Speaker 1: these things are unclear, but there's another part of our

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Speaker 1: statute that prohibits being allowed in court. So the lower

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Speaker 1: court judge said, I'm going to let the prosecution go

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Speaker 1: forward on the loudness violation. That said, the prosecutors decided

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Speaker 1: that they wanted the statute intact and may appeal the ruling,

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Speaker 1: and the uh unanimous Circuit court last Friday said, you

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Speaker 1: know what, this is pretty clear to us. You know

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Speaker 1: what a harangue is. When you hear it, you can't

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Speaker 1: yell at the judges and they reinstated haranguon oration to

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Speaker 1: the statutes so that it's still intact. Yeah, it doesn't

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Speaker 1: seem all that surprising that the higher court would want

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Speaker 1: to be able to enforce as much as possible prohibition

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Speaker 1: on making noise during their arguments, is it? No? No,

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Speaker 1: that wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was when

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Speaker 1: the lower court judge, in support of his ruling side

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Speaker 1: of James Madison and the Federalist papers, and when the

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Speaker 1: Appeals Court courted Judge Chamberlain Haller from my cousin any

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Speaker 1: in overturning him. What what did they? What did the

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Speaker 1: lower courts site? Well? The lower courts point was that, um,

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Speaker 1: sometimes language can be too vague to be understood. The

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Speaker 1: direct quote was, no language is so copious as as

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Speaker 1: to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or

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Speaker 1: so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas.

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Speaker 1: Point is, Hey, oration, harangue, we don't know what that means.

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Speaker 1: You can enforce that against these people? And the judge

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Speaker 1: who wrote the majority opinion in the Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Speaker 1: Have you seen that kind of writing before, Vinny quoting? Uh, Well,

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Speaker 1: sometimes judges get playful. Uh. Certainly some of the uh

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Speaker 1: Appeals Court judges out in Chicago as based for several years. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Judge Richard Posner, for example, will draw thing from pop

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Speaker 1: culture into opinions. The late Terry Evans was known for

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Speaker 1: doing that. They're uh, you know, in the pantheon of

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Speaker 1: great courtroom movies. You may hear about Twelve Angry Men

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Speaker 1: or Paul Newman in The Verdict, but my cousin Vinny,

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Speaker 1: for all of us, Screwball Comedy was a serious legal

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Speaker 1: movie with serious legal concepts, and one of them is

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Speaker 1: you have to respect the court. And a great example

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Speaker 1: of how to cross examine someone in that movie as well.

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Speaker 1: It's a great it's a great movie on many scores.

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Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being with us. That's Andrew Harris.

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Speaker 1: He is a legal reporter with Bloomberg News.