Welcome to The Marble Palace Blog. I am Tony Mauro, and I have covered the Supreme Court since 1979 and for ALM since 2000. I retired in 2019, but in 2021 I launched a blog focusing on the court’s history and mysteries, its quirks and its clerks, among other topics. I welcome tips and comments at [email protected].

On May 17, 1954, the day when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the historic civil rights decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the only people who heard him were inside the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s staff did not record the audio of oral arguments until 1955.