As a lawyer, I routinely practiced in courtrooms festooned with the portraits of judges who had presided over each given court in the past. While waiting for my case to be called, I hardly gave the portraits—overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly male—much thought at all, except perhaps to marvel at how sartorial styles for facial hair had changed so much since the late 1800s. At appellate courts, I strolled past the gallery of portraits of appellate jurists past and present, a mental journey that would eventually culminate in seeing my own portrait join those (mostly) solemn-looking ranks. For over 31 years, I regarded the judicial portraits that adorn our courthouses the way most lawyers and judges probably do: as a way of honoring those judges, both living and dead, and as a means of expressing the legal system's connection of the past with the present.