To digress for just 30 seconds, today’s bench notes remind me that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to register my thoroughly anecdotal, unscientific observation that note-passing among the justices seems to be a fading art.

This is based chiefly on the collection of bench memos kept by the late Justice Harry Blackmun, which suggest that in Blackmun’s early years in the 1970s, the justices were passing notes as often as a class of fifth-graders.

The most famous of those, of course, was highlighted by Linda Greenhouse in her book “Becoming Justice Blackmun.” It was a note passed to Justice Potter Stewart by one of his law clerks (but kept by Blackmun and added to his collection). It came on an early October day in 1973 that was particularly momentous for U.S. politics and the Major League Baseball playoffs. The note read:

V.P. Agnew Just
Resigned!!

Mets 2
Reds 0

Stewart was a fan of the Reds, who would lose that National League Championship Series to the Mets. And wouldn’t it be nice to have playoff baseball going on when the justices are on the bench?