It may seem strange to describe nine of the most powerful people in this country as anonymous, but in a practical sense, they often are. A C-SPAN poll from earlier this year found that only about half of Americans could identify any Supreme Court justice by name; only 25 percent of them could name Justice Clarence Thomas, who replaced Ginsburg as the court’s most relatively recognizable member after her death in 2020. About 7 percent of Americans could name Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who received the lowest numbers. These figures have nevertheless ticked up from past C-SPAN surveys. For most of his tenure, for example, Alito could only be named by between one and three percent of those surveyed. Thomas’s number also nearly doubled from the last survey in 2018.
I have not yet personally run into any of the justices since I moved to D.C. almost a decade ago, but I used to occasionally hear friends tell me that they spotted one of them at bookstores and supermarkets, almost always unrecognized by anyone else around them. Until her death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg lived in an apartment at the Watergate complex—yes, that Watergate complex—in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. When I worked at The Atlantic, which had office space in one of the adjacent buildings, my coworkers would sometimes see her buying things at the CVS store in the center of the complex. I never thought to ask them if she had a security detail with her, but I often saw her accompanied by one when she attended scheduled events.
Since the justices blend into the background so easily, they have not been immune to more pedestrian forms of crime. Ginsburg herself was accosted by a purse snatcher in 1996 near her Watergate home. In 2004, a group of youths attacked then-Justice David Souter while he was jogging in southwestern Washington. Justice Stephen Breyer went through two robbery-related incidents in 2012: one in which a burglar broke into his Washington home, and another at his Caribbean vacation home where an intruder wielding a machete stole about $1,000 in cash while he was there with family and friends. None of these incidents appeared to be related to their work.
