For those who just can’t get enough coverage of the Supreme Court, its members, and its potential members: The July/August issue of American Theatre, the national monthly magazine, contains an article by yours truly about several Supreme Court members participating in a D.C. theater company’s annual mock trials of literary characters.

Think it’s all work and no play to be on the national’s highest tribunal? I thought so too until I attended “Malvolio’s Revenge,” an April event mounted by Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito and Stephen G. Breyer, and five other Beltway lawyers, presided over a tongue-in-cheek trial based on Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

Alas, I cannot link to the article, since the magazine isn’t posting the text online. But here’s a link to the magazine’s website.  (Full disclosure: From 1999 to 2004, I was American Theatre’s managing editor.)

Who knows? If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed and joins the Nine, she too may someday be involved in these mock trials, ruling on the culpability of Hamlet and similar Bard-based legal issues.

Here’s a bit of Supreme Court trivia I didn’t work into the article. In a phone interview, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who is a huge Shakespeare fan, and regularly participates in the mock trials—told me her favorite Shakespeare plays include “Richard III” and “Henry V.”