The first thing I wondered after Chief Justice Roberts was sworn in was, who is going to paint his portrait? And what kind of portraits belong in the court? Certainly the justices belong in oil; they are towering figures in our national life. But what about the ordinary men and women, sometimes common criminals, other times idealists, some with their backs to the wall, some simply cantankerous, who find their fortunes, reputations and even their lives in jeopardy before the bench? They are the ones who have taken the great constitutional gambles.

How about a welder who worked for the Santa Fe railroad. His daughter, Linda, though only in the third grade, had to walk and ride a school bus to attend a black school though a white school was much closer. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People got one of the greatest lawyers ever to stand before the high bench, Thurgood Marshall, to plead the welder’s case. The rulings that were eventually handed down changed the face of America, and the name of the welder, Oliver L. Brown, will be learned by school children across the world when the names of every one of the judges then on the bench have been long forgotten. Why not hang Oliver Brown’s portrait in the court?

Along with that of the Florida convict who, while in jail for breaking into a pool room, became obsessed with the notion that he should have been able to have a lawyer, that the constitution gave him the right. So he spent his days in the prison library, scribbling out appeals. One was a pauper’s petition that was plucked from the pile at the Supreme Court and did more than any single piece of paper in the history of America to ensure that the due process clause of the Constitution would be honored in practice. His name was Clarence Earl Gideon, and he won a new trial and the right to have a lawyer and was found not guilty, after all, and countless Americans have benefited from his constitutional epiphany. His story is beautifully told by Anthony Lewis in his book “Gideon’s Trumpet,” but what did Gideon look like?

Then there is a not-so-petty criminal of whom it is hard to list a redeeming feature except for something that happened when, little more than 40 years ago, he was put into the dock on charges of rape. He concluded not only that he shouldn’t have signed a confession but that he had the right to remain silent. When that argument failed to sway the courts in Arizona, Ernesto Miranda had the stubbornness to file with the Supreme Court what would become one of the most famous pauper’s petitions in the history of the law, winning for all Americans the right, upon being arrested, to be told that they have the right to remain silent. Who will paint his portrait?

Could an artist capture in a portrait all the tragic ironies in the life of the unmarried indigent who, after she became pregnant, replied to charges of procuring an abortion by mounting a challenge to the law that made nearly all abortions illegal in Texas? The prosecutor, Henry Wade, had, according to the Wikopedia online encyclopedia, never lost a case, until the woman who filed under the name of Jane Roe haled him before the high court and won the right to abortion. As the years wore on, Jane Roe became a devout Christian, changed her mind about abortion, disclosed that she was really Norma McCorvey, and sought to reopen the case, only to be, earlier this year, rebuffed by the nine. How would one paint her eyes?

Would it be in a white apron flecked with red that a portraitist would depict the Brooklyn poulterer, Joseph Schechter? He was minding his own business when his premises were entered by agents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. Trying to impose a national standard on the chicken business, they got him and his companies indicted on criminal charges. When one of his lawyers tried to explain to the justices of the Supreme Court how awkward it would be to select a chicken according to NRA rules, the justices, according to a report in the Times, laughed from the bench. Then they declared the NRA unconstitutional. Back in the court’s robing room, relates historian Peter Irons, citing Arthur Schlesinger, Justice Brandeis told FDR’s crony, Thomas Corcoran, that he could tell the president that government centralization under the New Deal was over. This is how the hand of government began to be lifted from the economy so that eventually the country could climb out of the Great Depression.

Surely any collection of portraits of such giants might include some ogres, such as Jay Near, the anti-Catholic bigot, racist, and anti-Semitic newspaper publisher whom the state charged as a public nuisance, only to be stopped, in Near v. Minnesota, by the court’s the greatest ruling against prior restraint of the press. Or figures of enduring controversy, such as Madelyn Murray, whose case was one of those that got the high court to ban prayer in schools. Or even would be traitors, such as Bollman and Swartwout, who got Chief Justice Marshall to rule that merely plotting against America could not be set down as treason absent the actual levying of war. There are scores of such figures, each one special. As one contemplates the court, it is hard not to think of them all as giants themselves and wonder what they would look like framed in gold in the hallowed halls of the court they prodded to greatness.