Her son and his wife, however, were sitting in law school class, so they could not attend.
As was their practice when sitting as law lords, the justices wore neither gowns nor wigs, but ordinary suits, apart from Baroness Hale, the only woman on the 12-member court, who donned a smart grey skirt and jacket with what appeared to be a pin bearing the emblem of the court itself.
The idea for this column came to me while sitting in law offices in New York where a young woman said that she was going to miss her mother's marriage because she was working on a huge case.
In that great parliamentary hall it was an odd thought, since Britain is the only Western democracy that is part-theocracy, with its 26 unelected bishops sitting as law-makers in the House of Lords.
I'd sit behind a huge desk in a Louis XIV boardroom with my father-in-law sitting behind me and his father-in-law sitting in front of me.
"There's nothing a presidential candidate does that remotely compares in importance to picking the vice president," said Mr. Mondale, 80, sitting in his law office in Minneapolis.
Under an arrangement worked out with the White House, he will now continue to make money in the private sector, practicing law, sitting on corporate boards and lobbying in Washington (though no longer for Enron, he said today, given the many questions swirling around the company's collapse).
Rod came home from work one day and found his mother in law sitting with her feet up in his favorite chair.
When I started going blind, I was still trying to fight my case, and I remember sitting in the law library, straining to read the books.
