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It’s kind of stupid that the New York Times website requires you to register, but on the other hand, it’s quick and it’s free, and in the nearly five years that I’ve used the site, I haven’t received a single e-mail from the Times.

Anyway, register, because there’s a pretty interesting in-depth piece today about Bush v. Gore: Election Case a Test and a Trauma for Justices, by the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Linda Greenhouse, attempting to go behind the scenes during that crazy time. She writes that “any attempt to construct a narrative of those 20 days encounters substantial gaps and intriguing unanswered questions,” but she notes that since the case ended, “the justices are behaving almost like survivors of a natural disaster who need to talk about what happened in order to regain their footing and move on.”

I know one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s current law clerks (each justice has three or four clerks each term) — we sang together in a college a cappella group and then went on to the same law school. A few days after the final decision in Bush v. Gore came down, I e-mailed him and asked him if he could tell me anything about what those several days had been like. He responded that although he couldn’t reveal any details, the chaos was outweighed by the “coolness” of the whole thing, and that this would probably be the highlight of his professional career. “Many of my co-clerks had feared that our term would pale in comparison to last term’s sexy constitutional cases, but I think we’ve scored big with the elections cases,” he wrote. Yeah, I’d say so.