Putting it mildly, Judge Posner was at his cantankerous best during the oral argument, at one point yelling at Kairis “You answer my question!” Judge Posner also told Notre Dame’s lawyer several times “Don’t fence with me” when Judge Posner thought that Kairis was not answering a question directly enough. And at one point, Judge Posner told Kairis “If you don’t cooperate with me, I’m not going to let you continue your argument.”

Judge Posner never did carry through with his threat to shut down Kairis’s argument, so it’s not clear whether that would have required the concurrence of another panel member. In Judge Posner’s defense, at one point even Judge Hamilton seemed a little exasperated with Kairis’s failure to directly respond to a question, reminding the advocate that the lawyers had already inflicted a great deal of reading material on the judges communicating whatever the lawyers wanted to say, and now it was the judges’ opportunity to have the lawyers address the judges’ many questions and concerns.

Several times during the oral argument, Judge Posner told Kairis “Please don’t interrupt me.” At least several of those times, however, it was Judge Posner who was interrupting Kairis, who then failed to stop talking. Instead of trying to prove the point “You don’t interrupt me; rather, I interrupt you,” maybe Judge Posner could have better communicated his message by telling the advocate, “When I start talking, you must stop talking.”