Associate Justices of the Supreme Court make a healthy $214,000 annually, but their lifestyles tend to be even nicer.

For example, the late chief justice William Rehnquist made sure to adjourn the court each summer in time to take up his duties teaching at the American Studies Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, a lovely little city that was Mozart’s hometown and which also happens to host the world top (i.e., expensive) opera festival each summer.

Similarly, from McClatchy DC in 2013:

Justice Elena Kagan joined Justice Anthony Kennedy in Salzburg, Austria, in July to teach a three-week class on “Fundamental Rights in Europe and the United States.” The course, sponsored by the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, gave Kagan, a 53-year-old Democratic appointee, and Kennedy, a 77-year-old Republican appointee, an off-Capitol Hill chance to bond. “Their collaboration was extremely effective, and from what I could see they really enjoyed working together in this way,” John Cary Sims, a McGeorge law professor who served as on-site director of the Salzburg program, said in an email interview. “One afternoon, they stood together and smiled, smiled, smiled while each student had a picture taken with them.” Kagan and Kennedy are “both extremely gifted teachers,” Sims noted. At the same time, he observed that the possibility that summer bonding could lead to easier judicial collaboration, while a “sensible hypothesis,” is also “not one that outsiders are likely to be able to evaluate.” … Kagan told a University of Kentucky audience in mid-September that she has been bonding with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia over hunting. The two ideological opposites began by shooting clay pigeons together and have since graduated to game, including pheasant and antelope. “I’ve enjoyed it,” Kagan said. “I enjoy spending time with him. He’s a great guy.” Enjoyment, though, doesn’t necessarily translate to agreement. … Kagan and Ginsburg, by contrast, disagreed in only 4 percent of the cases. Ginsburg, too, stressed during the summer how she has been able to find common ground with her ideological opposites, like Scalia. Both are opera buffs. She told a New York state audience in July that a recent law school graduate is currently writing a comic opera, titled “Scalia/Ginsburg,” built around the theme that two people with notably different views can, nonetheless, respect and genuinely like each other. “Collegiality of that sort is what makes it possible for the court to do the ever-challenging work the Constitution and Congress assign to us,” Ginsburg told the New York audience.

By the way:

A liberal Democratic appointee who has served since 1993, Ginsburg is presumed to be timing her eventual retirement so her replacement will be selected by President Barack Obama. She has suggested that she might want to surpass the nearly 23-year tenure of the court’s first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis. That would peg her retirement to mid-2016.

About a decade ago, a friend of mine who is a big time senior lawyer in an Anglosphere country invited me to attend a series of symposiums and social events he was hosting for two visiting U.S. Supreme Court justices at his world famous golf club. I couldn’t afford to go so far, but when we had lunch at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 2013, he reported that Justice Breyer was a prince of a guest.

He had much more interesting gossip to report about the other Justice.