I didn’t go inside. I didn’t need to. The weight of the Missouri Supreme Court could be felt from the steps—those wide, cool slabs of stone that seem built for reflection as much as passage. I sat there, still, gazing across the street at the Capitol, as if watching a sibling across a long dining table. Between us, a two-lane street and a stretch of autumn grass; beyond that, centuries of power, principle, and tension.
There’s something fitting about the physical arrangement of these two buildings—the lawmakers and the law-interpreters, staring each other down across a public thoroughfare. Missouri’s grand experiment in governance, cast in limestone and dome, checks and balances reduced to architecture. And there I sat, not as an insider this time, not as a councilman or an activist, but as a quiet observer. A tourist of sorts, though the kind that returns to the same place again and again and still finds something new to consider.
I thought about how often we invoke "the system"—as though it were a machine operating independent of us, capable of correcting itself. But the truth is more delicate. It’s not a machine; it’s a set of agreements. Fragile, shifting, sometimes tested to their limits. And yet, we still believe in them—or at least we hope to. That laws will be made, interpreted, enforced, and challenged not by whim, but by structure. That when one branch overreaches, the others will pull back. That when rights are denied, there’s a courtroom where they might be restored.
I thought of Lloyd Gaines, who applied to law school at the University of Missouri and was denied because he was Black. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld that decision, a grim echo of the times. But his case climbed higher—to the U.S. Supreme Court—and forced Missouri to confront the myth of “separate but equal.” Gaines vanished before the ruling could reshape his life, but his name remains, carved into the moral geology of this place.
I thought, too, of Celia, a young enslaved woman who killed the man who repeatedly raped her. Tried here in Missouri in 1855, convicted by a jury of men who acknowledged the facts but not her right to resist. The court upheld her execution. Her case wasn’t just a failure of justice—it was a damning portrait of how the law can be weaponized to reinforce cruelty. And yet even that dark story endures, taught in law schools and whispered through lectures, because remembering is the first step toward something better.
So many other cases—some landmark, some nearly forgotten—have passed through these chambers and continue to shape how Missourians live, work, love, worship, protest, and vote. The Court doesn't just interpret law—it tells us who we were and forces us to ask who we want to be.
As I sat there on the steps, beneath a sky just cool enough to keep your thoughts sharp, I didn’t feel awe so much as awareness. That this place—this pair of buildings set across from each other like cautious partners—isn't sacred because it’s made of stone or history. It’s sacred because we keep returning to it. To argue. To petition. To sit and think.
It was a good day to be a tourist. A better day to be a citizen.