Rather than standing out for the persuasiveness of my argument or the scholarship underlying my position, my U.S. Supreme Court debut in 1993 appears to have been most notable for what law professor and blogger Josh Blackman called one of the longest laughs he had heard listening to audio of the court’s oral arguments.

My experience came to mind when I learned about the latest statistics from professor Jay Wexler of Boston University, who has been tracking the [laughter] notations in argument transcripts since 2005. He recently shared on Twitter that Justice Stephen Breyer was the funniest justice in the 2017-18 term with 38 laughs. But Wexler previously has said that Justice Antonin Scalia “always got the most [laughs]” until his death in 2016. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who succeeded Scalia, garnered 12 laughs for his first year.