By: Greg Hilton (MD)

On September 5, 2025, the second day of argument in the 2025 Term, the Justices of the Supreme Court of Maryland emerged from the doors flanking the bench as usual; but something had changed. The assembled lawyers and observers did a noticeable double-take. 

1972, 53 years earlier, five members of the Court of Appeals of Maryland met in an administrative conference and made an interesting decision. There were only five judges present because the Chief Judge had just retired and another judge had recently died in office. 

Judge J. Dudley Digges proposed to the other four judges present that the Court adopt red robes for its judicial attire. Dudley Digges didn’t come up with this idea on his own. His father, W. Mitchell Digges, also a Court of Appeals Judge, had unsuccessfully proposed the same change forty years earlier. 

At the 1972 conference, the judges questioned whether there was a historic precedent for the adoption of red robes. Proof of claims that the Court had worn red robes in the past was found in Samuel Tyler’s Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney (1872). The opening chapter of that book is an essay by Taney (pronounced “taw-nee”) himself providing an accounting of his early life. In it, Taney observed that: “The first session of the General Court, after I went to Annapolis, made a strong impression upon me. The three judges, wearing scarlet cloaks, sat in chairs placed on an elevated platform; and all the distinguished lawyers of Maryland were assembled at the bar.” (emphasis added).

The memory of Roger Taney is, of course, haunted by his opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). Taney had succeeded Chief Justice John Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1836 and served until he died in 1864.

Another inspiration for the design of the robes may have come from a portrait of Daniel Dulany “the younger,” a lawyer and member of the Maryland colonial council. Dulany was noted for his opposition to the Stamp Act, an impetus for the rebellion against England.

It is probable that the colonial and post-colonial Court’s red robes had a lineage from the British courts’ seasonally colored robes. British judges were known to have worn red, violet, green, and black robes at various times.  

So it is that in 1972, when the Court took up residence in its brand-new courthouse, it entered the courtroom wearing “red cloaks” with white collars and tabs. 

Fifty-three years later, on September 4, 2025, the Court likewise entered the courtroom wearing its red robes with the white collar and tabs. Then, the next day, without ceremony or prior announcement, the Court entered the courtroom in black robes. Thus, the double-take. Earlier in 2025, the Court had quietly decided to transition back to the black robes it had worn before the 1972 change. It has retained the red robes for the beginning of the term and other ceremonial events. 

The morning of September 4, 2025 …

The morning of September 5, 2025 …

The Court began wearing black robes in 1914 when it abandoned the wearing of business dress that had begun in 1828 in the Jacksonian era.

The readoption of black robes comes in the midst of some other significant changes in the Court. In 2022, the Court’s name changed from the Court of Appeals of Maryland to the Supreme Court of Maryland. At the same time, the Judges were renamed Justices. In a few years we will have a new Courts of Appeal Building. The new building will include the reinstallation and expansion of our 1903 courtroom and the reintegration of historic columns designed by famed architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The columns were first installed in the Baltimore Exchange Building in the early 1800s and were later installed in the Court’s 1903 courthouse. Latrobe’s son, a noted Baltimore lawyer, helped found the American Bar Association. Groundbreaking for the new courthouse was on February 27 this year. 

It is probably a coincidence that a month after Maryland reverted to black robes the Canadian Supreme Court abandoned its fur lined red robes in favor of specially designed black robes, reserving the more cumbersome traditional robes for ceremonial events. 

Sources: 

History of Court Dress, Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/history-of-the-judiciary-in-england-and-wales/history/ (last accessed Apr. 20, 2026).

Rudolf Lamy, A Study of Scarlet: Red Robes and the Maryland Court of Appeals, Md. State Law Library (2006), https://www.mdcourts.gov/sites/default/files/import/lawlib/aboutus/history/judgesrobes.pdf  (last accessed Apr. 20, 2026).

Ben Lazrick, Centuries-Old Column Installed at Miller Building, MarylandReporter.com (Jan. 2, 2011), https://marylandreporter.com/2011/01/02/centuries-old-column-installed-at-miller-building/ (last accessed Apr. 20, 2026). 

Library of Congress Catalog: https://lccn.loc.gov/2016646305 Image download:https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a40000/3a40000/3a40700/3a40703r.jpg

Daniel Otis, Supreme Court judges ditch red ‘Santa robes’ for new ‘modern and simple design’ CTV News (Oct. 13, 2025), https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/supreme-court-judges-ditch-red-santa-robes-for-new-modern-and-simple-design/ (last accessed Apr. 20, 2026).

Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL D., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1872).