Each morning before oral argument at the Supreme Court, a number of attorneys are sworn in as members of the Supreme Court bar. The entire exercise is one of rote formalism. The attorneys are introduced, they stand, routine sentences are spoken, an oath is sworn, Chief Justice William Rehnquist admits them all to the bar. They sit. Oral argument begins.

Because the swearing in is an exercise in repetitive stage business, most of the justices use these four minutes to flip through the briefs before them, or to whisper among themselves, or to slug water and peer around the room. But I can aver that after a year of watching this process, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has never once failed to look at every attorney as their name is being called. She never fails to bestow a huge smile—like a mamma bird with a worm—as they are sworn in.

For anyone who enjoys the sarcophagus quality of the high court—the feeling that nothing has ever lived or loved or shed a tear in that room—the notion of a justice beaming down upon the new admittees to the bar like a proud mother hen probably doesn't sit well. Oliver Wendell Holmes most likely wasn't all about sunshine on the bench. But my guess is that for the men and women being sworn in on any particular day, the recognition on the part of just one justice that they are more than just the daily veal in the life of this court is worth something. It's one of the few human moments you'll witness in there.

Today's case, however, is full of human moments—of the not-very-nice variety. Reporters walk out looking a little queasy, and at least one attorney isn't going to sleep for a long, long time without replaying it in his head.

The case is Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the subtitle might as well be "Garbage v. Birds" or, more accurately, (sigh) Local vs. Federal Government, Act MCIXI. I arrive at the court expecting busloads of environmentalists in Sherpa hats and Birkenstocks, but the court steps are covered with hip environmental lawyers in leather jackets and sideburns. As ever, they manage to make it hip to be green.

SWANCC is a consortium of 23 suburban Chicago cities trying to address their garbage problem. It bought a 533-acre parcel of land to use as a "balefill"—a landfill for baled, compacted, nontoxic waste. The land was actually a strip mine 50 years ago, but over time, it has developed into a rather lovely woodland known as an "early successional-stage forest." The trenches and depressions left behind by the mines have turned into over 200 ponds and puddles on which over 100 species of birds have been observed.

We've got your mallards. We've got your wood ducks. We've got Canada geese and kingfishers and redwinged blackbirds. And don't even get me started on the blue herons.

While Mother Nature was reclaiming her strip mine, SWANCC was seeking permission to fill in those ponds and start dumping trash. To do so, they needed a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, who are empowered under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to protect the "navigable" waters of the United States. While the Clean Water Act doesn't do much to define "navigable," a host of case law, regulatory law, and a preamble to the Army Corps Regulations drafted in 1986 go a long way toward doing so. The preamble actually interpreted the act's jurisdiction over "navigable waters" to include not only navigable waters in its obvious sense, but also waters that might in some way implicate interstate commerce, and also (enter the "bird rule") any body of water in the land that is used or could be used as a habitat by migratory birds. Since under this analysis, the bird rule authorizes federal jurisdiction over your neighbor's outhouse and your kids' plastic Pokémon wading pool, SWANCC sued, contesting the government's jurisdiction to enforce the bird rule.

There are two prongs to SWANCC's claim. Its broadest constitutional argument is that Congress had to grant the Army Corps jurisdiction over isolated, intrastate waters. Their other, statutory argument is simply that the Corps' interpretation of its own regulations went too far in including the protection of migratory birds within the definition of "navigable waters."

The district court and the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals both found for the Army Corps. In fact, in one of the most exquisitely ironic moments in jurisprudential history, the 7^th Circuit found that protection of the natural habitats of migratory birds "substantially affects interstate commerce" because "throughout North America, millions of people annually spend more than a billion dollars on hunting, trapping and observing migratory birds."