Maryland’s Justices Trade Red Robes for Black

By Alec Sandler
Guest Contributor

Maryland court watchers may have noticed a change on Friday morning. After wearing their red robes on the first day of arguments for the September 2025 Term, the justices of the Supreme Court of Maryland traded their distinctive red robes for new black ones.

The Court has not made a public comment, but the “opening day” red robes suggest that the justices will continue to wear red robes on ceremonial occasions. Today’s black robes match the nation’s other 49 state supreme courts, whose justices all wear black.

[Update: The Court’s website now explains: “Beginning with the 2025 Term, the Supreme Court of Maryland will be wearing red robes for ceremonial occasions, including the first oral argument day of each term and for bar admissions ceremonies. The Court will return to wearing black robes on most other court days.”]

The origins of Maryland’s red robes are the subject of debate. According to a memoir of Roger Taney, he was struck by the “scarlet cloaks” worn by judges of the General Court (the post-colonial period predecessor to the Court of Appeals) when he arrived in Annapolis to read law.[1] By the Jacksonian era, however, judges had abandoned robes altogether, appearing instead in plain business attire.[2] This change likely reflected the prevailing view that judicial dress was an aristocratic vestige of monarchy, something Jacksonian democracy firmly rejected.

In the early 20th century, the judges of the Court of Appeals began wearing robes again,[3] which were black, perhaps as part of a broader return to symbols of impartiality and tradition. A proposal to switch to red robes surfaced in the 1930s but went nowhere. Four decades later, in 1972, the Court made the change to red—a choice that endured until this week.[4] The Court’s name itself changed in 2022, when a constitutional amendment rebranded the Court of Appeals as the Supreme Court of Maryland.

Why the return to black? Only the justices know for sure. Some members of the bar took pride in Maryland’s distinctiveness—akin to the pride that drives Marylanders to buy anything adorned with a crab or the quartered black-and-gold Calvert and red-and-white Crossland coat of arms.

On the other hand, the “tradition” is barely fifty years old, dating to the same year Atari released Pong and McDonald’s debuted the Egg McMuffin. And in truth, most Marylanders likely care less about robe color than about whether the Rule of Law thrives in their state—which, in this former clerk’s view, it most certainly does.

In the end, red is out, and black is back, at least most days. Though, I have not lost hope that one day the bar can lobby for at least a Maryland flag stock.  

[1] Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney (Kessinger Publishing 2008).

[2] Rudolph Lamy, A Study of Scarlet: Red Robes and the Maryland Court of Appeals (Rev. Oct. 2006), available at: https://www.courts.state.md.us/sites/default/files/import/lawlib/aboutus/history/judgesrobes.pdf.

[3] Id.

[4] For a more complete history of what led to the 1972 change, see id.