There was little else to do, as the first argument heard by Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s newest member, was a perfectly ordinary bankruptcy dispute.
Justice Kagan’s eight questions were crisp and pointed, and they indicated mastery of the difficult if mundane question before the court: May some bankrupt debtors include among their living expenses a standard monthly amount for the “ownership costs” of cars they own outright?
A credit card company, supported by the federal government, said that only people making loan or lease payments should qualify for a standard deduction of $471 a month over five years.
The distinction between leasing and owning, Justice Kagan suggested, does not always make sense.
“What would happen,” Justice Kagan asked, “if the debtor had a car that was 200,000 miles old and it was going to break down, you know, within the next five years? Would the debtor then be able to take the deduction?”
A lawyer for a credit card company, Deanne E. Maynard, said no.
Justice Kagan left the bench after the first argument and sat out the second one, a criminal case involving the federal government. In that case and about two dozen others — amounting to almost half of the court’s argument docket so far — Justice Kagan has disqualified herself because of her recent service as United States solicitor general, the federal government’s top appellate lawyer.
For the hour that she was present, Justice Kagan’s questioning and the thinking it implied meshed with those of the other justices. But she was notably more direct than some of her new colleagues, who quickly reverted to type.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the master of the fanciful hypothetical, asked about the implications of owning a dozen apples. “You are not going to say the ownership costs refer to the apples, even if you decorate the car with them?” he asked.
Before he could get an answer, Justice Antonin Scalia, the grumpy textualist, chastised the debtor’s lawyer, Christopher P. Burke, for not including the words of the relevant law in his main brief.
“What’s the language we are dealing with, Mr. Burke?” Justice Scalia asked. “Do you want to quote the language to us? Nobody’s quoted the language.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the student of irony and paradox, suggested that the issue presented in the case had no good answer. “Your argument leads to a result that is just as absurd as your colleague’s result on the other side,” the chief justice said to Ms. Maynard.
He elaborated in an exchange with a lawyer for the federal government, which supported the company. A nominal payment toward a lease or loan, the chief justice said, would entitle a debtor to shelter about $28,000 over five years, while outright ownership would allow no deductions.
By her colleagues’ standards, Justice Kagan asked straightforward questions in a mild tone. At one point, she deftly aligned herself with the member of the court often at its center, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
“This goes back to Justice Kennedy’s question,” she said, before unspooling an elaborate inquiry about the meaning of a “notwithstanding clause.”
Earlier in the argument in the case, Ransom v. FIA Card Services, No. 09-907, Justice Kennedy had followed a line of questioning sketched out by Justice Kagan. He was the only justice to mention her by name.