Ahoy bobblehead fans: Bobbleheads can be picked up at the reception desk of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, at 1625 Eye Street NW in Washington, DC, during the business hours of 8:00-1:00 or 2:00-5:00 ET. To be admitted to reception, you will first need to present your original bobblehead certificate to the security desk in the lobby of the building. Bobblehead quantity is limited, and we cannot guarantee that yours will be in stock.

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About the bobbleheads

We make them for the joy of it, and then we give them away. We do not sell them. If you get one, we hope you enjoy playing with it as much as we enjoyed making it. (Our bobbleheads are produced by the finest bobblemaker in the world, Alexander Global Promotions.) Barbara Berdahl, Pat Graybill, and Ryan Greenwood at the University of Minnesota Law Library have created a superb online bobblehead exhibit (based on a gift from James M. Rosenbaum), and Meggan Cashwell and Addie Patrick at the University of Virginia's Arthur J. Morris Law Library have put together an impressive bobblehead display (details here and here). Prototypes of the bobblehead Justices (and samples of production versions) are archived at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Yale Law School, where they are surely safer than they would be in the clumsy hands of Green Bag editors. To learn more about the Yale collection, click here and here.

Getting bobbleheads

We make no promises about when we will make them or who will get them. Some (but not all) subscribers to the Green Bag as of the date we announce the release of a bobblehead receive a certificate potentially redeemable for a doll, and we arbitrarily and capriciously give certificates to some folks who are not subscribers (including some public interest groups at law schools that auction the dolls at their fundraisers). Moreover, even holders of certificates are not guaranteed a doll, because we reserve the right to refuse to redeem any certificate for any reason, including but not limited to (a) a shortage of dolls, (b) reasonable or unreasonable suspicion of theft or forgery of a certificate, (c) rudeness by a person seeking to redeem a certificate, and (d) caprice. There is, in other words, no way to lock-in a Green Bag bobblehead. If you want to buy one, your best bets are those charity auctions and eBay.

You might ask: What do certificates look like, and where can I find one? And we might answer: They have ranged from big (8.5 x 11 inches) to medium (6 x 9) to small (2.5 x 3.5), and they will probably continue to vary. The certificates can show up in surprising places. We have inserted them in issues of the Green Bag (which has had the pleasing effect of giving people who actually read the journal a bit of a head start on picking up, for example, the Alito and Trimble bobbleheads), printed them on the backs of Supreme Court Sluggers trading cards (which has had the same kind of effect with, for example, the Lockwood and Marshall bobbleheads), and distributed them loose, in separate envelopes. Occasionally, we sneak one into an unrelated item at a charity auction. In the future, they may well show up in such places again, and in others.

So, if you represent a bar association — or a dean, or a professor, or a judge, or students in a constitutional law class, or some law clerks, or an ACS/FedSoc chapter, or a wedding party, or a rotisserie baseball league, or yourself, or anyone or anything else other than a public interest group at a law school — how do you solve the bobblehead acquisition problem? For starters, we would suggest asking your members or associates whether they can give you the bobblehead you desire. We tend to make between 500 and 2,000 of each bobblehead we design, and most of them make their way out of our hands and into the wide world pretty quickly, which means there may well already be a bobblehead available in your own circle. If that does not work, the solution is in a previous paragraph: You can find one on eBay, or you can do what it takes to make one appear at an auction conducted by a public interest group at a law school. This last approach should be pretty easy for nearly all lawyers: Encourage a public interest group at your alma mater (or, if you are a professor or librarian or administrator, your place of work) to ask us for a bobblehead to be auctioned at its fundraiser in support of public interest work, and then be the winning bidder when the auction happens. What’s especially pleasing about this approach is that you end up with the bobblehead you desire and the bobblehead itself (through the money you pay for it) ends up serving the needy. That is why we do not make exceptions for our friends and admirers: doing so would undermine support for public interest groups at law schools (and we do seem to enjoy a temporary uptick in friendship and admiration every time we release a new bobblehead). If your law school does not have a group that raises money to support public interest work, you might want to encourage it to start one.

If you just want a chance to get a bobblehead and do not care about any of the other stuff, there is a way, though the odds are long. It involves a quiz. Alas, the quiz is on hiatus right now, but it should be back soon.

There are two ways to ensure you will not receive a bobblehead from us: (1) ask us to give or sell you one (unless you represent a law school public interest group that will auction the asked-for doll at a fundraiser); (2) assert a right to one.

Certificate redemption

The bobbleheads are invariably in short supply and too fragile for us to ship with any confidence that they will arrive in good condition. And besides, we cannot afford to do it. That means redemption of a certificate must be done in person.

Instructions for in-person certificate redemption are at the top of this page. Please follow them!

To facilitate retrieval of bobbleheads by proxies, we do not insist that a person redeeming a certificate be the original recipient of that certificate. Please don’t lose a certificate. If you do, you will also lose any bobblehead that might be associated with it. We will not respond to a photocopy, fax, scan, or other reproduction of a certificate. Originals only.

The bobbleheads themselves

We have been making bobbleheads of U.S. Supreme Court Justices for a long time, and we hope to keep that work going forever. We've recently begun making bobblehead honoring non-Justices — first Belva Ann Lockwood, then a young Thurgood Marshall, then William T. Coleman, and next, who knows — and we hope to do more work of that sort too.

Green Bag bobbleheads - Lockwood, Marshall, Coleman

Even more recently, in the 2019 edition of our Baker Street Almanac, we explained that we “are moving away from putting a little bit of Sherlock Holmes into many of our legal publications and toward putting a little bit of law into an annual Holmes publication.” Reader response has been pleasingly postitive. So, we have resolved to try similar approaches with some of the other kinds of things we make. We are starting with a bobblehead.

Green Bag bobblehead - Sherlock

The Justices are listed below in order of their appointment to the Court,  with oath-taking(s) and bobblehead release dates in parentheses.

John Jay (1789; 2010)

John Rutledge (1790 & 1795; 2010)

William Cushing (1790; 2010)

James Wilson (1789; 2010) (packaging)

John Blair (1790; 2013) (packaging)

James Iredell (1790; 2014) (packaging)

Robert Trimble (1826; 2017)

Benjamin R. Curtis (1851; 2007) (packaging)

Samuel Blatchford (1882; 2019)

David J. Brewer (1890; 2015) (packaging)

Louis D. Brandeis (1916; 2008) (packaging)

Louis D. Brandeis (1916; 2008) (Harvard ed.) (packaging)

Harlan Fiske Stone (1925; 2022) (packaging)

Stanley Reed (1938; 2014) (packaging)

Byron R. White (1962; 2019)

Harry A. Blackmun (1970; 2009) (packaging) (formerly for FantasyLaw champions only) (baseball not included) (assembly instructions)

William H. Rehnquist (1972 & 1986; 2003)

William H. Rehnquist (1972 & 1986; supp. 1 - Athens & Rome - 2014)

John Paul Stevens (1975; 2004)

John Paul Stevens (1975; supp. 1 - 2023)

Sandra Day O'Connor (1981; 2004)

Antonin Scalia (1986; 2005)

Antonin Scalia (1986 prototype - never released)

Anthony M. Kennedy (1988; 2006) (packaging)

David H. Souter (1990; 2009) (packaging)

Clarence Thomas (1991; 2011) (packaging) (accessories)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993; 2012) (packaging)

Stephen G. Breyer (1994; 2014) (packaging) (assembly instructions) (stickers)

John G. Roberts, Jr. (2005; 2015) (video)

Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (2006; 2017)

Sonia Sotomayor (2009; 2022)

• Elena Kagan (2010; forthcoming 2024)