Jan Greenburg passes along a portion of an interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in which Justice Thomas explains why, unlike some of his colleagues, he chooses not to participate much during Supreme Court oral arguments. He thinks they are largely overrated:

There’s a way that we do business and it is very methodical, and it’s something that I’ve done over the past 16 years.
I have four law clerks. We work through the case, as I read the briefs, I read what they’ve written, I read all of the cases underlying, the court of appeals, the district court. There might be something from the magistrate judge or the bankruptcy judge. You read the record.
And then we sit and we discuss it, that’s with my law clerks. So by the time I go on the bench, we have an outline of our thinking on the case. So I know what I think without having heard argument or anything else. Argument is really not a critical part of the process, the oral argument.
The real work is in the documents, the submissions that we get from counsel. And when you do your work in going through that, it makes the oral argument sort of almost an afterthought.

Oral argument is stimulating and fun, but you’ve probably already lost the appeal by the time of oral argument unless you have won the battle of the briefs.