Supreme Court refuses to broadcast opinion announcements live
Supreme Court justices are set to take the bench Thursday morning to announce their latest rulings in cases argued this term. They won’t say which ones are coming ahead of time, but among the remaining rulings are ones on birthright citizenship and other consequential decisions for America’s future.
Yet all Americans won’t see or even hear the justices as they make these important announcements in open court.
The opinions will be posted on the court’s website as the justices summarize them. But that doesn’t excuse the court’s lack of transparency.
Think about the birthright citizenship case, for example, to understand why the court’s practice does not make sense. When it was argued in April, anyone with internet access could tune in live to hear the audio of the hearing in real time. When the resulting ruling is announced, however, there will be no such live audio, even though both the hearing and the opinion announcement will happen in the same public courtroom. It’s not a technological obstacle.
Nor does the court view opinion announcements as so sensitive that no one can hear them, because these sessions are open to however many people can fit into the courtroom on a given day. Nor does the court view opinion announcements as so sensitive that everyone can’t hear them eventually, because the audio is typically published at some point during the following court term. It’s only that the court does not want everyone to be able to tune in live for these announcements in the same way that it lets people tune in for hearings.
What could possibly justify the court’s selective transparency?
A common attempt at an explanation is that an opinion announcement is a summary of the ruling spoken by the opinion’s author, as opposed to a verbatim readout. Therefore, the argument goes, it would be pointless or even confusing or harmful to broadcast information that is not precisely the ruling, especially when the ruling is on the court’s website for all to read.
It’s good that the opinions are posted, but it’s not an either/or situation. Posting the opinions doesn’t change the fact that the justices are choosing to take actions in a public courtroom that they are delaying from mass public access. It would be one thing if the justices didn’t think they needed to make these public statements at all. But they apparently do think they are valuable, so they should share their words in the same way that they share the audio of the hearings.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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