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Supreme Court Takes Eeny Weeny, Teeny Tiny Step Forward For Transparency

Woohoo -- live audio will be back this Term.

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(Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Chalk this up to an unexpected benefit of the pandemic: the Supreme Court has announced they’ll keep on livestreaming audio of arguments — at least for this Term. Previously, it was the Court’s practice to only release audio of arguments on the Friday after they took place. The livestreaming will continue despite the fact that arguments will be reopened to members of the public for the first time since the COVID pandemic.

Non-Court watchers probably see this and think, “welcome to the year 2000.” And that’s a fair criticism for the notoriously backwards institution (I’m specifically referring to the adoption of technology, but you’re forgiven if you thought backwards on reproductive freedom, voting rights, gun control, or any number of other issues). In 2017, Jeffrey P. Minear, counselor to Chief Justice Roberts, said live audio “could adversely affect the character and quality of the dialogue between the attorneys and justices.” Which… cue the world’s biggest eye roll.

Gabe Roth of Fix the Court also takes the view that this is a step in the right direction, but acknowledges there’s still a ways to go:

I had hoped that live argument audio would have been made the permanent policy of the Supreme Court, but there’s reason to rejoice that the feed will at least be maintained throughout what’s expected to be another contentious term.

The justices have a constituency of 330 million, and all of us, not just those who have the time and money to get to Washington on argument day and wait for hours in line, deserve to be able to follow the Court’s work in real time, as modern technology permits.

Since, in my view, it’s going to take a generational turnover at the Court — that is, whenever Gen Xers and Millennials have replaced all the Boomers — to get cameras in the courtroom, the public for now should keep up the pressure to ensure that live audio doesn’t go away a year from now and that opinion announcements, should they return, are also livestreamed.

We won’t have cameras in the Court till there’s “generational turnover” — at a job where there’s lifetime appointments? It’s going to be a long 30ish years…

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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