The Supreme Courts of Canada and the United Kingdom allow cameras. What the public sees in those countries, and what it would see here, is something not always prominent in the elected branches of our government: able public servants with a complete mastery of difficult materials grappling seriously with matters of surpassing consequence. It probably inspires confidence. It certainly dispels ignorance.
Justice Elena Kagan, the member of the court who has been most outspoken about the value of television coverage, recently recalled what it was like to see Supreme Court arguments before she joined the court.
“Everybody was so prepared, so smart, so obviously deeply concerned about getting to the right answer,” she said at the Aspen Institute in August. “I thought if everybody could see this, it would make people feel so good about this branch of government and how it’s operating. And I thought it’s such a shame actually that only 200 people a day can get to see it.”
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The arguments against cameras are mostly rooted in paternalism or self-interest. Some justices say the public cannot be trusted to understand what goes on at oral arguments and how the arguments figure in the work of the court. Others worry that additional public scrutiny would alter the behavior of lawyers and justices for the worse. Still others say they fear harm to their personal privacy or to the court’s prestige.
In an interview, Mr. Lamb said he had heard one main objection from the justices. “It’s the sound bite,” he said. “They don’t like, in the modern age, that people can sound bite them.”
C-Span would carry entire arguments, but it is true that others might use excerpts. It is also true that newspaper reporters use the text equivalent of sound bites all the time. We call them quotations.
The justices’ real fear is probably not that their questions would be taken out of context but that they would be made to look silly, as they do occasionally say goofy things.
In a speech in July, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg collected 10 examples of amusing comments from the term that had just ended, including questions about a “9,000-foot cow,” Satan and whether smoking marijuana amounted to the destruction of evidence.
Justice Ginsburg drew this conclusion: “From the foregoing samples, you may better understand why the court does not plan to permit televising oral arguments any time soon.”
There is room for compromise, and the court might consider half-measures and baby steps. When other courts cannot accommodate spectators in a single courtroom, for instance, they often arrange for a closed-circuit transmission to an overflow room within the courthouse. It is hard to see an objection to that, or to closed-circuit transmissions to other courthouses.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for four justices, discussed that idea in a dissent last year. He suggested that there would have been no harm in a plan that contemplated remote but carefully supervised viewing from courthouses around the nation of a trial over same-sex marriage in San Francisco.
Mr. Lamb, for his part, analyzed the fundamental question this way.
“If you can’t do this in public and you’re doing the public’s business,” he said, “then something is wrong with this picture.”
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