Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
- 9,608
- 910
There is a really good article in the New Yorker.
The Supreme Paper Caper
I think those papers should belong to the public and available immediately. I understand that brings a new set of problems and why it's not done.
The Federal Records Act, passed in 1950, specifically excludes the Supreme Court. In 1978, in the wake of Watergate, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, which made the papers of American Presidents the property of the federal government; destroying them is a federal crime. There is no judicial equivalent. The Supreme Court’s official papers—formal filings, such as petitions, opinions, and briefs; and official records, such as audio recordings, transcripts, and governmental, case-related correspondence—end up at the National Archives. The papers of the Justices, if they save them, tend to go to the Library of Congress, to their alma maters, to their home towns, or to some other place they happen to like. They’re scattered across the country, and, by the time they arrive, they have, as a rule, been carefully culled.
The secrecy surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court derives from a policy set by the fourth* Chief Justice, John Marshall, who wanted the Court to issue single, unanimous decisions and to conceal all evidence of disagreement. His critics considered this policy to be incompatible with a government accountable to the people. “The very idea of cooking up opinions in conclave begets suspicions,” Thomas Jefferson complained. This criticism has never entirely quieted, but every time things get noisy the Court simply brazens it out. To historians and journalists who are keen to have the Court’s papers saved and unsealed, advocates of judicial secrecy insist that the ordinary claims of history and of public interest do not apply to the papers of U.S. Supreme Court Justices; the only claim on the Justices is justice itself.
Sitting Justices often view their colleagues’ decisions to make their papers public without delay as a betrayal of the living.
The Supreme Paper Caper
I think those papers should belong to the public and available immediately. I understand that brings a new set of problems and why it's not done.