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How important is Supreme Court Security anyway? [1]

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Date: 2023-02-04  

There has been a lot of discussion about Supreme Court leaks lately, and recent reports indicate that security was lax. While at first glance this seems to be a concern, maybe more transparency would be a better idea.

Consider the practice in other arms of government. In our state of New York, for example, the Open Meetings laws require nearly all governmental meetings to be open to the public. On a local level, that means that school board members, village boards, and even library boards must not discuss business without advance notice and public access, and members of such panels typically avoid meeting in groups where any public business might be discussed. And, of course, Freedom of Information laws on both state and federal level make correspondence and emails between and among members open to discovery by the public and press.

Likewise, on the trial court level, most proceedings are open to the public. It is a common practice for busy lower court judges, when they have decided an issue, to give counsel for both sides notice of their decision and request the prevailing lawyer to submit a proposed order outlining the legal basis, a copy of which the other counsel can review and comment on. Right or wrong, everyone has a chance to understand what goes into a decision.

Th Supreme Court is supposed to be using logic and precedent to “call balls and strikes” and decide the proper legal outcome. We understand that discussing the proper outcome would involve tossing around a lot of ideas that could later be rejected, but isn’t that what we already see in oral argument? The whole purpose of a written opinion in a case is to guide lower court judges, attorneys and the public in understanding and applying what the Court declares to be the law. Seeing how the opinions are arrived at would simply provide a better understanding of the nuances of the final outcome.

A Supreme Court opinion is a little like a piece of sausage — packed up in a casing and with a list of ingredients on the package. Sometimes, though, you have a little more faith in the final product if you can watch the sausage being made, to be certain what went into it in the first place. Health inspectors check up on sausage factories; shouldn’t we be able to check the purity of the Court?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/4/2151047/-How-important-is-Supreme-Court-Security-anyway

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