A Stitch in Haste

Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has joined Justice David Souter in declaring his unmitigated opposition to televising Supreme Court sessions:

"We don't want to become entertainment," he said. "I think there's something sick about making entertainment out of real people's legal problems. I don't like it in the lower courts, and I don't particularly like it in the Supreme Court."

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has introduced legislation in the Senate that would allow sessions of the high court to be televised. The court has allowed the audio recordings of sessions to be released, but it has refused to allow cameras into its hearing chamber.

Here's the problem I have with Scalia's logic: The nature of the cases the Court hears is such that those "real people's legal problems" are now poised to become my legal problems. It is therefore specious to dismiss my desire to see the process in action as mere "entertainment." To analogize C-SPAN watchers to the voyeurs of Court TV denigrates the civic spirit of the all-too-few people who take an interest in public affairs at all.

Furthermore, the fear that judges will "play to the camera" the way politicians do (e.g., in Congress for C-SPAN) is in my opinion overstated. Supreme Court justices are not politicians. They may very well be political, but they are not politicians.

The right to a public trial is not only a right of the defendant, but also of the public itself. That principle should flow all the way up to the Supreme Court. Taxpayers fund the judiciary, taxpayers should -- through Congress -- have the final say.