Will the Supreme Court's evolving view of privacy undermine the First Amendment?

What some of them seem poised to do is restrict more speech. I have argued that Thomas and Alito tend to view the American public and the media largely through the prism of their own confirmation hearings—which they found to be painful and humiliating. They both appear to believe that allowing a camera into a room transforms any event into a "raucous media event" (to use Alito's language from the Westboro Church opinion). As Shon Hopwood suggests, in describing the Snyder funeral in his dissent, Alito could have been describing his own experience with the press at his hearings. And I suspect that they will continue to find that whenever the media intrudes into private places, "the wounding process" (again, quoting Alito) is inevitable.

If they see service at the Supreme Court as nothing more than a string of unpleasant gotcha moments and embarrassing reprisals, then Alito and Thomas's retreat from public view makes a kind of sense. In Thomas' case, this has been a decades-long endeavor. In Alito's case, as Jeffrey Rosen observed, he clearly "cares more about the government's ability to protect a range of privacy values—including dignity, anonymity and community standards of decency—than anyone else on the court." But more and more it appears that both justices, and Breyer although for different reasons, carry a suspicion about the inherent incivility of public discourse that comes with an impulse to shut down more speech. In other words: If you think that the justices' own experiences with the media and their shrinking sense of personal privacy aren't affecting them, think again. As they come to the realization that there are indeed no more private spaces in America, some justices might be more inclined to chip away at the First Amendment to protect what's left of them.