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Court OrdersSlate readers weigh in on how to fix Supreme Court reporting.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 6:59 PM ET

(Continued from page 2)

One of the most important effects of things like releasing SCOTUS audio arguments is their educational value. The court is an arcane institution that few average Americans understand. ... And most people don't realize how much the dynamics of personality and human irrationality steer the court to its final decisions. Listening to arguments reveals the justices for the humans they are and makes the whole process and procedure more accessible.

Paul Camp, on the other hand, is not interested in audio or video or anything that attempts "to reproduce the TV news experience online, with all its shallow, time-constricted talking headitude." That said, he cautions SCOTUS reporters not to fall captive to the myth of the neutral jurist: "Despite the pretense offered by people like Scalia that their words somehow descended unchanged from a Platonic realm of absolute truth, the fact is that personal histories and relationships, both within and outside the court, influence points of view in strange and subtle ways."

Danielle Goldstein wants us to do more to explain why cases matter. "The press corps are the only ones who can translate for the public—not just what the broad constitutional themes are, but also what the decisions mean in terms of people's actual lives. The courts are necessarily embedded in their own discourse, and it's one that isn't really tied, necessarily—or is tied in unpredictable ways—to real life."

Glenna Goldis makes a related point about journalists' reliance on experts:

If you're looking for someone to go hand to hand with John Roberts, she can't have anything to lose. Professors believe they have everything to lose. They want the court to adopt their ideas. Their former students are clerking on the court and they want to get more students on the court, so that the students will implement their ideas. They want to be on the court. And they think they are this close.

It's a fascinating problem consumers of Supreme Court news may highlight: We want the court to be covered like any other political and human decision-making institution, but with a deep respect for and understanding of the ways in which the court is different. Yes, it needs to be demystified, but not so much so that it is disrespected. It should be analyzed, but not in ways that might damage it or its credibility. The justices should be covered like people, but not like ordinary, silly people.

I've always known that the reporters who cover the high court are the hardest-working folks out there, but this exercise helped me understand why their job is so hard: Perhaps for the rule of law to mean anything, Americans need to see the high court as both human and oracular, and the folks who cover it inevitably have to walk some invisible, unknowable line between two myths that are each partly true.

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of the Supreme Court by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
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