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Article
Open Secret: Why the Supreme Court has Nothing to Fear From the Internet
Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media at Syracuse University
  • Keith J. Bybee, Syracuse University
Document Type
Article
Date
1-1-2012
Keywords
  • Supreme Court,
  • transparency,
  • openness,
  • digital information,
  • internet,
  • judicial legitimacy,
  • politics,
  • impartiality,
  • open secret
Language
English
Description/Abstract

The United States Supreme Court has an uneasy relationship with openness: it complies with some calls for transparency, drags its feet in response to others, and sometimes simply refuses to go along. I argue that the Court’s position is understandable given that the internet age of fluid information and openness has often been heralded in terms that are antithetical to the Court’s operations. Even so, I also argue the Court actually has little to fear from greater transparency. The understanding of the Court with the greatest delegitimizing potential is the understanding that the justices render decisions on the basis of political preference rather than according to legal principle and impartial reason. Yet this political understanding of the Court cannot be revealed by greater transparency because this understanding is already broadly held and co-exists with the popular view that the Court is an impartial arbiter. The notion that the justices are influenced by politics is, in short, an open secret. Rather than wondering how judicial legitimacy might survive in an era when information continuously floods into the public sphere, I argue that the better question is how judicial legitimacy can be maintained in the first place when the judiciary is widely understood to be partisan and impartial at the same time.

Additional Information

Keith J. Bybee is Paul E. and the Hon. Joanne F. Alper ’72 Judiciary Studies Professor at Syracuse University College of Law and Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Citation Information
Keith J. Bybee. "Open Secret: Why the Supreme Court has Nothing to Fear From the Internet" (2012)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/keith_bybee/6/