ABSTRACT
Of the three national policy making institutions, the Supreme Court is the most removed from the press and public. In no small part, this is a consequence of its constitutional design. Unelected, and serving for terms of “good behavior,” its members are intended not to be held to any type of direct democratic accountability. But this separation is also the product of the studied behavior of the justices, the norms associated with the Court’s operation, and the traditional deference that the institution is afforded. Historically, the justices have been loath to make themselves available to the Fourth Estate or to interact with the mass public. Richard Davis, for example, reports that the willingness of Supreme Court justices (and certainly not all of them even now) to “go public” is a very recent phenomenon (2011, Preface; 2014). And this isolation from the press is imposed on other employees of the Court as well. For example, concerns over press leaks led the Court in 1987 to promulgate a “Code of Conduct for Supreme Court Law Clerks” that included the stipulation that the clerks were permitted to discuss their work for the Court only with the justices and other law clerks (O’Brien 2005, 120).
