The Supreme Court hasn't changed much since moving into its massive marvel marble building. The tables for the lawyers still have quill pens on them. The Chief Justice writes his opinions in Longhand, and cameras remained forbidden in the courtroom. So it was actually news when the Supreme Court announced recently it would require briefs to be filed electronically and it would make them available to everyone online. It was a step towards the kind of transparency that critics say
is often lacking at the Court. Our guest is someone whose professional mission is to make the Court more open and accountable. He's Gabe Roth, the executive director of the group Fixed the Court. Gabe, thanks for joining us. I want to start by playing a clip of something Chief Justice John Roberts said in we are the most transparent branch of government. Um. Everything we do that has an
impact is done in public. Gave. His point was at the Court's most important Really, it's only important output are its visions, and those are things where they include the reasoning. They put those out in the public. Uh So is a Chief Justice right that the Court is actually the most transparent branch of the government. He's not greg he's
not at all the Court. While its opinions maybe posted online and distributed within minutes of them being handed down from the bench, the fact remains that if you are a public official in seventeen there are certain responsibilities that you have to the public. Doesn't matter if you're a
life tenure like the justices are not. And the fact that you can't experience the cases of the court live unless you're one of the lucky few who gets into the courtroom on argument day, you don't know very much about their travel, their stock ownership, their potential conflicts of interest. It's not like the justices overall are in trouble, it's
not like they're they're unethical people. But if you are going to have a life tenure position in the federal government, there should be a little modicum of transparency in terms of the way the stitution works and the outside activities
of the individuals who are part of that institution. With with all that being said, does the Court get some credit in your mind for this this new step with regard to electronic filing and making uh they say they will make essentially every brief that has filed with them available to the public online. Absolutely, they they credit work, credit is due. They've Chief Justice Roberts said that this was going to happen within the next year or two.
I guess it took a little longer to work out the kinks, and there's there's still a few kinks on the on the website. UH. In addition to the filing, the website was was remade within the last few weeks. So so yeah, they absolutely get credit for this. I mean, every other federal appeals court in the country has been doing this for years. Most state courts have been doing this for years. But there's as as the court likes to say, there are reasons that they're the architecture one
of the architectural features of the building is turtles. The court moves slowly of jurisprudentially and on trans parrency issues. Um, but I'm young and I'm patient. I'm gonna keep pushing them to, uh to to to become more transparent across the board. But yes, they do. They do get credit for doing something that they should have done a decade ago. So I want to move to the subject that's that's always a big one, which is UH television cameras, which
of course, are are forbidden in the Supreme Court. You can bring still camera in there. Um. Nominees when they get nominated to the Court tend to express at least some openness to the idea of of cameras there. And now Neil Gorsich was perhaps less open than some previous nominees were. And then they joined the court um and
they seem a little less open to it. Um. Is there some reason you think that happens That maybe speaks to the notion that maybe once they get there, they actually realize there are some downsides to having cameras there. I don't. I don't. I don't necessarily buy that argument about becoming a member of the court and then changing the mind. I think it really has to do with the fact that there is a fairly stark generational split
at the Court. Some of the justices were born You think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, uh Stephen Bryer, and also the late Justice la Some of them were
born in the thirties, so they were growing up. They were not having the ubiquity of television as someone like you or I or anyone born after has and and and as justice has become younger overall, to get more used to the idea that, uh, if you're in public service, if if you're a public figure, to use a legal term, if you're a public figure, there's not the expectation, I mean, there is the expectation that you're going to be filmed
on a fairly regular basis. So I think it's there are a few holdout to maybe you're part of the older generation. But I think that within a few years, once the generational generations have turned on the Court, that that will get will get cameras more importantly that we it's it's more immediacy that we're after. If if live you know, the Supreme Court we learned in the last year has the capability of allowing live audio from the courtroom. They live audio broadcast a Scalia memorial, so it's less
you know, look, it's about the the visuals. But but to me, as as a former journalist, it's it's it's more about the immediacy, about ensuring that the oral arguments of the sixty or seventy cases that the Court heres each year is capable in real time for the evening news or the afternoon news. Um in the most modern way possible, and that's audio live streaming, and then hopefully we'll get cameras a few years after that. Gabe, I want to play for you something else that that John
Roberts said about the idea of televising Supreme Court arguments. Um, actually just do that. Do that in just a second. Let me first ask you, Um, other than cameras, if there's one other thing you could you would want the Supreme Court to do to become more transparent, what would you pick? I think it would be stock ownership. Only three of the current justices own individual stocks and stocks and individual companies. Uh, whether it be Cisco or Felled
both ways actually um or HP or uh Uh. Johnson controls the only Briar, Aldo and Roberts owned stocks and individual companies. And the reasons are Roberts invested when he was at law partner. Briar and his wife were active investors in the past. Aldo's father in law bequeathed a bunch of stocks to him when he passed away. But there's no reason that they should these three contrary to the other six, or owning individual stocks because there's so
many cases. We have such a litigious society. Seven thousand petitions come to the Supreme Court every year, and we don't want these unnecessary recusals caused by having these individual stocks. That Justice is should instead own blended funds or mutual funds like there, like there the other six counterparts, and instead should divest from individual stocks from the time that they're on the bench in order to reduce the amount
for potential conflicts of interest. Let me go ahead and play that clip from John Roberts talking about why he's opposed to televising Supreme Court arguments. People say, you know, everything other government institutions have been opened up, but be interesting to know what governmental institutions people saying function better now that they're on television. What do you think about that? About a minute left, which you know, it's I think
it's an apples to oranges comparison. You think of Congress on c SPAN. They're using those clips and their charts to run for office, to run for re election, to to sort of denigrate the other, the other party. A lot of times the justices don't don't do that. They have, you know, for better or worse, they have life tenure and the the idea that anything which I mean, you know, empirically, we know when cameras are used in appellate courts the world over, from the Supreme Court of Ohio to the
Supreme Court of Brazil. Nothing changes all that from the quality of the argument and the quality of what happens legally. All that changes is that the American people are the people who are not able to make it to the courtroom are able to understand their government better. And I think there's no better time than now, when where there's a clearly a civic deficit in this country, to have the citizens of this country understand what's going on at
the top court in the land. I want to thank our guest Gave Broth, executive director of Fix the Court. That's it for this edition of Bloomberg Law. We'll be back tomorrow thanks to our technic Wold director Chris Try Call Me and our producer David Sutterman. Coming up on Bloomberg Radio Bloomberg Markets with Corey Johnson. Stay tuned for that and more here on Bloomberg Radio. This is Bloomberg