The rules are rigid: No cameras or tape recorders in the courtroom; visitors are barred from floors where the justices work; justices are anonymous in argument transcripts released to the public.
By comparison, congressional debates and presidential appearances are aired around-the-clock on C-SPAN. Transcripts are made available within minutes of almost everything significant that happens in Washington, from war briefings at the Pentagon to White House news conferences.
Not the Supreme Court.
In fact, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist apparently made some colleagues uneasy with his decision to release immediately a tape recording of the recent two-hour court argument about affirmative action in college admissions. Only once before has the court provided audio of an argument right after its conclusion -- in Bush v. Gore over the contested 2000 presidential election results in Florida.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in testimony before Congress last week, said not to expect such a thing to happen often.
"The focus of the system ought to be on what we write and what the judgment is, and we don't wish to distract from that by giving the hearings an importance and significance that they don't in fact have," Kennedy said during the hearing, which was aired on C-SPAN.
The comments perplexed court watchers, who vie for seats in the courtroom and hang on justices' every word for clues about a case. Justices receive about 10,000 appeals a year. They schedule arguments in only about 80 cases. The arguments are open to the public, although lines are long.
Kennedy is not the only justice concerned about protecting the privacy of the court. Justice David H. Souter told Congress in 1996 that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body."
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