bench presence – The Interdependent Third Branch

Court transparency is essential, but it cannot be one-size-fits-all proposition. Here’s why.

Several recent articles in the popular press and academic literature have grappled with the issue of transparency. Professor Scott Dodson has written about the “open-courts norm” in the United States which, “accentuated by the First Amendment,” guarantees that criminal (and in most cases, civil) proceedings are open to the public. And, channeling Homer Simpson, Professor David Pozen has described government transparency “as the cause of, and solution to, a remarkable range of problems.” Outside the academic world, organizations such as Fix the Court are issuing their own transparency report cards to draw attention to the refusal of some courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) to broadcast oral arguments.

These commentators are on to something important. As public organizations, courts are expected to be broadly transparent about their activities. But not all forms of court transparency are the same. Some types of transparency are necessary to the courts’ survival, while other types of transparency would actually undermine the courts’ operations. It is worth considering why.

Continue reading “What is the right level of court system transparency?”

The Legal Intelligencer reports that only 17.5% of federal appellate cases decided on their merits were disposed of after oral argument in 2015-16, the most recent statistical year available. Put another way, nearly five out of every six cases that are filed in the U.S. Courts of Appeal are decided without any sort of oral hearing. That is a significant drop: ten years ago, nearly 26% of cases received an oral hearing before disposition. Twenty years ago, the number was better than 40%.

The decline in hearings at the appellate level is, unfortunately, representative of a larger trend. A few years ago, Judge William Young (D. Mass.) and I examined the time that federal district judges spent on trials and courtroom hearings — a statistic we called “bench presence” — and found a year-over-year decline from FY2008 through FY2013. By 2013, federal district judges — our trial judges! — reported spending about only 2 hours a day on average in the courtroom.

Continue reading “Oral arguments in federal court continue to decline”