The public had ample opportunity to parse the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Senate Web sites before she was confirmed on Thursday, but when she begins hearing cases from the nation's top bench in September, the Supreme Court Web site will not provide the same level of accessibility.
The Court's Web site does not contain much information about its day-to-day business, including oral argument recordings and briefs, partly because it views proceedings as ancillary to making final decisions, say legal specialists.
"The Supreme Court just doesn't have the tradition" of the Government Printing Office, the executive branch's publishing arm, said Thomas Goldstein, who helps lead the Supreme Court practice at law firm Akin Gump and is the primary contributor to SCOTUSblog. "It's always viewed its job in publishing information [as simply] putting out its decisions. The oral arguments aren't binding. The thing that matters for them is their decisions."
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Most of the thousands of petitions filed every year requesting the Court to hear a case never go before the bench -- or online for the public to see. Petitions for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court -- briefs that request justices review a lower court's decision -- are not posted on the site. Of the 8,517 petitions filed in the Court's 2005-06 term, only 78 were granted argument, according to a 2009 empirical analysis of certiorari petition procedures in the George Mason Law Review.
Many of the approximate 8,000 certiorari petitions submitted annually do not exist in electronic form, Supreme Court officials said. Court rules only require digital copies of briefs that justices agree to review. Entries on SCOTUSblog often provide links to petitions, but the copies are obtained through lawyers working on the cases, not the court, Goldstein said.
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