Cameras in the court: will allowing recording devices unleash the Supremes' inner Judge Judys?

• Author: Beato, Greg

In 1935, the Supreme Court moved into its current home, a building designed to express as much majesty and unimpeachable authority as $3 million worth of marble could buy. (The overall budget for the project, in 1935 dollars, was $10 million.) According to a C-SPAN website devoted the Court, seven of the Court's nine justices immediately "refused to move into their new chambers." Frank Gilbert, grandson of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, has said his grandfather felt the plans for the building were "too grand." Harlan Fiske Stone, another Supreme Court justice at the time, remarked in a letter to his sons that the palatial structure was "almost bombastically pretentious."

But if the structure's deliberate magnificence struck many of its intended inhabitants as more fit for a king than a judge, its size also made the Court's proceedings far more accessible to the public than it had been in its previous digs. The new courtroom may have featured Italian marble columns reportedly procured with the assistance of Benito Mussolini. But it also included space for an audience of approximately 400. By contrast, the Old Senate Chamber, where the Supreme Court sat from 1860 to 1935, could only accommodate 150.

Alas, today's justices seem far more taken with their marble palace's heavy-handed stateliness than its accessibility. In early March, in anticipation of imminent Supreme Court hearings on cases involving the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, a group called Fix the Court bought airtime on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Comedy Central to promote a long-standing dream of open-government advocates: to make the Supreme Court's "biggest decisions" at least as accessible to the American public as Seinfeld reruns, Swiffer commercials, and weather forecasts. These activists want to televise the Supreme Court.

Only two photographs of the Supreme Court in session exist, and both of those were taken in the 1930s by photographers who'd smuggled cameras into the courtroom. According to Sonja West, a law professor who wrote about these incidents for Slate in 2012, the first unauthorized shutterbug "faked a broken arm and hid a camera in his sling." The second concealed a small camera in her handbag; its lens protruded through a hole the woman had fashioned to look like "an ornament."

Both photos ended up in print, the first in Fortune, the latter in Time. At the time they were taken, there was apparently no formal law against photographs in the...