The Supreme Court on Wednesday inadvertently streamed audio online of its opinion announcements, which are typically not intended for release until the subsequent term.
Since nearly the start of the pandemic in 2020, the Supreme Court has provided live audio feed for the public to listen in on oral arguments by attorneys and the justices. The high court recently resumed the tradition of reciting summaries of decided opinions from the bench, a practice that only those physically inside the courtroom are intended to hear.
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But those who were waiting on oral arguments to commence Wednesday caught a brief snippet of the justices summarizing their opinions aloud from the bench, as the high court released three new decisions Wednesday.
James Romoser, legal editor at Politico, tweeted that the Supreme Court is “live streaming the audio of its opinion announcements!”
The court has resisted live-streaming opinion announcements, the thinking seeming to be that they want the focus to be on the written opinions. Bench statements can vary a bit from the opinion and don’t necessarily have majority sign-off for every word. https://t.co/jEJDLJRM4m
— Greg Stohr (@GregStohr) April 19, 2023
Several spectators of the routine live chat for SCOTUSblog also noticed the apparent accident, prompting the blog’s primary moderator, Amy Howe, to write, “The court just turned the audio off, which suggests that perhaps it was” accidental.
The long-standing tradition of reading opinions from the bench was halted from March 2020 to December last year, as the court opted to issue opinions only on its website.
The National Archives will make the opinion announcement audio available for public access around the start of the court’s next term in the fall, though it was not immediately clear whether the Wednesday live recording would mark a change of tradition.
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“By all appearances, what happened today was inadvertent,” tweeted Greg Stohr, a Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg. “Probably best not to get used to it.”
The Washington Examiner contacted the Supreme Court Public Information Office for a response.
