Many Americans believe the Supreme Court operates behind a blanket of secrecy, but Justice Stephen Breyer says the nation's largest court is also surprisingly open, and sometimes he wishes there were cameras allowed in the court during proceedings.
"It's terrible they think it's the most secret," Breyer said in a pre-recorded interview aired on
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program Monday. "Opinions are open, reasoning is open, arguments are open, the press is always there except in our conferences, so why not cameras in the court?"
He said that he believes people would find Supreme Court proceedings to be "very educational," but at the same time, he is "slightly afraid" that there may be distortions when it comes to answers.
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Breyer, who was on the show to speak about his new book,
"The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities," described the court as a "conservative institution," in the sense that it's served for more than 200 years, and "none of us want to change it for the worse," but still, he does think there will be cameras in proceedings eventually.
Meanwhile, he said when people think of the "good old days" when there were fewer questions that weighed the balance between security and citizens' rights, those days "weren't that good."
"During World War II, 70,000 American citizens of Japanese origin were taken from the West Coast and put in camps, like prison camps and they had done nothing wrong," Breyer said. "There was no need to do it and the Supreme Court in 1944 upheld it. That wasn't such a good thing.
"The Guantanamo cases come along and we had a different approach," he continued. "When we had those cases the lawyers were well armed with two questions. When civil liberties are infringed, the first question a lawyer asks is why? What's the need? Then if there's a real need, why not. Why not do it in this less restrictive way?"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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