Supreme Court Justices Negotiate Uniform Seal for Personal Records

Chief Justice John Roberts led private negotiations among Supreme Court justices to establish a more uniform seal for their personal working papers. The effort followed the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who left no instructions for his records, highlighting the lack of formal laws governing the preservation or public release of internal judicial documents.

Unlike the executive branch, the Supreme Court allows individual justices to decide which documents to save or destroy. Recent trends indicate a shift toward tighter restrictions. For instance, the families of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Scalia arranged for papers to remain sealed until every justice involved in a specific case has died.

Justice Elena Kagan testified that such secrecy is necessary to protect the authority and finality of judicial decisions. However, historians warn that this opacity, paired with the rise of the shadow docket and a lack of digital record-keeping procedures, may permanently obscure the reasoning and inner workings of the current court.