It’s hard to imagine a clearer violation of journalistic ethics than pretending to hold beliefs you don’t, asking Supreme Court justices if they agree, and surreptitiously recording their answers at a no-media dinner. But the novelty of the stunt shouldn’t distract us from the real takeaway, which is precisely that the recordings yielded nothing we didn’t already know.
Noah Feldman
The key conclusions are that Justice Samuel Alito is a religious man; his wife Martha-Ann likes political flags; and Chief Justice John Roberts is genuinely committed to the (somewhat unrealistic) idea that only elected officials — not judges — should make moral decisions.
The recording was obtained by liberal documentarian Lauren Windsor at the annual dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, itself a rather misunderstood event. As someone who’s been to the dinner (I was the speaker one year after writing a book on Supreme Court history) let me try to set the scene.
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The dinner is a reasonably accessible way for a non-billionaire to hobnob with the justices: Anyone who buys a $500 ticket can attend, which is how Windsor got in. That might sound like a lot of money, but it’s much less than many non-rich people pay to go to sporting events or Taylor Swift concerts.
