Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs is sponsoring a panel discussion this Wednesday (yes, Veterans Day) titled “Full Court Press: The Supreme Court, the Media and Public Understanding.” I’m amused to see that the four panelists—Emily Bazelon, Adam Liptak, Dahlia Lithwick, and Jeffrey Toobin—all come from the same sliver of the ideological spectrum. By noting this, I don’t mean to denigrate any of the panelists, each of whom, individually, is a reasonable selection for the panel. But the ensemble hardly seems well designed to generate meaningful debate over why, as the program’s press release puts it, “public knowledge of the justices and the impact of the judiciary remains fairly foggy.”
Somehow I suspect that more time will be spent puzzling over why the public refuses to embrace the canard that the Supreme Court is “fundamentally conservative” than over the detrimental effects of ideological groupthink among Supreme Court reporters.