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77 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 343 (2020)
Supreme Court Journalism: From Law to Spectacle?

handle is hein.journals/waslee77 and id is 343 raw text is: Supreme Court Journalism: From Law to Spectacle? Barry Sullivan* and Cristina Carmody Tilley** Abstract Few people outside certain specialized sectors of the press and the legal profession have any particular reason to read the increasingly voluminous opinions through which the Justices of the Supreme Court explain their interpretations of the Constitution and laws. Most of what the public knows about the Supreme Court necessarily comes from the press. That fact raises questions of considerable importance to the functioning of our constitutional democracy: How, for example, does the press describe the work of the Supreme Court? And has the way in which the press describes the work of the Court changed over the past several decades? This Article seeks to address those questions by comparing the print media coverage of two highly salient cases involving similar legal issues decided fifty years apart. Our study suggests that, at least in highly salient cases, the nature of print media coverage may well have changed dramatically during that fifty-year interval. More specifically, our study suggests that while the mid-twentieth century press described the Court's decisions largely in terms of the legal questions presented, the contemporary press seems more likely to describe the Court's decisions in non-legal terms-as something resembling a spectacle, in which unelected judges are presumed to * Cooney & Conway Chair in Advocacy and George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History, Loyola University Chicago School of Law. ** Associate Professor, University of Iowa College of Law. The authors wish to thank John Dehn, James Gathii, and Michael Kaufman for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. We are also indebted to our research assistants, including Emily Ancona, Emily Eggmann, Rachel Groves, Stephen Hilfer, Pilar Mendez, and especially Helaina Metcalf, whose enthusiasm for the project matched her expertise and attention to detail. We are also grateful for financial support from the Cooney & Conway Chair Fund, the Loyola University Chicago Law Faculty Research Fund, and the University of Iowa College of Law Empirical Research Fund. The usual stipulation applies. 343

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