Tom had a whole lot of credibility even before the blog started as a Supreme Court advocate. I first started writing about tom when he was a clerk, when he was interning for nina tote 10 berg at n 3 r. As on npr. As an up start, somebody who did not fit the mold as pete said and who was cold calling, the losers of cases in lower courts to see if they wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court, was a model that really hadnt been used before. I remember interviewing another top advocate of the, before the Supreme Court and asked him about tommy and he said, well, you know you wouldnt want your heart surgery done by the, by the heart surgeon who called you up and asked if he could do it. Who was that . That was a fellow by the name of john roberts who became a chief justice. I think he is sort of eating his words on that. So i think, tom had the reputation of a real innovator within this stuffy world of the Supreme Court and he was a good media source. So that when the blog came along i think he was, he and amy were able to over come some initial suspicions because this was a totally unique creature here. It was a blog about an institution by someone who, interacted with that institution as an advocate. Somebody who wouldnt have an interest in pissing off that institution to be blunt about it. As, journalists, sometimes do we, you know, i had an editor once who said, you know, if the sources you write about are happy with everything you write then youre not doing your job and i think thats, thats a key element of being a journalist. The fact that scotusblog overcame that initial suspicion through an incredible array of resources, through its credibility and through Lyle Denniston who is fiercely independent i, i think that enhances the remarkable nature of scotusblog and how it has become viewed as a Journalistic Institution. In almost every way. I mean it is possible we could seen talk about this at some point whether there are stories you might not write because arguing before the Supreme Court but i still think as a public resource, and i spent my career trying to lift the veil and shed light on the Supreme Court and i applaud anybody who does that and i think scotusblog has just been a remarkable public resource thats deserves all the applause it gets. If i can just, obviously this is way, way too generous. I would say one, if we try, in my opinion this ought to be what you can extrapolate from our experience rather than than, yay, scotusblog. If we try to do the same thing in other places. What you have in us is, people who practice in front of the Supreme Court and who teach about Supreme Court litigation. So we know that place, okay . Thats what we do. Anybody who spends their entire careers focusing on one places going to understand it pretty well. What we arent as journalists but what we do is appreciate journalists. We revere them. We crew up, either working for them or working with people like tony and pete who are better journalists than we could ever hope to be and there is a sense in an expert community, whether its lawyers or doctors, whatever, of were better, the journalists just report. But our attorney general eric holder wynn appreciation and honor we give absolute journal system absolutely true. Why it is if tony, pete or any of their colleagues come and ask us a question we think it is an unbelievable opportunity. It is also the case a lot of the people on the Supreme Court bar are more reactive and dont like to talk to the press. They think something will go wrong and upset the justices and that has never been our perspective but we really value it and that led us to hire lyle. It led us to adopt a set of values halfway through the existence of the blog where as if we were just out there pimping ourselves and the law practice the blog would be very different and much less successful. How well it does or doesnt right now really turns on the fact that people dont perceive it as something thats out there trying to sell you something or to develop the some advantage for our law practice and i do think tony raises a really important set of issues that should be discussed and that is, okay, but can you truly have it both ways . Can you practice in front of the Supreme Court, right, and your professional success there depends on your credibility with the justice and at the same time run an institution that is going to truly cover the Supreme Court . And truly be able to describe it warts and all . And how is it that you navigate that sort of thing if you want to really call yourself a Journalistic Institution . Because that dilemma will repeat itself too potentially. If youre an expert in physickings, if youre an expert in plumbing there are lots of things you can talk about and write about and cover where you dont face the dilemma of really pissing some people off if you, you know, speak truth to power. We, the justices Pay Attention to their press and so there are a unique set of challenges. I will identify one other thing we can talk about and that is we watch the court with a sunlike intensity because were completely fan boy obsessed with it. And so we have a finger on the pulse of the institution so that when it has glitches, when it, as it does, releases opinions early when it doesnt mean to, when it identifies case that is its going to grant cert in, without days early and it is not supposed to do that and we because were just watching them obsessively, we figure that out what is it that we, because we practice in front of the court and owe them a set of ethical obligations what do we owe them there . So there are a set of challenges. Here is the weirdest anomaly about scotusblog. We have a bunch of people, we may have 200 people write for us during the year. Were only about the Supreme Court. We are the only people who materially cover the Supreme Court in any way, even the thin nestest way the Supreme Court refuses to recognize and we dont have a press credential at the court. The court always followed a rule that says if you have a senate press credential that you will be credentialed by the Supreme Court and we got a senate press credential earlier this year and supplied our, then applied to the, the courts press office and at which point the Court Announced it was reviewing its credentialing practices. And i think genuinely. The court is an institution that is very stayed. Its entire premise things shouldnt change very much. It isnt embracing technology because the Company Expects them to be exceptionally stable. As the law, the law is very ossified and we are a puzzle that the court hasnt quite been able to figure out soft that is an interesting thing. That we are thus far unable to get credentialed by the court itself. Explain that. Give us limits. Give us the nuts and bolts. During the doma and samesex marriage case i was not going to wait for the legacy press to report it. I watched the feed coming from scotusblog. So do you have a mole . Explain, explain the nuts and bolts how you go about that instantaneous reporting. Sure. The courtroom itself is a vault when the court is announcing opinions. So there are no Electronic Devices allowed. But the press are, for covering really large opinions, for the most part not in the courtroom. They are outside the courtroom and at the point that the chief justice says, Justice Kennedy has the opinion in United States versus windsor, they start handing out the opinions to the press corps and then Lyle Denniston will get his copy of the opinion and pete will be outside waiting for his copy of the opinion and well talk to us about what the opinion says and then we will be typing that into our live blog to go out into the rest of the world. So and to finish this off, you know, were going to take advantage of every opportunity we have. There are a whole series of rules at the Supreme Court that are to be perfectly frank, adopted to prevent our invasion of various policies of the Supreme Court. So were not recognized as members of the press corps, okay . Then well not be subject to any of the constraints that the press corps is. So while the core press corps at the Supreme Court, the court makes a set of Public InformationOffice Available to them as many institutions do where you can have a person or two people there. Well, were not recognized as part of the press corps, so well have seven people running on five different Internet Connections in another two unidentified places in the building. [laughter] around so well have, when the final decisions of the term came down we had a massive team of people, lawyers, technical staff, two backup technical team, when we had done the Health Care Case the year before, hackers attempted to crash the blog. There were about a Million People on the blog at once. And so we will set up an infrastructure that is designed just to push out information. The court does, i shouldnt leave the impression that the court is either agnostic about our existence or trying to prevent us from getting access because the court does give Lyle Denniston a press pass because he is also anomaly anomaly covering the court for wpr in boston. The court is trying to accommodate us. The court is not trying to prevent information getting out to the public but we will do things like during oral arguments well sit the press corps is inside the courtroom and as amy says it is on lockdown. Were in the members Supreme Court bar. Well sit in the lawyers lounge. Listen to audio piped in. Halfway through the argument, believe the building, collect our phones. Used to allow us to keep our phones and then leave. But they have adopted a new rule that you have to put your phone in a locker. And so there are different, different on stag cycles that are being created but we will didnt you once try to blog from the lawyers lounge . Yes. Right. So this is, the fourth rule that was created to address our practices was there was an oral argument. Audio was being piped in, i was, no problem with this, i will just live tweet the oral argument. I got a call from the marshall of the court and who said, you know, tom, we noticed this twitter thing. We dont really know what that is, it was straight on to the blog. It was straight on to the blog. It was straight on to the blog, thats right. And we dont, you know, i didnt see you in the courtroom. What was going on . I said, we were just sitting in the lawyers lounge writing away. She says okay, that is not going to happen anymore. The next day they put in signs, no Electronic Devices in the lawyers lounge. So we have, you know, as anomalous as it is were not recognized by the court we have great advantages. Again this is a thing where experience and form present opportunities but they also constrain. If you just go in there and say, look ive got this technology, you have a set of rules . I will look where the margins of the rules are and im going to exist there. I have zero cost of distribution. Nobodys ever done this before . Thats not my problem. Youre going to screw a lot of things up and you will upset some people and we have upset some people and they have been justified being upset with us. Not just because theyre being crotch chetty. What i crotcety. People should look for targets of institutions a lot of places out there, fascinating to write and talk about. If one were to come in and say, look, all right, i will do that, get an audience for a Million People to sit on the blog waiting for the results of the Health Care Decision. We obviously have to thank cnn and fox contributing to the reputation that the blog developed. We have to thank the press in many different ways. But the, is an extraordinary statement about how it thats there is a hunger for information out there. How there are a series of institutions that their, their goal is not to make themselves more accessible. The Supreme Court is ironic in the sense that it is, the place, in washington that is most open in some senses. You know, all the cases that theyre going to hear. You know, all the arguments that theyre going to consider. You see the results of their decisions in the opinions. That is unlike the presidency. Unlike congress in any way. And so, at the same time it does very little to explain itself to the public. It kind of leaves itself out there. That is just waiting for someone to come along, okay, i will explain that place to you. And because it is so focused, because there are so few cases and briefs are available and that sort of thing it creates a Incredible Opportunity for us. If you imagine try to cover the presidency as a blog, who are they talking to, what information are they being presented with and same with congress. There are other things out there in the world, other areas of study, other places where you can literally own them and i think those are just waiting to be discovered. Can i follow up on that . I think thats, you know tony and pete, journalist who is cover the court and see us on a month to month, week to week, year to year basis, have sort of made their judgments about the brokings credibility but for reporters who dont cover the court regularly and on a beat where all of sudden they have a water case out of texas and they need to know what the Supreme Court is going to do with us they find us. I dont think they know a lot about us but they know we purport to be experts on the Supreme Court and were willing to talk with them and were willing to be resources for people on all kinds of topics. We get calls, give fashion advice, what can i wear to the Supreme Court arguments . When should i get in line . I got a lot of calls from the pattington case from hedge funds and how quickly would the court issue their decision and how quick we could know. If you decide to dominate a small niche, mind over matter, you can do it. I want to ask a question that any or all of you can address and weve talked about it a little, tony used the word, theres a veil and tom just talked about the secretive nature. Lets talk about the opening up and the role that scotusblog has played in providing if not more access, certainly a platform for dialogue, a platform for additional reporting. And that opening up it seems to me is also with the Legal Community. The scholarly, i mean the scholarly experts around the law can be very tightly arranged around law schools or law journals. How has scotusblog opened up both our knowledge of the court, our information about it but also the Legal Community and who is involved in this discussion . Well i would say that it has maybe broadened the circle of people with special knowledge. It has brought more people into the tent to use a perhaps a different term. You could get this insidey feeling about the Supreme Court by going to the annual seminar that law schools put on about the court or Reading Law SchoolJournal Articles or hanging out with other law professors who are obsessed with this institution as much as tom and amy are but this has, scotusblog invited basically the entire country to come in and be a party to these discussions. So i think one of the things that we have to talk about today is the, you know, the sort of flow of information about the court. You know, no single institution, scotusblog included, can fundamentally change the way the Court Decides to let you know what it is up to. Because, remember, it all starts with nine justices and only nine justices. There are no staff people in the room when it decides to hear or not hear a case. The decisions dont leak. Were talking about another, this is very unusual about the Supreme Court. The number of times in the last century that what the Supreme Court was going to do in a case has leaked out i think is two. Theyre welldocumented and both resulted in changes in the way the court operates to make sure that would never happen again. So the flow of information is very controlled by the court and so, you know, i dont think any blog or News Organization can change that but the access to it, the scotusblog has certainly changed that by allowing everybody to sort of gather around this watercooler and hear about what the Supreme Court is up to. I would agree. I wont tell too many old guy stories but when i first started covering the Supreme Court it was literally, if you were not in d. C. Or if you didnt have some, a friend in d. C. Who could go down to the courtroom to get the actual physical copy of the decision and then put it on a fax machine or something, you just, it was not accessible. You could not get a Supreme Court opinion until u. S. Law weekly printed it up and sent it to you in the mail three days later. So its, its remarkable what scotusblog has done. The court has also entered this field gingerly. They have a pretty decent website and they do put up decisions fairly soon after