The court's reputation and the public's trust

Reason reports that a detailed Marquette Law School survey finds Americans hold modestly negative views of the Supreme Court as an institution, even while most of the Court's consequential recent decisions enjoy majority public support. That is a curious combination — and a printer who once set type for arguments about colonial charters knows what it means when the public approves of a verdict but mistrusts the judge who delivered it.

Let me state the principle plainly: a court's authority is not a physical thing. It is paper money of the most refined sort — it holds its value only so long as the people believe it will hold its value. Unlike a coin, you cannot bite it to test its metal. The moment a sufficient number of citizens decide the institution is partial, factional, or for sale to the highest patron, its decisions become merely the commands of nine individuals in robes rather than the solemn expression of a republic's fundamental law.

The poll's finding — that specific decisions are popular while the institution is not — suggests the public's quarrel is less with what the Court has ruled and more with how it appears to conduct itself. I would infer, though the dossier does not say so directly, that questions of recusal, of undisclosed hospitality, and of the speed with which certain justices seem to audition for one team or another have done the damage. A man's reputation, I once observed, is like fine porcelain: hard to make, easy to break, and never quite the same once mended.

The remedy is not novel. Republics since Rome have understood that judges must not only be impartial but must be seen to be impartial. Disclosure of substantial gifts, enforceable recusal standards, and some mechanism of accountability short of the blunt instrument of impeachment — these are not radical impositions on judicial independence. They are the minimum discipline that any public institution must accept in exchange for the public's deference. A bank that refuses to open its ledgers forfeits the depositor's confidence; a court that refuses transparency forfeits no less.

I am not without sympathy for the difficulty. Every reform of such an institution risks becoming a political weapon in the hands of whichever faction finds itself disadvantaged at the moment. That danger is real. Yet the alternative — allowing trust to erode until the Court's rulings are treated as merely advisory opinions from a partisan committee — is far worse. A judiciary that no one believes in is no judiciary at all.

Counsel for the working citizen: The health of your highest court is not an abstraction remote from your daily affairs. Every contract you sign, every property line you defend, every liberty you exercise ultimately rests on a legal order whose capstone is that tribunal. Attend to its conduct as you would attend to the credit of the bank that holds your savings. Demand transparency, support those who press for enforceable ethics rules, and make your view known to your representatives — for the court does not stand apart from the republic; it is the republic's own conscience, and a conscience that goes unexamined grows unreliable.