Sotomayor Touts Privacy, Questions Cameras at Court In her first major talk on issues of free speech and privacy, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said recently that her experiences as a nominee and as a justice have led her to censor herself and to question whether camera coverage of the court should be allowed.

"Yes, my notion of freedom has changed since I became a justice of the Supreme Court" Sotomayor said in a New York City speech on May 5 that got little press attention at the time. "There for the first time in a court of final resort, I have come to appreciate in an unanticipated way the great burden that my work imposes."

That burden, as Sotomayor explained it, includes self-censorship and barring media coverage in some situations to promote the court's image as a neutral and apolitical institution. "The veil of privacy that shelters us from political influence and protects the public perception of the court is necessary because history shows that our authority is not unassailable." She added, "Maintaining the court's decorum and its respect in the public eye are not minor questions of image and public relations but essential to the proper functioning of the institution and our democracy."

In her speech delivered at Cooper Union before the PEN America Center, Sotomayor said she has tempered her own tendency toward transparency because of this responsibility. "When I give a speech or express myself publicly outside of court opinions, I voluntarily and scrupulously censor myself," she said. "I am cautious to avoid any topic that might foreseeably come before the court or to express myself in any way that would telegraph a future decision, because it's clear that such expression can and does undermine the public's confidence in the court."

Sotomayor criticized news coverage of Supreme Court oral arguments, which she said "becomes the occasion for dramatic prognostication in the press as pundits examine the entrails of every utterance for some hint of how we will decide."

That kind of coverage, she said, places too much emphasis on "who might have been having a bad day at the podium," missing other parts of the deliberative process -- including the impact that lawyers' answers to justices' questions sometimes have on the outcome of a case. "A sportscaster's reckless account does not guide a ball through the air and neither does the flood of commentary that follows oral arguments sway our decision."

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