Of the three branches of U.S. government, the Judicial is the most secretive. Judges appear in public for trials and then disappear to cogitate in solitude before rendering their verdicts — which often appear suddenly, as if by divine intervention. But what if courts had to act transparently — the way other parts of government do — and let us watch them deliberate?
That is the question chief justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is asking. Last week she proposed a series of reforms for her court. Among them: requiring justices to hold their deliberations about which cases to take and how to decide them in the open. That could mean conducting deliberations in a place where the public could watch or broadcasting their discussions on television or the Internet.
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