“Open and Shut”

“One day I can perform Shostakovich. Congress does something. The next day I can’t. Doesn’t that present a serious First Amendment problem?”

— Chief Justice John G. Roberts,Jr. on whether Congress acted constitutionally in 1994 by restoring copyright protection to foreign works that had once been in the public domain.

“If there’s liability, perhaps it’s just for not being funny enough.”

— Robert Corn-Revere, a media lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine in Washington, D.C., on likely First Amendment protection for The Onion’s satirical tweets describing gunfire in the U.S. Capitol in late September.

“Do not, under any circumstances, use a Hitler analogy. It never works.”

— Kelly McBride, senior faculty for ethics at the Poynter Institute, on a Twitter “don’t” for reporters.

“The claims of a problem with public access to truthful information are anecdotal and unsupported by any study It is important to note that the information available on the judicial branch’s public Internet site is not information found by a Google or similar search. It is found by people who specifically come to our court website seeking accurate, public information about specific individuals.”

— North Dakota Supreme Court Justice Dale V. Sandstrom, reacting in a letter to a proposed amendment in his state that would give district judges the discretion to block public Internet access to certain criminal records

“He embarrassed the appeals court he is supposed to lead and cast serious doubt on his judicial impartiality.”

— An Oct. 5 New York Times editorial on Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs’ dissent from an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York (2nd Cir.) that allows a legal challenge of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to proceed.

“I initially supported the idea, but now less and less so. If I thought it would be a great piece of education, I’d be all for it. But I guarantee that for every 10 people that watched gavel-to-gavel and saw how the law works, there would be 10,000 who would only see a 30-second sound bite (on the news), which would not be representative of what we really do.”

— Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on bringing cameras into the Supreme Court.