In addition to a post last week broadly raising visitors' physicial interaction with courts, an earlier post discussed variation in the website availability of daily calendars for U.S. bankruptcy courtrooms. Today's post follows up on this narrower thread for two reasons. First, some who responded privately were interested in hearing what else was discovered. Second, the end of Judith Resnik's recently published Addison C. Harris lecture stresses that public access to court proceedings is more than of merely conceptual importance. While she observes that, "obtaining a robust audience for courts also requires structural attention," it turns out that "many judges report their courtrooms to be lonely spaces" and "[i]n contrast to the popularity of media shows about courts, real judges often find themselves without an audience."(p. 339) These were not references to bankruptcy court (the lecture recognizes in other places that the nature of bankruptcy work occupies more courtroom time notwithstanding the phenomena of managerial judging and vanishing trials), but tee up the issue raised earlier: why don't all public courts post calendars on their websites?
We could come up with a long list of reasons why a person doesn't go visit court that are unrelated to the court itself. But one shouldn't discount the difficulty of knowing when to show up. My original query about calendars focused on bankruptcy courts, as will much of the rest of this post, but of course the question is appropriate to ask about all public courts (whether the answer should differ depending on type of court is a subject for another day). Needless to say, the modest content that follows represents neither an exhaustive search nor a systematic sample, but are points I gathered from feedback to the original post.
If I'm not mistaken, everyone who offered feedback came from a district in which bankruptcy courts posted calendars on their websites. Some were surprised to hear that this was not universal.
One reader suggested that nonuniform technology within the federal judiciary probably explained a lot of the variation and perhaps the ease of generating content for public view. A random comparison of websites is almost guaranteed to be consistent with the technology theory, as they are far from uniform. I would embellish this by noting the challenge of frequent schedule changes; if the calendar does not directly feed onto the website, questions arise about how often to update the information.
Everyone probably could agree, though, that technology is unlikely to be an exclusive explanation. It presumably is coupled with different sensibilities about what constitutes adequate notice of events in court, a cost-benefit on resources, and who the audience might be (e.g. lawyers, financial reporters, and others who follow specific cases and matters via other routes, including but not limited to PACER). Or maybe no one has brought the website question, and the variation in practices, to their attention.
Readers also encouraged comparison of the calendars of district courts and bankruptcy courts. This suggestion dovetailed with plans to visit district and bankruptcy courts in various locations for research purposes. The first several I checked were parallel: either both were available or neither in a single district. But this is not universally true. That is, in some districts, the bankruptcy court posts a calendar of daily events in each courtroom on its website while the district court does not (and, presumably, the reverse could be true).
Additional thoughts are still very much welcome, whether in comments below or at bankruptcyprof@gmail.com.
