Most court reporting in this country is built on summaries of summaries. A judgment runs to eighty pages; a press summary runs to two; the report runs to a paragraph that is a paraphrase of the summary. At each stage, something is lost.
This is a view piece. It argues a position, and it should be read as an argument rather than a report of events.
The problem with paraphrase
Paraphrase is not neutral. Deciding which paragraph of a judgment is the holding, and which is commentary, is an interpretive act. When that decision is made by whoever wrote the summary closest to the judgment, their interpretation is embedded in everything downstream.
A reader who cannot reach the source cannot tell the difference between a judgment and someone's account of it.
What publishing records would change
If judgments and filings were published in full as a matter of course, the reporting would still be selective. Reporters would still choose what to write about, and would still summarise. The difference is that a reader could check.
- A claim about what the court held could be verified against the text.
- A disputed interpretation could be identified as disputed.
- The gap between what was argued and what was decided would be visible.
The objections
There are real objections. Full publication of filings can expose people who are party to proceedings but not accused of anything. Some records contain material a court has ordered withheld. Those are problems to be solved with redaction and embargo, not reasons to publish nothing.
The threshold question should be reversed. The default should be publication, with withholding justified case by case, rather than publication justified case by case.
That is a harder system to run. It is also the only one in which a reader has any basis for trusting what they are told about their own courts.
