This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Death tends to make people realize things. Unexpected departures from this earthly plane, in particular, can prompt the living to reflect on how to better use the time they have left. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the Supreme Court since 2005, received such a prompt in February 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died in his guestroom at a luxury ranch resort in Texas. 

According to The New York Times, Scalia died without having told anyone what to do with his papers—drafts of opinions, copies of memoranda exchanged between the justices, notes on the Court’s internal meetings, and so on. If those documents were to become public, they could shed light on the Court’s deliberative processes, revealing, for instance, when and why justices changed their minds, or in which cases their minds were already made up. 

Scalia’s family donated his papers to the Harvard Law School Library, on the condition that files related to specific cases would remain sealed until every other justice who participated in the case had died, too. But his death made Roberts realize that he needed to do a better job of ensuring that the Court’s secrets remain secret. On Tuesday, the Times reported that in the wake of Scalia’s death, Roberts pushed the living justices to impose a “more uniform seal for their own papers.”........

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