J-Law 4 — The Right to Record

All individuals have the absolute right to record their interactions with judges.

Misconduct lives in the gaps of the record. The off-record remark, the threat delivered before the court reporter begins, the sneering aside that never appears in any transcript — these are the tools of courtroom abuse precisely because they leave no trace. Every litigant who has tried to report such conduct knows the response: prove it. Without a recording, proof is impossible by design.

Police officers across the country now wear body cameras because the public learned that official accounts of contested encounters could not be trusted on faith. Judges wield power at least as consequential as any officer's — over liberty, property, children, and livelihoods. Citizens may record their encounters with police in public; the same principle governs their encounters with the public servants who sit on the bench. Courtrooms belong to the people who fund them, and what happens inside them is the people's business.

The expected counterargument: recording threatens courtroom decorum and the privacy of proceedings. Decorum is a strange thing to protect with darkness. Conduct appropriate for a public official to engage in is conduct appropriate to record, and the only behavior a recording ban actually protects is behavior the official would be ashamed to see replayed. Privacy interests belong to the parties and witnesses, and the parties are the very people this law empowers — a litigant recording her own hearing invades no one's privacy but documents her own experience of government power. A public official who objects to being recorded while exercising public power has told you everything you need to know about how that power is being exercised.