J-Law 45 — Livestream Every Hearing

Every court hearing shall be livestreamed on YouTube, with safeguards for privacy: viewers shall not have access to the full names or faces of the parties.

Courtrooms are constitutionally open to the public, and always have been — the guarantee of public proceedings exists because the founders knew what happens in tribunals no one can watch. Physical openness, though, is now a technicality. A hearing at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning in a courthouse across the county is "open" only to people with no job, no children, and no distance to travel. Functionally, most of what happens in American courts happens unobserved.

The pandemic proved the alternative works: courts nationwide streamed proceedings for years, and the sky did not fall. Judges behave differently on camera — more patient, more careful, more procedurally correct — because observation is accountability in its purest form. Streaming with privacy safeguards, withholding parties' full names and faces, delivers transparency and dignity together. The people fund these courtrooms and live under their rulings. Watching them work is their right, from anywhere, at any hour.

The expected counterargument: cameras change behavior, encouraging grandstanding by lawyers and intimidating witnesses. Behavior change is the point, and the objection accidentally endorses it — participants who conduct themselves more carefully under observation were conducting themselves less carefully in the dark, and only one of those conditions serves justice. Grandstanding concerns emerged before every past expansion of court access and materialized nowhere at scale; years of pandemic streaming produced no epidemic of performance, and appellate courts have broadcast argument for decades without theater. Witness protection is what the safeguards are for — faces and full names withheld, with courts retaining power to shield genuinely at-risk testimony, exactly as they do for physical spectators now. The residual objection, stripped of its borrowed concerns, is that officials prefer not to be watched. Preference of that kind, in a public servant, is the strongest argument for the camera.