Should the Supreme Court be joining the NHL, NBA, and NFL in jumping on the replay wagon? In 2007, the court sided with the police in Scott v. Harris in which a car chase ended with a cruiser ramming a speeding car (and permanently injuring the driver). But don't take it from us, the court said. Instead, they posted the cruiser-filmed video clip of the chase online to, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, "allow the videotape to speak for itself." But, as the New York Times Adam Liptak reports, a Harvard Law Review study that let 1,350 Americans watch the tape found that who's responsible for what in a chaotic scene is a normative judgment -- far less black and white than whether a home run is fair or foul. Most Americans indeed saw what the Supreme Court's majority saw. But, writes Liptak, "African-Americans, liberals, Democrats, people who do not make much money and those who live in the Northeast," blamed the police for the crash. What's more, while Justice Scalia called it "the scariest chase I ever saw since 'The French Connection,'" Nick Cage fan John Paul Stevens thought it had more of a "Raising Arizona" feel to it, and thus dissented. (One of these two things is true.)

As Liptak notes, this might be a sign of things to come. A petition filed with the Supreme Court last month referenced as its first citation not a court precedent or law review article but a YouTube video. Perhaps the judicial branch also needs its own hub.

Forget all this talk this morning about the balance of the Supreme Court not shifting with the retirement announcement of David Souter. Change is indeed afoot.

How so? Well, for one thing, out goes Souter's fountain penned-opinions; Souter notoriously shied away from all things technological. And judging from the ages and experiences of the names being bandied about for Souter's replacement, in comes an emailing, Internet-using justice.

I make the point half in jest. But the context for it is that U.S. judicial branch comes in a distant third out of the three branches of government when it comes to embracing technology's potential. Both the White House/executive branch and Congress have far more fully integrated technology into how they go about fulfilling their missions. A changing of the guard -- along with the activism of tech-friendly justices present and past like John Roberts and Sandra Day O'Connor -- might be what sparks a modernization of the courts on the tech front. (Of course, there's a broader argument to be had about whether the courts should properly lag behind the rest of the country technologically, as part of its somewhat unique place as an institution apart from the rest of the political system and outside world. Then again, that argument is a bit of a tougher sell in the post-Bush v. Gore America.)

At the very least, maybe the new justice can help do something about SupremeCourtUS.gov, the seriously less than welcoming online home of the high court. (Plan your visit to the court, with this handy PDF!) Many high schools have more attractive and functional sites, which isn't really befitting an institution of the Supreme Court's stature.

One most likely meaningless but nonetheless fun social media indicator of how separated from Internet culture the Supreme Court is: how often photographs of the justices turn up in Flickr. Let's use, say, Rahm Emanuel as our baseline for level of Flickr exposure. The White House Chief of Staff pops up in 337 shots shared on the site. Even the most popular justice on Flickr, Chief Justice John Roberts, shows up in just 143 photos (filtered with the keyword "justice," as his is a common name). It goes down from there: Clarence Thomas, 119; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 73; Antonin Scalia, 69; John Paul Stevens, 40; Samuel Alito, 36; Souter: 23.

And Anthony Kennedy (also filtered with "justice") turns up in just 21 items on Flickr -- one photograph for every year he's spent on the Supreme Court.

(Photo by White House photographer Pete Souza)

Good to know. In the comments, Tim Cullen points out that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer were up on Capitol Hill last week to ask a House Appropriations subcommittee for, among other things, funding to bring the Supreme Court website at SupremeCourtUS.gov in-house. The site, which enjoys 18 million hits a year, is currently housed with the Government Printing Office -- which means content from the court has to be routed through GPO for posting. That arrangement worked well enough for a while, said Thomas and Breyer, but the court is ready to run its own website. To that end, the court is asking Congress for some web development money (pdf):

The Court can move its Website in-house through a relatively small expenditure of funds. This initiative would require $303,000 for purchasing additional hardware, software, network components, and electronics to support the Court’s Website. It would also require $418,000 to fund four new full-time information technology specialist positions: one new information technology (IT) specialist who will be the first point of contact for all technical and user issues; a security analyst/auditor who will monitor Website activity, analyze and respond to incidents and implement security enhancements; a software developer who will develop, support, and administer the Website’s software applications, and a network administrator who will support the Website network and server environment. The Court would also need $78,000 to hire a composition specialist to prepare and post data on the Website.

Tim also points us to a funny/awkward moment when subcommittee member Rep. John Culberson made the argument in favor of court transparency to Justices Thomas and Breyer by pulling out his pocket video camera and livestreaming via Qik (noted previously on the Sunlight blog):

Man, to be able to read Thomas and Breyer's minds at that moment...

When John McCain made the surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, the McCain camp dallied in getting a biography of the little-known Alaska governor up on to their official campaign website. In that absence, observers turned to Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web to make immediate sense of the choice. The Obama White House seems to be taking the opposite approach with the choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. Her official selection was coupled at the start with the White House's attempts to quickly define the nominee and her nomination.

The Obama White House, for example, is emailing out 14 different high resolution pictures of the judge (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), including shots of her as a young child at a birthday party, at her 8th grade graduation, with her nephews at Yankee Stadium, and in her judges robes. They've posted a photo of her mother, Celina Sotomayor, choking up at yesterday's announcement ceremony that will only not melt your heart if you don't have one. The White House website features a lengthy bio of what they're calling Sotomayor's "American story." Then there's the fact that the WhiteHouse.gov team blogged about an previously-made video from the Law School Admission Council on Sotomayor called "A Wonderful Life." It's an important point: the Obama White House's blogospheric savvy-- plucking third-party material from the web that makes their case and using their high-profile platform to promote it -- may stand them in good stead as Sotomayor's nomination process moves along.

Conservative opponents have pledged to do battle on the web over Obama's judicial pick. The Judicial Confirmation Network's (JCN) chief counsel Wendy Long told the Washington Post, "We need to do this because the White House really has the bully pulpit...The American people, if we don't do things like this, are really only getting half the story.'' JCN has launched AboutSoniaSotomayor.com, featuring talking points against her nomination. The centerpiece of the site: a YouTube clip in which Sotomayor, attending a conference, makes the statement "court of appeals is where policy is made." She quickly noted that she probably shouldn't say such things "on tape." Expect the video to get major play.

The back-and-forth over Sotomayor's nomination has of course just begun. Google, for example, returns no text ads yet for a search on her name.

A potentially interesting note, though: ConfirmThem, the site launched by the conservative blog Red State around past battles over judicial nominations in the Senate, is featuring a post by one "Feddie" (as in, the Federalist Society) that doesn't exhibit much stomach for a fight over Sotomayor. "My take on the appointment?," he or she writes. "She's the best of the worst." That's relatively high praise.

Just about 24 hours have passed since President Barack Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve as the next justice on the Supreme Court. What's the web making of the pick? Somewhat surprisingly, the Internet hasn't exactly been a celebration of instantaneous reaction to Sotomayor's selection. All things considered, all has been relatively quiet on the web front. Are folks laying in wait for more opportune moments? Or is this nomination fight all but over before it began, pending any unforeseen revelations? Who knows. But let's do a grab bag review of Day 2 of the Sotomayor nomination.

Not Up for a Fight? Elected Republicans and their close circle of aides and allies are telling Politico that absent any significant new news about Sotomayor, they're not eager to do battle over her nomination. "The sentiment is overwhelming that the Senate should do due diligence but should not make a mountain out of a molehill...If there's no 'there' there, we shouldn't try to create one." Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation posted on their Foundry blog under the title "‘Advice and Consent’ Takes Time" that they're not prepared to rush the process: "The President hopes to have his nominee confirmed by Congress’s August recess -- an aggressive timetable. But that may not comport with the Senate’s constitutional role and responsibility." The conservative group Judicial Watch, so aggressive in pursuing the alleged wrongdoings of the Clinton Administration, put out a tepid press release saying that "If Judge Sotomayor shares Obama's activist judicial philosophy, U.S. Senators who want to protect the Constitution will have no choice but to oppose her nomination." Judicial Watch also posted Sotomayor's financial disclosure forms from 2003 to 2007.

Off-Message Retweeting. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent reports that the RNC's new media director Todd Herman retweeted a Twitter note from Newt Gingrich in which Gingrich made the arguement: "Imagine SCOTUS nominee 'my experience as a white make makes me better than a latina woman' new racism = no better than old" -- a reference to a speech made by Sotomayor in which she said that the diversity of her life experience shapes her judicial approach. Sargent reports that while RNC chair Michael Steele has urged the party to avoid "knee jerk reactions," the GOP is now refusing to say whether it agrees with Gingrich's characterization.

Ad Wars. Not much is happening on the Google Ad front, as of yet. The sole Google Ad now running for "Sonia Sotomayor" is from the pro-immigrant group America's Voice. Even there, the tangential case they're making is that Sotomayor's nomination doesn't reflect all that much on the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform under the Obama Administration. Google searches for "Supreme Court Justice" don't return any ads of yet. The Washington Post reported that the Heritage Foundation was ready yesterday with an imminent Google ad buy, but they have yet to pop up.

The Video. One copy of a video clip of Sotomayor saying that "court of appeals is where policy is made, and I know this is on tape and I should never say that," has been viewed on YouTube 184,000 times since it was posted at the beginning of the month.

Doing a Deep Dive. Over on the conservative blog Hot Air, Ed Morrissey is picking over Sotomayor's record from her many decades on the court and examining the Republican pushback against her nomination to the Court of Appeals back in 1998. The New York Times has posted copies of some of her more notable court opinions, as well as the full transcript from her "A Latina Judge's Voice" lecture which has led to Gingrich's criticisms. Meanwhile, Sotomayor's Wikipedia entry is unlocked, lengthy, and largely positive.

Driving the Nomination from the White House. The Above the Law blog's David Lat has the back story on "a conference call between a senior Administration official and several reporters, to discuss the Sotomayor nomination." The White House pushed a talking point for allied groups to use in responding to critique's of Sotomayor's decision in the New Haven firefighter case: "They can't criticize her as a judicial activist on the one hand and then attack her for applying Second Circuit law on the other."

Infrastructure Building. People for the American Way has a mild-mannered press release calling on senators to conduct "a smooth, fair confirmation process." The new Coalition for Constitutional Values, which includes progressive groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, have launched ConstitutionalValues.org; the site is centered around a new web ad that calls attention to Obama's call for a justice whose work is informed by his or her life experience. The Washington Post reports that the Latino blogosphere is gearing up for a fight, and the National Organization of Women has announced it will launch as "Confirm Her" campaign.

The New York Times Kate Phillips has more. And you can follow along the confirmation process -- and compare it with Supreme Court vacancies gone by -- with CQ's nomination tracker.

They're not bad. Obama released a 76-page "Cyberspace Policy Review" report Friday, the result of a 60-day process of consultation. And as an opening volley, advocates, activists, and lawmakers are judging it a solid shot. The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, for example, quotes one cybersecurity advocate calling the plan "pretty good." Similarly, NextGov's Guatham Nagesh finds praise for the review at AT&T and the computer security think tank the SANS Institute. And then there's the positive first reaction of both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill; CQ's Daniel Fowler has Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) coming together to "applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity."

You'll find one of the major reasons why folks are happy with the review in the inevitable White House Films movie version of the report's release...

Besides the fact that it's an eyesore and it doesn't function very well...nope, any way you slice it, the website of the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't match up with the institution's imminence, history, and unique role in the American democratic system. (A trivial but telling case in point: the two search filter options on the site are "Supreme Court Files" and "Supreme Court Docket Files." This is clearly not a website dying to please.) Simply put, SupremeCourtUS.gov needs help. That's where Sunlight Foundation designer Ali Felski and policy counsel Daniel Schuman come in. They've done one of their patented redesigns on the SCOTUS site.

First, the problem, in brief:

The current web site has many shortcomings. It doesn’t contain briefs by the parties and omits all but a few relatively recent Court opinions. Its navigation is a nightmare and its design fails to incorporate modern techniques such as RSS feeds and XML. Much information is unnecessarily locked in PDFs.

Then, their vision for a redesigned high court site... (Keep reading)

In the opening remarks to his press conference yesterday, President Barack Obama adopted a stronger tone against the violence and repression in Iran than he had previously, saying "suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away." Fair enough. But can translating them give them legs? After the event, a notable Farsi-language tweet popped up in the White House's Twitter stream. Google Translate's new Farsi-to-English option gives a rough translation as "President Obama's remarks in his press conference about Iran with Persian." The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has the details on the Obama White House's multilingual outreach, including a note from the White House that intention behind the translation is so that "the Iranian people could read it in their own language."

But if the Obama White House now speaks Farsi, it also seems fairly fluent in Twitter. Worth noting is how the White House adopted the #iranelection hashtag -- a signal that they see themselves as part of an ongoing, global conversation.

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

This is something of a personal obsession, but indulge me. Minnesota Democratic Senator Herb Kohl just asked Judge Sonya Sotomayor about what, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, her take would be on letting cameras into the high court so that the rest of us can watch and learn from the court's now-closed proceedings. Alas, Sotomayor more or less punted on the question, though she left a bit of an opening for open court advocates to cherish. She'd be a brand new justice, she said, and new judges tend to "consider taking new approaches."