Larry Lessig’s “Naked transparency movement”

Against Transparency – The perils of openness in government by Lawrence Lessig

“How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency

Source:  

The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association

http://units.sla.org/chapter/csfo/csfo.html

Source of Information or ‘Dog and Pony Show’?: Judicial Information Seeking During U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument, 1963-1965 & 2004-2009

Source of Information or ‘Dog and Pony Show’?: Judicial Information Seeking During U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument, 1963-1965 & 2004-2009

by James Cleith Phillips (University of California, Berkeley – School of Law) and Edward Carter (Brigham Young University)

Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 50, pp. 101-203, 2010

Abstract:

Scholars and lawyers have long debated what role, if any, oral argument plays in the U.S. Supreme Court‘s decision-making process. While some have attempted anecdotally to determine whether or not Justices use oral argument to gather information in order to decide a case, few have attempted to investigate oral argument empirically. Additionally, no scholar to date has specifically measured the levels of information-seeking behavior during oral argument of individual Justices. Finally, there have been few studies attempting to quantitatively compare oral argument behavior in different time periods. This study attempts to address such deficiencies in Supreme Court scholarship.

Source: LSN Experimental & Empirical Studies Abstracts, Vol. 10, No. 84: Oct 12, 2009