Yet again, the Supreme Court’s controlled release of rulings is upended in a major abortion case

For the second time in two years, the public learned of where the Supreme Court was headed in a major abortion case before the justices had formally handed down their ruling, spoiling the court’s highly controlled protocols.

For the second time in two years, the public learned of where the Supreme Court was headed in a major abortion case before the justices had formally handed down their ruling, spoiling the court’s highly controlled protocols. The circumstances around the mistaken publishing of an apparent ruling in an Idaho abortion case are very different from the norm-busting leak of the 2022 draft opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. But both disclosures showed the limits on justices’ ability to roll out controversial opinions on their deliberate and custom-oriented timetable. Typically, rulings are released on pre-scheduled opinion days with no forecast ahead of time of which cases are coming down. Those mornings, the justices gather in the court to read summaries of their opinions, which are posted online shortly as hard copies are distributed to the court’s dedicated press corp. Every day, agencies, businesses and organizations deal with the premature disclosure of internal information. But for the Supreme Court, it is viewed as a major departure from its culture of confidentiality if even the smallest nugget about what’s going on behind the scenes makes it into public view. The leak of the 2022 opinion overturning Roe – obtained and published by Politico nearly two months before the ruling was formally handed down – was a shocking breach of the storied cone of silence around the Supreme Court’s internal deliberations. It prompted endless speculation about the culprit and their political motives, with an investigation by the court’s marshal unable to identify the source of the leak. The internal probe did reveal that the court had surprisingly lax systems that allowed draft opinions to circulate among a wide group of people, with gaps in the technical security that was supposed to protect the court from such exposures. While much is still not known about how a version of the Idaho case ruling was accidentally posted online, it nonetheless comes as tensions at the court are running high, as the justices scramble to catch up with a backlog of undecided cases.