The New York Times reported this week that Chief Justice Roberts has implemented nondisclosure agreements for Supreme Court employees and clerks since 2024. With the online headline “How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive,” the reporting predictably treats this as some sinister move toward opacity. But context matters, and the Times conveniently glosses over the catastrophic breach that necessitated these measures.
In May 2022, someone leaked Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to Politico. The leak came from within the Court. It was unprecedented in the Court’s modern history and represented not merely a violation of confidentiality but an attempt to intimidate the justices into changing their votes. It put the lives of the justices and their families in grave danger.
Within days of the leak, the dark-money group “Ruth Sent Us” doxxed the six Republican-appointed justices, posting a map of their homes and offering to pay protesters to demonstrate there. The Supreme Court building went into lockdown, surrounded by eight-foot fencing. Protests at the justices’ private residences became routine—illegal under federal law, yet the Biden Justice Department refused to enforce the law.
Then came the assassination attempt. On June 8, 2022, Nicholas Roske was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s home, armed with weapons and burglary tools, and later charged with attempted murder. Roske told police he intended to kill Kavanaugh to change the composition of the Court and the outcome in Dobbs. He also said he hoped to murder three justices total.
The threats have continued. In September 2024, an Alaska man was arrested for threatening to torture and kill six Supreme Court justices and their family members. The targets were, of course, the conservative justices. Meanwhile, dozens of crisis pregnancy centers and Catholic churches were vandalized following the leak, with extremist groups like “Jane’s Revenge” declaring “open season” on pro-life facilities and several crisis pregnancy centers firebombed. And this past October, a man with 200 explosives who was targeting Supreme Court justices and Catholics was arrested prior to the Red Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.
The media’s role in this cannot be ignored. After all, Politico published the leaked draft opinion, and the mainstream press amplified it for weeks, treating the leak as a journalistic coup rather than what it actually was: a dangerous breach that weaponized confidential Court deliberations for political purposes. The coverage wasn’t neutral reporting. It was participation in an intimidation campaign. By breathlessly dissecting every line of the draft and speculating endlessly about whether justices might change their votes, the media made itself complicit in the effort to pressure the Court. And when the threats and violence predictably followed, much of that same media remained conspicuously silent.
This is the environment Chief Justice Roberts was left with after the leak. The Court’s traditional reliance on norms and informal expectations of confidentiality catastrophically failed. Three and a half years later, we have yet to identify and hold the leaker accountable, despite an investigation conducted by the Court.
Roberts did what any responsible leader would do: He formalized what had previously been informal. The nondisclosure agreements convert the Court’s longstanding expectations of confidentiality into enforceable contracts. This was not some radical departure. It is damage control in the wake of an unprecedented breach that endangered lives and the Court as an institution. The real threat to our system of government isn’t nondisclosure agreements. It’s the belief that mob pressure should determine Supreme Court decisions. The chief justice is not making the Court “even more secretive,” as the Times headline says—he is trying to ensure that a breach of that magnitude does not happen again.