Supreme Court Awaits Funding For Website FaceliftSupreme Court Awaits Funding For Website Facelift

As the Obama administration readies its open government directive for the executive branch of the U.S. government, the judicial branch of the government awaits word of funding for much-needed updates to the Supreme Court's Website.Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked Congress for $799,000 in additional funding next year for software, hardware and employees to create and host a new Website that would update the look and feel of the Website, post data more quickly and have new features like online scheduling for tours of the Court.

The Court's Website, currently hosted by the Government Printing Office -- not the Court itself -- is more popular than ever. In January alone, the site received almost 19 million hits. However, the thing looks like it just crawled out of 1997.

As others have mentioned, it's not necessarily even the best place for people to get information on important cases, as other sites have eclipsed it in terms of usability. Old cases and minor documents associated with new cases are especially difficult to find or absent from the site, and other sites sometimes beat the Supreme Court to the punch in posting new documents to the Web.

"The website is outdated," Justice Clarence Thomas said in an April hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government. "It's at a crossroads [and] it's time to do something with it."

A "Web 0.5" Website just not going to cut it anymore in this "Gov 2.0" era, especially when it comes to the Supreme Court. Case law is one of the foundations of our democracy, and the Supreme Court one of the government's fundamental institutions. As Justice Stephen Breyer said at the April hearing, "if there is one problem that faces us, it's the public not knowing how their institutions work."

Open government advocacy group The Sunlight Foundation took a shot this year at creating mock-ups and making recommendations for how the court's Website could better serve the public. "Much of the information generated by the Court is difficult or expensive for most people to access, and often times is provided in formats that are difficult to use," Sunlight policy counsel Daniel Schuman told SCOTUSblog.

The 2010 financial services and general government appropriations bill, which the House of Representatives passed in June, included funding for the Court's Website. However, the Senate has been sitting on its bill (which would give the Supreme Court $47,000 more than the House bill for "salaries and expenses," under which the House funded the Website) since reporting it out of committee in July. The bill still isn't scheduled for a vote.

It's unclear when the Senate will pass the appropriations bill. Right now, the Court is being funded by a continuing resolution, which sets funds at last year's level and expires on December 18th. A Senate appropriations committee staffer told me he didn't expect the bill to be put on continuing resolution for all of fiscal 2010, but added that when the healthcare debate really ramps up, it will likely take up much of the Senate's time.