The preceding chapters have addressed consequences of assuming that judicial power depends ultimately on the public. The immediate implications of this assumption are that high court judges have reason to concern themselves with judicial legitimacy and with the transparency of the decisions they render. I have suggested that judicial public relations should be understood as a means of ensuring transparency and promoting legitimacy, and as such, it is a means of developing power. In the last section of the book, I wish to expand the inquiry in three ways.

First, transparency and legitimacy have been treated as if they were independent; however, the judicial legitimacy scholarship reviewed briefly in Chapter 3 suggests that they may reinforce each other. That literature suggests a straightforward approach for developing judicial legitimacy: increase public exposure to courts while emphasizing procedure. As we know, high courts around the world have done exactly this over the past decade. They have courted media coverage and promoted impartial procedures by educating their publics on legal institutions and jurisprudence. Yet, we also know that courts have not necessarily sought to maximize transparency. Information is promoted selectively. If transparency promotes legitimacy, then this tactic may be mistaken. If more information is better, then providing less information is worse.

But what if existing accounts of the link between transparency and legitimacy are incomplete or inaccurate? What if transparency does not always increase beliefs in judicial legitimacy?