When Adam Liptak reports on the Supreme Court for The New York Times, readers assume they're getting journalism. What they may not fully appreciate is that Liptak is also a member of the New York Bar and holds a Supreme Court Bar admission dating to June 15, 1992 — credentials that, according to a new legal analysis, may carry professional obligations that cut against the norms of investigative reporting. That tension has exploded into public view following a April 20, 2026 piece at the Volokh Conspiracy by law professor Steve Sachs, who argues that prominent SCOTUS journalists with active or inactive bar memberships may be violating professional conduct rules — specifically by publicizing leaked court documents.
The piece lands amid simmering debate about media accountability at the nation's highest court, and it raises a question that is genuinely difficult: when a lawyer becomes a journalist, do their obligations as an officer of the court disappear, or do they follow them into the press corps?
The Sachs Argument: Officers of the Court in the Press Gallery
Steve Sachs, writing at Reason's Volokh Conspiracy blog, focuses his critique on a straightforward but underexplored conflict. Lawyers admitted to a state bar or the Supreme Court Bar are bound by rules of professional conduct. Those rules don't typically include a journalism exception. When a lawyer publicizes materials they know — or reasonably should know — were obtained through unauthorized disclosure from an institution they are formally admitted to practice before, Sachs argues that creates a genuine professional conduct problem.
Liptak's case is notable because his credentials are not historical artifacts. He is an active member of the New York Bar and was admitted to the Supreme Court Bar in 1992. His reporting has included coverage of leaked or confidential court documents, and his access to the court as a credentialed "Hard Pass Holder" is precisely the kind of privileged access that, Sachs suggests, comes with corresponding duties.
The argument is not that Liptak committed a crime. It's more subtle: that the professional conduct framework governing attorneys establishes duties of candor, confidentiality, and institutional respect that don't pause when the attorney in question is also holding a press badge. Whether bar associations will act on this reasoning is a separate question — but Sachs contends the rules, as written, don't carve out an exemption for journalists.
The Joan Biskupic Dimension: Inactive Doesn't Mean Exempt
Sachs also examines CNN's Joan Biskupic, whose career has been built substantially on publishing leaked Supreme Court documents and insider accounts of the justices' deliberations. Biskupic has been an inactive member of the D.C. Bar since 1997 — nearly three decades. That "inactive" designation, however, does not remove her from the bar's jurisdiction over professional conduct.
Inactive members are still subject to all bar rules. The inactive designation typically means a lawyer is not practicing law and is exempt from certain continuing education requirements, but it does not create a safe harbor from discipline. If Biskupic's conduct as a journalist would violate professional conduct rules for an active attorney, her inactive status may not provide the cover one might assume.
This is a particularly pointed observation because Biskupic's reporting — including her work on the inner workings of the Roberts Court — has been celebrated as groundbreaking journalism. The notion that it might simultaneously constitute a professional conduct violation for a bar member is jarring precisely because the journalistic and legal ethical frameworks have rarely been put in direct confrontation this explicitly.
The Hard Pass System and the Dual Identity Problem
The Supreme Court's credentialing system for journalists — the "Hard Pass" — creates a specific institutional relationship between reporters and the court. The Supreme Court publishes a list of approximately two dozen Hard Pass Holders, and a meaningful number of them are attorneys. This is not coincidental: legal training is enormously valuable for covering constitutional law, and many top SCOTUS reporters came through law school before entering journalism.
But the Hard Pass isn't just a press credential. It represents a formal relationship with an institution whose rules extend, in different forms, to lawyers admitted before it. When a Hard Pass Holder is also a member of the Supreme Court Bar, they occupy two roles simultaneously — journalist and officer of the court — and those roles carry different, potentially irreconcilable obligations.
Sachs raises another uncomfortable dimension: some reporters have published anonymous quotations from judges. Publishing such quotes, he argues, may actually induce judges to violate their own legal duties — creating a situation where the journalist isn't just passively receiving leaked information, but actively participating in conduct that draws court personnel into professional misconduct. That's a step beyond the typical "source protection" framework journalists invoke, and it implicates the lawyer-journalist in a different kind of ethical failure.
The broader context here is worth noting. Concerns about accountability and institutional transparency cut in multiple directions simultaneously — the same instinct that makes leak-based journalism feel vital to democracy also makes institutional accountability for those leaks feel necessary.
Aftershocks: The Shadow Papers and What Triggered This Debate Now
This controversy didn't emerge in a vacuum. The New York Times reported on April 21, 2026 about the aftershocks from what it called "The Shadow Papers" — a set of leaked Supreme Court documents whose publication has roiled the institution and reignited questions about how confidential court materials end up in the press.
The Shadow Papers reporting represents the kind of high-profile leak that periodically rattles the court's culture of secrecy. The Dobbs draft opinion leak in 2022 was the most dramatic recent example — a complete draft of the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade appeared in Politico weeks before the decision was formally issued. The fallout from that leak, which remains officially unsolved, accelerated existing anxieties about court security and the relationship between SCOTUS and the media organizations that cover it.
The Shadow Papers appear to represent another iteration of this pattern, and the Sachs piece is, in part, a response to that specific episode. When high-profile leaks occur and prominent journalists with active bar memberships publish the results, the professional conduct question moves from theoretical to concrete.
Can You Be Both? The Lawyer-Journalist Dilemma
There is an obvious solution to the conflict Sachs identifies: a lawyer who becomes a journalist can resolve the tension by resigning from the bar entirely. If you're no longer a member, you're no longer subject to professional conduct rules. The journalist's obligations — to sources, to the public, to newsworthiness — become the only framework that applies.
But resigning from the bar carries real professional costs, which is why many lawyer-journalists don't do it. A law license is a credential that opens doors, confers credibility in legal settings, and represents years of investment. For journalists covering the Supreme Court specifically, the credential signals expertise. Maintaining bar membership — even inactive membership — preserves optionality: the ability to return to legal practice, to consult on legal matters, or simply to maintain the professional identity that law school conferred.
The result is a class of professionals who occupy both roles simultaneously and who, Sachs argues, have never been seriously asked to reconcile the obligations those roles carry. Journalism schools teach source protection; bar associations teach confidentiality and candor to tribunals. When those norms clash, there's been no clear mechanism for resolution — and no serious institutional pressure to create one.
This is, at bottom, a question about professional accountability that mirrors debates happening in other domains. The question of who governs high-information professionals operating at institutional boundaries — whether in law, finance, or technology — is one of the defining governance challenges of this era. Debates about institutional accountability and oversight increasingly require grappling with the fact that the most powerful actors often exist at the intersection of multiple frameworks, each incomplete on its own.
What This Means: Analysis and Implications
The Sachs piece is unlikely to result in bar discipline for Liptak or Biskupic anytime soon. Bar associations are slow-moving institutions, and complaints against prominent journalists would face political and institutional headwinds that make formal action improbable. But that's almost beside the point. The value of Sachs's argument is that it makes explicit a conflict that has been ignored precisely because it was convenient to ignore it.
SCOTUS reporters occupy an extraordinarily privileged position. They have physical access to the court, relationships with clerks and justices cultivated over years, and institutional credibility that makes their reporting authoritative. That access isn't neutral — it's structured by the court's own rules and by formal credentials like the Hard Pass and bar membership. Pretending those credentials carry no obligations is a form of having it both ways: claiming the authority and access that comes with formal court relationships while disclaiming the duties those relationships impose.
There's also a structural concern that Sachs's piece gestures toward without fully developing: if lawyer-journalists are induced to violate professional conduct rules in the course of their reporting, and if that reporting induces court personnel to similarly violate their duties, the effect is a kind of institutional corrosion that operates largely below public view. The individual stories may be newsworthy. The aggregate effect on court culture may be genuinely harmful.
None of this means leak-based SCOTUS journalism should stop. A free press covering the most powerful court in the country serves a vital function, and the public interest in transparency about Supreme Court deliberations is real. But "the journalism is valuable" and "the journalists may have professional obligations they're ignoring" are not mutually exclusive propositions. Both can be true simultaneously, and the fact that the first has been treated as defeating the second is itself worth examining.
The more durable implication may be institutional: if the Supreme Court and the bar associations governing its admittees were ever to take this question seriously, it could force a formal clarification of what dual-role lawyer-journalists owe to the institutions they cover. That clarification, if it came, would reshape the economics of SCOTUS journalism in ways that are hard to fully predict — and that would matter well beyond the handful of reporters currently named in the debate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Adam Liptak currently a practicing lawyer?
Liptak is a member of the New York Bar and holds a Supreme Court Bar admission dating to June 15, 1992. His primary professional role is as a journalist and Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. Whether he actively practices law in a traditional sense is separate from the question of whether his bar membership subjects him to professional conduct rules — which it does, regardless of his day-to-day activities.
What exactly did Steve Sachs argue in his Volokh Conspiracy piece?
Sachs argued that lawyer-journalists who hold active or inactive bar memberships and who publish leaked Supreme Court documents may be violating professional conduct rules that apply to all bar members, not just active practitioners. He also raised the concern that publishing anonymous quotes from judges may induce those judges to violate their own legal duties, creating a compounding professional conduct problem. His piece, published April 20, 2026, specifically named Adam Liptak and Joan Biskupic.
Does Joan Biskupic's inactive bar status protect her from professional conduct rules?
No. Inactive bar members are still subject to all professional conduct rules. The inactive designation exempts members from certain continuing education requirements and the requirement to pay full active dues, but it does not create a safe harbor from discipline for conduct that would violate professional conduct rules. Biskupic has maintained inactive D.C. Bar membership since 1997.
Can a journalist who is also a lawyer simply resign from the bar to resolve the conflict?
Yes, resignation from the bar would remove the journalist from the bar's professional conduct jurisdiction. But resignation carries real costs: loss of the credential, inability to return to legal practice without reinstatement, and loss of the professional identity and credibility the license confers. Many lawyer-journalists maintain their licenses precisely because the costs of resignation outweigh the benefits, even if the ethical conflicts are real.
Has any SCOTUS reporter ever faced bar discipline for their reporting?
There is no prominent public record of bar discipline being imposed on a SCOTUS reporter for their journalistic work. The Sachs piece is notable in part because it explicitly raises this possibility in a way that has rarely been done before. Whether bar associations would actually pursue discipline — and whether they could do so successfully given First Amendment and press freedom considerations — remains untested.
Conclusion
The controversy over Adam Liptak, Joan Biskupic, and the professional conduct obligations of lawyer-journalists is, at its core, a question about whether formal credentials carry real duties or merely decorative ones. The legal system's answer has always been that bar membership is not honorary — the rules apply to members regardless of their primary professional identity. What Sachs has done, in a piece that deserves wider engagement than it will probably receive, is apply that answer to a context where it has been systematically avoided.
The Supreme Court is arguably the most consequential institution in American public life. The reporters who cover it wield enormous influence over how it is understood by the public, by lawmakers, and by the legal community itself. Asking whether those reporters have professional obligations that match their access and influence is not an attack on press freedom — it's a basic question of institutional accountability. The answer may be uncomfortable. It should be examined anyway.
