A BILL circulating in the House of Representatives, the charmingly named Sunshine in the Courtroom Act, aims to overturn a 70-year prohibition on cameras in federal courtrooms. It would allow media coverage of proceedings in such courts at the discretion of the presiding judge. Spectacles like the Boston Marathon bombing case may, if the bill passes, be streamed into citizens’ living rooms. But the proceedings of the country’s highest court are another story. The sun will shine on the Supreme Court only if the chief justice wants it to. And despite the grudging openness to new technology he showed in his end-of-year report, neither he nor his colleagues seem terribly keen on cameras.

This will disappoint the nearly three-quarters of Americans who say they would like to watch the justices in action. Some contend that oral arguments have little effect on how the court rules, but Timothy Johnson, Paul Wahlbeck and James Spriggs, three political scientists, posit that Supreme Court oral arguments “provide justices with useful information that influences their final votes on the merits”.

A small cadre of advocates bend the justices’ ears much more often than everybody else. Before he was appointed chief justice in 2005, John Roberts argued 39 cases before the court and won 25. Paul Clement, solicitor-general under President George W. Bush and now in private practice, has appeared before the court 75 times and is considered a virtuoso. Despite a universally praised appearance in 2012, however, Mr Clement could not persuade the justices to strike down Obamacare. A somewhat bumbling defence of the Affordable Care Act by Barack Obama’s solicitor-general nonetheless contained the key contention that the law’s penalty for not buying health insurance was best regarded as a “tax” permitted by the constitution; and that was enough to persuade Chief Justice Roberts to join the court’s four liberals in upholding the law.

The chief justice and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest of the three women on the court, tend to ask brief, piercing questions to clarify a point or probe a weakness. Justice Ginsburg is all business, but the chief justice—as he showed recently in Elonis v United States, a case concerning the legality of violent Facebook posts—is affable and can even be hip. Probing the limits of free speech, he invoked Eminem, an artist who writes violent rap lyrics, and drew laughter when he wondered whether “a reasonable teenager on the internet” would interpret a jilted man’s violent comments as evidence he meant to physically harm his ex-wife. Nobody beats Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer in the humour department. Justice Breyer tosses out plaintive ironies, while Justice Scalia kills with sarcasm: “What about devil worshippers?” he deadpanned in 2013 in the case of a town accused of alienating dissenters by starting its town-board meetings with Christian prayers.

Sitting one at each end of the bench, two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are both feisty in arguments. Justice Sotomayor tends to bear down on lawyers with fine-grained questions about precedent, while Justice Kagan is the master of the big picture. Her hypotheticals are crystal-clear and concise, a contrast to Justice Breyer’s sometimes impenetrable stream-of-consciousness. Justice Samuel Alito, with his cocked head and sternly arched eyebrow, often poses the toughest questions of the day. Two justices are sphinx-like: Clarence Thomas, who has not asked a question since February 22nd 2006, and Anthony Kennedy, often the presumed swing vote in the biggest cases, whose questions rarely betray how he will decide.

Transcripts and audio recordings of the hearings are available on the Supreme Court’s website; but, for the time being, court-watchers are limited to members of the press and people who line up early to vie for one of a couple of hundred seats in the public gallery. Not a lot of sunshine penetrates the Supremes’ sacred chamber; law or no law, the heavy drapery is not about to be pulled aside.