For most of the last 20 years, a rule has applied to the Supreme Court: All Washington, D.C. institutions leak, but the court doesn’t. Now, in a four-part series, CNN Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic has revealed details of the court’s inner workings, including deliberations the justices conducted behind closed doors with no one else present.

The reports follow similar, less extensive reports Biskupic filed last year. They also follow some conservative opinion pieces fretting that Justice Elena Kagan might have swayed conservative justices to her side in the LGBTQ and contraception cases — essays that have sometimes looked as though they’ve been informed by inside information.

Something appears to be changing in the culture of the court. In the light of the court’s tight-lipped history, it’s worth asking: What are the consequences of these leaks? And would it be better for the court if they stopped?

Discretion at the court isn’t an inexorable reality. Rather, it’s a pattern that has come and gone over the years. In the 1850s, the New York Tribune published the results of one case before it was handed down, then revealed the court deliberations in the notorious Dred Scott decision, one of the most consequential (and racist, and disastrous) opinions ever issued by the court.

In the late 1930s and ’40s, a period I wrote about in my book “Scorpions,” several justices leaked to the press, poisoning the personal dynamics between them and leading to decades of back-stabbing and hatred. It was part of how the justices of that era came to be described as “nine scorpions in a bottle.”

When Justice Hugo Black was new to the court, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone served as a source for a Harper’s article that compared the novice Black to “a comparatively inexperienced player” who “had stepped into a fast game (of) tennis … and, ignoring the rules, made vigorous passes at every ball with a piece of board.” Black was a Southerner deeply sensitive to his own honor (not to mention a tennis player). Stone publicly and falsely denied that he was the source and then privately apologized to Black while claiming that his words had been distorted. Black held his tongue, but never trusted Stone again.

In an even more extreme instance, Justice Robert Jackson, on a self-appointed leave from the court to act as chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, didn’t just leak: He openly revealed on the front page of major newspapers the contents of a fight between the justices that had taken place during private deliberations in the sacrosanct conference room.

In 1979, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong published “The Brethren,” for which five justices gave interviews on the basis of anonymity. That book was the low point for the court’s leaking — or the high point, depending on your attitude. It had the effect of undermining the legitimacy of the body that had decided Roe v. Wade. And in retrospect, it’s possible to argue that the book’s publication helped spur the politicization of Supreme Court appointments by making it harder to see the justices as uninfluenced by partisan politics or petty disagreements.

Probably in reaction, a new cultural norm appeared in the years that followed. Leaks became rare and scattershot — until last year.

The danger of a breakdown in collegial relations among nine people who serve for life is not trivial. Limiting leaks helps protect collegiality. Whichever justices are doing the leaking, they ought to think hard about it, lest the practice spiral out of hand as it has in the past.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist  ©2020 Bloomberg News.  Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.