Legal Commentary

C-Span?s Video Archives ? Another Great Internet Time Waster

By Orin Kerr

Over the last year or two, C-SPAN has been putting its archived shows online. As I understand it, the ultimate goal is to make every non-copyrighted program that has ever appeared on C-SPAN online, available for free whenever you want to watch it. Incredible, isn?t it?

There?s lots of great stuff on there already for the law-geek set. For example, you can watch the confirmation hearings of then-Judge Anthony Kennedy in 1987, with then-Senator Joe Biden presiding over the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or maybe you want to watch the entire Bork hearings a few months earlier? Alternatively, watch Justice Scalia giving reflections on the Constitution in 1988, when he was a pretty new Justice. Whatever your interests, C-SPAN has many hours of law geekery for you.

More great stuff will appear when the rest of the archives are put online. Just sticking to espisodes in 1988 alone, it would be interesting to see President Reagan?s address to the Federalist Society; this post-retirement interview with Justice Powell; and this debate between Charles Fried and Paul Bator on whether the Separation of Powers is dead ? a topic then in play in light of Morrison v. Olson, handed down just two months earlier. All of it will be available eventually. There?s a button at the top of each of the pages that you can click to ask C-SPAN to consider making that video available sooner rather than later, so feel free to search the archives and make some requests.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 16, 2009 (boomark / email).