When Justice Gorsuch spoke at the University of Louisville in 2017, there was some fairly heated back and forth between the University of Louisville press staff and the Supreme Court press staff over Gorsuch’s decision to prohibit any electronic recording of the event.

No video. No audio. Just pen and paper.

An exasperated then-U of L media director Mark Hebert wrote to the SCOTUS media team weeks before Gorsuch’s talk:

“We’ve never had a guest speaker at the McConnell Center ask us to bar TV and radio recordings, including Chief Justice John Roberts (2009) and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (2000). […]

“We would respectfully ask Justice Gorsuch and/or your office to reconsider those restrictions.” (Gorsuch didn’t.)

We know about this, and received the above-quoted email, thanks to a public records request we sent to the university last year.

So today, we sent another request, below, which we hope will help us get to the bottom of why these unnecessary, and ultimately self-defeating from Justice Barrett’s perspective, restrictions were put in place for the newest justice’s Sept. 12 talk hosted by the university’s McConnell Center.

We’ll let you know if and when we receive a response.

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Dear Open Records Officer:

Pursuant to the Kentucky Open Records Act, I request access to and copies of the following:

Any and all email and physical correspondence between Office of the President administrators Michael Wade Smith (mws@louisville.edu) and Victoria Schulz (victoria.schulz@louisville.edu); Office of Communications & Marketing administrator John Karman (john.karman@louisville.edu); and/or McConnell Center administrators Gary L. Gregg (glgreg01@louisville.edu), Jessica Freels (jessica.freels@louisville.edu), Natalie Smith (natalie.smith.1@louisville.edu), Sherry Allen (s.allen@louisville.edu), and GlyptusAnn Grider Jones (g0grid01@louisville.edu) and the staff of the Supreme Court of the United States — i.e., individuals whose emails addresses end in “@supremecourt.gov,” or whose address is “One First Street NE, Washington, DC, 20543” — between Sept. 26, 2020, and Sept. 13, 2021.