In an interview with businessman David Rubenstein that’s scheduled to air on C-SPAN Sunday night (clip here), Justice Barrett said that those seeking greater insight into SCOTUS via the case-specific memos the justices circulate to their colleagues will have to wait until the jurist’s demise to review them.

“After a justice dies and donates his or her papers, [then] you can see all of these memoranda,” she said.

This is both morbid and not what we’ve envisioned.

Instead, Fix the Court has long called on the justices to release their papers 12 years after they’ve left the Court — at a point in time in which we very much hope they’re still alive.

We get the 12-year timeframe from the Presidential Records Act (the PRA in this post’s title), which deems a president’s records the property of the government and requires those records to be transferred to the National Archives, after which they become public 12 years after his or her term ends.

So, if you’re appointed to SCOTUS around age 50, and you serve for 18 years — a requirement that we hope will apply to future justices — you’d be releasing your papers at age 80.

Per the actuarial tables, that’s about a decade before a justice living today and in relatively good health can expect to shuffle off.

Under the current hodgepodge of a records retention system, some justices have opted to keep the bulk of their papers hidden from public view until 2060 or 2075 or later — in other words, putting ridiculous constraints on the release of what should be public records.