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was disappointing. Recognition of the need to protect the court's decorum and the fair administration of justice should be kept in balance with the need to make courts as open and transparent as pos- sible, it says. "Instead of blanket rules, the Supreme Court could have advocated for more flexibility, such as publication bans tailored to a specific case," says the asso- ciation's president, Mary Agnes Welch. However, the high court also noted that according to the Quebec rules, journalists are expressly authorized to ask a person who is heading toward or exiting a courtroom if he or she would agree to give an interview while being photographed or filmed in an area pro- vided for that purpose. Such areas are designated on every floor, near places participants must go through in order to enter and exit the courthouse, accord- ing to the rules cited by the SCC. "The impugned measures are a way to assure courthouse users that they will not be taken by surprise or harassed by jour- nalists and that they will be interviewed, photographed, or filmed only with their full consent," Deschamps noted. Although the SCC did not grant the media organizations what they asked for, there is a silver lining in the deci- sion because the court affirmed the freedom for the cameras to be inside courthouses. "While the Supreme Court of Canada maintained that the rules of practice were constitutional, they took care to say that freedom of expression does apply in the courthouse and in the public areas of the courthouse," says Landy. The previous decisions in the Quebec Court of Appeal had not made that clear. "So from that perspective, the judgment was one that the media felt necessary to obtain." Landy adds the media had been dis- appointed by the second aspect of the case too, the top court's affirmation of a ban on broadcasting court recordings. "Voice transmits meaning that words don't transmit," he says. It's also important to note that the ban on camera access inside court pro- ceedings themselves was not part of the Quebec case, and so was not addressed by the SCC decisions. It remains an open question, according to the Canadian Media Lawyers Association (Ad IDEM). It's a point Landy says is very important to make. "It's an easy, but erroneous, jump to make because cameras in the courtroom is a hot-button issue, so there is a tendency to want to make a link," he says, adding the point was not argued at all in the Quebec case. In the end, advocates for full media access into courthouses did not get a victory at the SCC, but it wasn't a total loss either. "It's somewhere in between, because ultimately, the goal of this case was to invalidate the sections that were limiting the access of cameras," says Leblanc. "I can't say that I wasn't disap- pointed by the judgment, but I saw that there was a lot of positive aspects to it too." Untitled-8 1 www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com A PRIL 2011 49 3/15/11 8:55:45 AM