If there’s a first time for everything, then sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad.

The leak of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion draft is bad.

No matter what the draft says.

No matter what the draft is about.

One way or another, such a draft landed in the hands of Politico, which published it on May 2.

Either directly, or indirectly through a third party, the draft got to Politico from inside the court. According to reports, not everyone who works at the court has access to such drafts.

¯ It’s almost inconceivable that any justice or justices did this.

Each of them – John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – must be just (fill in the blank) that this has happened.

Whoever did this has violated a duty to the court.

If any lawyer or lawyers did this, they’ve also violated a duty to their client.

The court needs no advice from this column on precisely how to handle this.

Yet whatever the court does, it needs to send the signal that this is intolerable, regardless of the motive behind the leak.

Whatever the law means, it must mean that the ends can’t justify the means.

¯ There’s more worth remembering: Despite all the bluster in the press, we don’t know who leaked the draft from the court, so we can’t know from which side of the jurisprudential or political spectrum the leak came.

While it’s tempting to believe that whoever did this didn’t take kindly to the draft, we don’t know that.

Whatever the law means, it must mean that we let the facts lead to the conclusions.

To put it simply, there are conclusions we can’t reach without, at the very least, knowing the source of the leak. And it may well be helpful to know more than that.

¯ The press had a duty too.

The press doesn’t have to print or broadcast everything it knows.

Regardless of whether anyone solicited the leak – another fact we don’t know – no one in the press, and no press organization, had to print or broadcast this story.

Does that mean the press didn’t have a First Amendment right to print or broadcast this story?

No, it doesn’t.

Yet there’s a difference between the existence of a right and the propriety of its exercise.

Any press organization would have honored itself, not to mention its readers, listeners, or viewers, by not – repeat, not – running this story.

If one press outlet hadn’t run it, would another have done so?

Maybe.

No, make that probably.

No, make that almost certainly.

In part because there’s a hunger among reporters and press organizations for getting a story first.

The 24 hour news cycle has made this hunger to be first all the greater.

Sometimes, though, it’s better to be quiet than first.

For the sake of the court, and even more importantly for the sake of the law and the country, this was one of those times.

Had any press organization declined to run this story, that organization – after the story ran elsewhere – could have trumpeted its declination.

That organization could have said that, yes, it could have had the story. However, the organization had a duty greater than being first. It had a duty to the court, the law, and the country – not to mention its readers, listeners, or viewers – to be quiet this time.

Yes, others would have had the glory of being first. Yet the organization that had remained quiet would have had the glory of being right, because it harmed neither the court, the law, nor the country with the leak.

Sometimes it’s better to be quiet than first.

This time it would have been better.

Much, much better.

Randy Elf was a newspaper report before going to law school and afterward was a law clerk to federal-district-court and federal-appellate-court judges.

COPYRIGHT ç 2022 BY RANDY ELF