WASHINGTON -- Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter introduced legislation yesterday to televise the proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court to make the court, as he put it, "more accessible" to the people who are affected by its decisions.

The legislation would require the Supreme Court to permit television coverage of all of its open sessions, unless a majority of justices vote that televising those proceedings would violate the due-process rights of those appearing before the court.

"In the context where the Supreme Court decides, really, the cutting-edge questions of our day" -- including abortion, the right to die, expression of religion and the death penalty -- "it's very much, in my view, in our interest to have the Supreme Court televised," said Specter, R-Pa.

"The public has a right to know what the Supreme Court is doing," he said in a statement when introducing the legislation.

Specter, along with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., introduced a similar bill in September 2000, and he noted yesterday that his argument was bolstered then by the level of public interest in the Bush v. Gore case, which determined the outcome of the 2000 election.

The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure bar cameras from filming lower-court crime cases because of a possible chilling effect on witnesses. The U.S. Judicial Conference adopted a policy allowing each federal appeals court circuit to decide for itself whether to permit cameras in the courtroom, and the 2nd and 9th circuits have allowed them.

Supreme Court arguments are audio taped, but Specter said he believes that audio recordings are "ill-suited to capture the nuance of oral arguments and the sustained attention of the American citizenry."

A number of Supreme Court justices have stridently opposed the idea of letting cameras into the court. Justice David H. Souter told a congressional committee during a mid-1990s hearing that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body."

During a TV appearance in April, Justice Antonin Scalia said he "wouldn't mind" televising the court's proceedings as long as they were broadcast on a network that carried them gavel-to-gavel. But the danger of sending out a video recording of arguments on C-SPAN, he said, would be that other networks could use snippets of court arguments and thus take them out of context.

"What will happen is, for every one person who sees it on C-SPAN gavel to gavel -- so that they can really understand what the court is about, what the whole process is -- 10,000 will see 15-second takeouts on the network news, which I guarantee you will be uncharacteristic of what the court does," Scalia said. "So I have come to the conclusion that it will misinform the public, rather than inform the public, to have our proceedings televised."

Other justices, including Stephen G. Breyer, have said the court should be cautious about any change that might create a "negative influence" on the institution.

Federal appeals court Judge John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee for chief justice, said during his confirmation hearings that he was open to the idea of televising Supreme Court proceedings. But he deflected a more definitive reply by referring to his media-savvy adviser for his confirmation process, former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who is a television actor.

"Well, you know, my new best friend, Senator Thompson, assures me that television cameras are nothing to be afraid of," Roberts said, but he then added the caveat that, if he were confirmed, he would need to consult with fellow justices about the prospect of cameras in the Supreme Court.