The high-court high life.(lavish US district court conference/junkets)(No Sacred Cows)

The Hotel Del Coronado sits on a peninsula just off San Diego, attached by a narrow strip of land called the "Silver Strand." It's a hotel compound where 14 presidents have stayed and where Frank Baum wrote part of the "Wizard of Oz" series.

In West Virginia the Greenbrier and the Homestead are mirror-image resorts, places where guests still dress for dinner, which begins with pheasant consomme and ends with properly aged cognac.

Outside New York City there's Tarrytown House, a conference center whose centerpiece is the one-time Biddle Manor, complete with a wood-paneled library and carved marble fireplaces. In Colorado Springs, Colo., the Broadmoor Hotel is replete with art dating to the Ming and T'Sing dynasties, as well as a championship 18-hole golf course. On more tropical terrain there's the Maui Intercontinental Hotel, famous for its lively luaus, and Puerto Rico's El Conquistador, perched on a cliff overlooking the convergence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

What, besides top-of-the-line pampering, do these resorts have in common? They're the "conference sites" where taxpayers have sent federal judges to discuss things like evidence, expert witnesses and science in the courts. These so-called business meetings don't come cheap; in fiscal year 1994 the tab came close to $1 million, according to a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO).

But such calls to duty may come in a different kind of package in the future. The third branch of government, traditionally the most shielded from the sunshine of public disclosure, has caught the eye of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the ...