
The Supreme Court Needs Real Oversight
Without an effective system in place, problems like leaks and conflicts will not be adequately addressed, and public confidence in the Court will continue to plummet.
Without an effective system in place, problems like leaks and conflicts will not be adequately addressed, and public confidence in the Court will continue to plummet.
And Congress should claw it back.
The Commission on the Supreme Court’s findings may end up helping to set reform in motion, rather than stopping it in its tracks.
Returning abortion to the states doesn’t put power into the hands of voters in much of the country.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, it will betray the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of bodily autonomy.
The Supreme Court seemed skeptical of Texas’s new law, but that doesn’t mean Roe will stand.
Firearms are having a documented chilling effect on free speech.
They would have been clear-eyed about the role of the Court and the dangers of too much fidelity to their original designs.
The president has a historical model he can follow to try to save his agenda from the Senate.
There’s no clean end to this story.
A majority on the Supreme Court appears ready to strike down the landmark decision—but they’re not prepared for the ensuing havoc.
Two recent decisions capture perfectly just how distorted the Court’s approach is.
The conservative majority’s opinion has declared that voter fraud, not racial discrimination, is a threat to the American system of representation.
Prosecutors aren’t charging suspects with hate crimes, even in clear-cut cases.
The law’s opponents have a good chance of winning their next showdown, though it won’t threaten the law as a whole.
John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.
When courts consider the prospect of excluding noncitizens from representation, they should bear in mind the country’s past.
The theory has not provided the clarity some of its early proponents had hoped it would.
Anti-abortion-rights activists have turned their arguments away from protecting democracy and toward maximizing protection for fetal life.
America is inching closer to a possibility it has never seen before: the indictment and trial of a former president.
I quit the DOJ because I no longer wanted to participate in a system this permissive.
States do not have a defensible reason for denying children recommended medical care.
The new attorney general has inherited a department plagued by scandal, just as Edward Levi did in 1975.
To send the right message, Donald Trump’s removal from Facebook must be permanent.
Retrocession is being used to derail what Washingtonians actually want: statehood.
Criticizing the Founders is in vogue these days, but what they did was extraordinary.
Its guilty verdict resulted not just from the strength of the evidence, but from a jury-selection process that departed from American norms.
What’s astonishing is that presidential criminal immunity has no grounding in actual law. It’s not in the Constitution or any federal statute, regulation, or judicial decision. It is not law at all.
The next two years might be America’s last chance to protect the basic democratic principle of majority rule.
By the early 2040s, Trump-appointed chief judges will simultaneously sit atop nearly every appeals court in the country.
What if a coherent legal philosophy could exist between the poles of living constitutionalism and originalism?
Partisan primaries motivate legislators to keep in lockstep with a narrow and extreme slice of the electorate rather than govern in the public interest.
The Founders would have been appalled by the attack on the Capitol but not surprised.
Their ability to hold on to their job should not depend on the same people they challenge in court.
For an institution whose legitimacy depends largely on the public’s perception of its integrity, the growth of unseen, unsigned, and unexplained decisions can only be a bad thing.
America must regulate guns not only to protect life, but to protect its citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear.
Conservative justices seem poised to use complex, technical doctrines that will likely sanction all manner of state voter-suppression measures.
And those paying attention haven’t missed it.
The 45th president profoundly altered our system of government.
The impeachment trial offers a chance to show how Donald Trump tried to undermine the election’s legitimacy for months—not just on the day of the Capitol attack.
The First Amendment does not limit the removal and disqualification powers conferred on Congress by the Constitution.
People may like to believe that the Court can accommodate conservative religious groups without causing much harm, but that does not seem to be the case.
Prohibiting Trump from running again is no outlandish measure, but an expressly constitutional remedy.
Should Richard Nixon have faced criminal prosecution? A never-before-published article from 1974, written by a leading legal scholar, offers answers that speak to the present.
We can’t rely on the private sector to protect the common good.
Liberals once believed that private corporations have far too much power over the flow of ideas and information in today’s society. Now it’s conservatives who are worried.
The whole American government is premised on the idea that politicians will act in their own interests. A Senate that won’t protect itself from attack can’t protect the country.
Could a truth and reconciliation commission help the country heal?
Following Trump’s intensely polarizing presidency, Biden’s message of decency, truth, constitutional integrity, and care for one another is more imperative than ever.
The Senate must convict Trump in order to disqualify him from ever holding public office again.
One hundred and forty-seven Republican members of Congress voted to sustain a delusion in the American mind.
Republicans are arguing that going after him will do irreversible damage to American democracy. Don’t believe them.
The NRA and its allies have argued for years that citizens need to arm themselves for a fight against tyranny.
There can be no confusion over who is president, even for a moment.
Trump’s allies are not making good-faith arguments within America’s legal system. Rather, this is a challenge to the legal system.
No law can stop reckless people from trying to thwart the popular will, but we should still address the obvious weak spots in our system.
Religious, pro-abortion-rights voices were not always so rare.
George Mason anticipated the president’s act more than 230 years ago.
He may now attempt what no one thought a president would ever try.
The justices’ decision not to wade into a sloppy coup attempt is no victory for rule of law.