Eye-Opening Book About How the Roberts Court is Shaking the Foundation of Our Nation’s Laws
H. L. Mencken reputedly said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
Understanding the Supreme Court undoubtedly qualifies as a “complex problem.” The nine justices currently issue more than seventy opinions every year, some of them thunderbolts that rock American life and others rightly destined for obscurity. With a hand in nearly every major issue of our time, from privacy and affirmative action to gun rights and health care, the Court is inescapable. Yet it is also mysterious and secretive, committed to rituals and reasoning that even experts struggle to understand. Its opinions are poked and prodded, examined under a microscope and held up to the light. The public hangs on to rumors of backroom drama, while scholars read tea leaves and prophesy the future. Clear trends predominate in certain areas of law, but efforts to develop a unified field theory of the Court—to explain its work as the result of a particular clash of politics, personalities, or principles—inevitably fall short. Even in this age of statistical models that seek to wring hidden meaning out of human behavior, the nine men and women who make up the Court intrigue and surprise us.
Consider a handful of the Court’s rulings since 2005, when John G. Roberts Jr. was appointed Chief Justice of the United States. In 2008, faced with a challenge by detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, the Roberts Court struck down an Act of Congress regulating national security in wartime. That same year, a narrow majority invoked the Constitution’s “original meaning” to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. In 2010, the Court issued Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, triggering heated debate over corporate money in American politics. Then, in 2012, the Court upheld Barack Obama’s signature achievement—the Affordable Care Act. Since 2012, this Court has also blocked state efforts to regulate immigration, limited warrantless GPS surveillance, invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act, and held that part of the Defense of Marriage Act violates the rights of same-sex couples. Trying to comprehend the legal precedents, constitutional philosophies, and judicial personalities that shape these wildly divergent decisions can seem overwhelming.
Of course, an effort to understand the Roberts Court—much like an effort to understand the Court at any point in history—must reckon with more than just its results. The Court issues opinions in which the justices grapple with fundamental principles, argue over what the Constitution means and what role they should play in giving it life, and offer signals of where they are heading. These opinions open a window into the justices’ hearts and minds, giving us a glimpse of how they view the world. In many cases, the justices’ decisions, as well as their concurrences and dissents, also exert a magnetic pull on American life, both in their practical effects and through their bold interventions in our discourse. When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President,” and when Roberts condemned the “sordid business” of “divvying us up by race,” they spoke to the public about constitutional values in ways that can’t simply be reduced to how they voted in those cases.
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