What to make of the Supreme Court’s tumultuous term
IN MAY, AT the cusp of the Supreme Court’s busy season, Justice Elena Kagan heaped praise on John Roberts, the chief justice, as he received an award. Her “great, good friend” is “incapable of writing a bad sentence”, she said. “His writing has deep intelligence, crystal clarity, grace, humour, an understated style.” Five weeks later, dissenting from the court’s decision to nullify President Joe Biden’s plan to relieve borrowers of a chunk of student debt, she sang a different song. The chief justice’s majority opinion “from the first page to the last…departs from the demands of judicial restraint”. It fails, she wrote on the final day of the term, to represent “a court acting like a court”. Far from understated, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion “overreached”.
The critique was not “personal”, Justice Kagan emphasised. Yet the heavy charge that her colleague had used judicial power illegitimately captured the atmosphere of a year that was only marginally less dramatic than the previous one—when the Supreme Court expanded gun rights and overruled Roe v Wade.
By the numbers, the term that ended on June 30th looked more moderate than the one that ended a year before. There were only five ideological splits with all six Republican-appointed justices on one side and all three Democratic appointees on the other. Last year, there were 14.
2023-07-02 09:24:21
Source from www.economist.com
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