For all of the ink that has been spilled over the Supreme Court in recent years, no one has been able to bridge the growing divide between those who think we should bury the Court and those who think we should praise it. Meanwhile, public faith in the Court continues to decline. The result has been an erosion of the Court’s moral authority and an impasse about how to restore it at the exact moment when we most need it—with the other institutions of government increasingly unable or unwilling to check each other. Now, more than ever, we need a Supreme Court that has, and that has earned, widespread popular support. For two centuries, that was the Supreme Court we had. It’s no longer the Supreme Court we have. But it is very much the Supreme Court we need, and this talk will explain how we get there from here.
Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, the Supreme Court, national security law, and military justice. He is this year's Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor at Cardozo. Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts.
