A couple days ago I found myself in a brief online (social media) argument with a Court-reformer member of the legal academy insisting that, contrary to my claims, it’s totally false that there are no reformers in the academy. Of course I never said there were no reformers in the academy. What I said, what I think is undeniable, is that the legal academy as a group or a community, and especially its most powerful voices, have been deep in the SCOTUS-reverencing camp. And for more clarity here we’re talking really about the liberal+mainstream academic legal community. It goes without saying that this applies, on a contingent basis certainly, to the conservative legal movement which not only participates in the corruption of the Roberts Court but is in effect its deep root structure, from which the Roberts Court is simply the degenerate, swaggering oak dominating the canopy and blocking out the sun which civic democracy needs to flourish.
In any case, I’ve been getting a lot of your emails from the legal academy and please keep them coming. This isn’t surprising. Historically, our biggest TPM Reader community professions are higher education and lawyers. (We don’t have to break every stereotype.) So the legal academy is sort of an obvious ground zero for TPM Readership and I guess makes my campaign of denigration somewhat paradoxical. In any case, as I noted a few days ago, every profession has pretensions beyond its area of true expertise. The late 19th professionalization movement very much affected the history profession. Indeed, it’s the only reason it’s even considered a profession. But historians can’t take away your right to an abortion or multiple your constitutional order into an autocracy. At worst they can rob the past of its mystery and fascination and reduce it to a few stale or precious debates occluded with obscure and ornate jargon. So it’s really no comparison.
More seriously, I’m very interested in hearing from you because I’m very interested in what is happening right now within the legal academy. For all my potshots the legal academy has a key role in all this. High profile legal academics, especially those in the towering heights of the profession and the clerkship networks, embracing the reform mantle would and will be huge. My sense from a distance is that we’re in the midst of or at the beginnings of a sea change on this front for the simple reason that 2025 and the beginnings of 2026 have simply left no available space for a defense of the legitimacy of this Court. In a way, it is the mildest of silver linings of having the Biden presidency sandwiched between two Trump presidencies. It made it simply to deny that the Court’s corrupt majority is anything but a group of Republican functionaries attempting to rule through country and buttress Republican rule in the guise of constitutional interpretation – the case analogs are too tight, the time separating those analogs are too short.
In any case, ye righteous among the legal academics, lemme know what’s happening.
