An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars

Adam Liptak / The New York Times

One study found that the Supreme Court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been 'uniquely willing to check executive authority.’ (photo: Haiyun Jiang/NYT)

21 December 22

Several new studies document the current court’s distinctive insistence on its dominance and the justices’ willingness to use procedural shortcuts to achieve it.

The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.

But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.

The phenomenon was documented last month by Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, in an article called “The Imperial Supreme Court” in The Harvard Law Review.

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