Sublime

To prepare for arguments, Roberts would draft hundreds of questions he could conceivably receive from the judges. He would prepare answers for every single one, but he knew that simply writing the answers wouldn’t be enough. On argument day, the questions would be thrown at him in random order from different judges. To bring the test closer to flig

Indeed, I will argue that liberty in the broad sense requires judges and officials, when applying legal principles, to assert norms of reasonableness. Otherwise, self-interested people will use law to claim almost anything.

When one of the Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, suggested that they be elected by the people, not a single member of the Convention rose to support him. “The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Roger Sherman declared. “They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.”

After his landslide, Jefferson, in control of two branches of government, had turned his attention to the lone branch still dominated by the other party—the judiciary—moving, in the impeachment of Samuel Chase, to curb its independence. Now Roosevelt, too, moved against the judiciary’s independence. The Supreme Court had declared crucial New Deal m

AND FOR MANY YEARS the Senate made use of its great powers. It created much of the federal Judiciary—the Constitution established only the Supreme Court; it was left to Congress to “constitute tribunals inferior,” and it was a three-man Senate committee that wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789, an Act that has been called “almost an appendage to the Co

Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s arch antigay justice, had posed a sarcastic question in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas: If sodomy laws are overturned, “what justification could there possibly be for denying homosexuals the benefit of marriage?”48 None, was the implication. He’d been prescient.