Americans love a powerful Supreme Court, but it's not good for us

Judicial review — or judicial supremacy?

The Supreme Court.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Americans love courts.

Despite the jokes about sending attorneys to the bottom of the sea, legal disputes and judicial decisions play an outsize role in the national imagination, as they have for centuries. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted "[t]here is virtually no political question in the United States that does not sooner or later resolve itself into a judicial question." Because Americans are disproportionately represented by lawyers acting under a Constitution written mostly by lawyers that provides endless fodder for legal wrangling, Tocqueville said, "the language of the judiciary becomes the vulgar language. Thus the legal spirit, born in law schools and courtrooms, gradually spreads beyond their walls. It infiltrates all of society, as it were, filtering down to the lowest ranks, with the result that in the end all the people acquire some of the habits and tastes of the magistrate."

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.